We’re living in a completely fake political war. Where one side of the war argues for the benefits of…
We’re living in a completely fake political war. Where one side of the war argues for the benefits of government, and the other argues to get rid of most of it. A thread on why it’s a fake debate. /1 https://t.co/JWYRBTxtOS
Sometimes you have to go back to first principles to understand why things are such a mess. In this case, both sides of this modern fake debate agree on one thing. That government, or the State, exists as some over-arching level of oversight and control of societies. /2
One side says that’s a good thing, the other says it’s an oppressive restriction of individual freedom. What’s funny though is that the State or government, as described in that way, doesn’t exist and has never existed. So they’re arguing over literally nothing. /3
When I say government/the State doesn’t exist in this way, I mean that societies have no levels. There is no bird’s-eye view level of oversight and control. If there was, politicians wouldn’t spend all day every day desperately looking at polling. /4
If they could occupy some sort of control room and have ‘power’ over everybody else, they could ignore polling completely. But they know that their fates and the fate of any decisions they make are in the hands of the public they supposedly represent. /5
One of the reasons I switch off when people wheel out concepts like ‘fascism’ and ‘authoritarianism’ is because it ignores that society isn’t a machine where you just plug in different operating systems. You can’t just come to power and then boot up ‘fascism’. /6
There are no levels, a fascist government that succeeds is the result of a whole range of social behaviours amongst the wider population that support that success. Those who grew up in Nazi Germany for example have written about how the shift there wasn’t imposed on them. /7
It was a gradual and then fast re-jigging of all of social life. Fascism is just the endgame of populism, and when you read historical accounts like Haffner’s, you can experience that firsthand. Fascism arrives unexpectedly, by people just following what’s most popular. /8 https://t.co/rWSIRP1Cu4
And then suddenly the populist Great Leader and his thugs have total control, and act however they like. Something we all experienced at school, with popular bullies. It’s not some Star Wars type narrative of evil dark forces imposing fascist rule on their people. /9
The people clamour to put the Great Leader there, in great populist surges of enthusiasm. Only then do they realise, too late, that the whole movement wasn’t about them, it was about the Great Leader and his cronies. The point here is there are no levels. /10
The illusion that a government or State ‘controls’ us is only one that can be sustained if you ignore the basic fact that anybody ‘in power’ is continuously paranoid about the people deposing them. /11
Mussolini lived an illusion of total power, until the Italians killed him and strung him up by the feet in a square, like a carcass in an abattoir, next to his lover. The same people who had cheered his rise to power not long before. /12
The illusion of society having levels, with the top level being the one that controls the rest, comes from a misunderstanding of scale. It’s about delegation. Humans, in groups of every size, have always delegated some tasks to some small number of people in those groups. /13
If you have a local soccer club, some handful of members are delegated the job of running it, as president, secretary, coach etc. They’re not at some different level, they’re just members like any others, delegated a specific role, on behalf of the group. /14
The group retains control, they can turf them out at any time if they’re not happy. And they often do. This is the key thing we miss, that the ‘macro’ level of a group or society is not some different controlling level of reality. It’s a handful of delegated, specific tasks. /15
Governments are the same. They’re not a separate, distinct body existing at some different level of society, controlling everything else. Government is a long list of delegated, specific tasks, which it performs for the wider group (society). /16
Its members, the politicians, are just members of the same social group as the rest of us, society. And like with the soccer club, if we don’t like what they do, we replace them. The critical thing is to not misunderstand their job. They’re not there to have ‘power’ over us. /17
They are us, too. They live in the same communities. They’re there to do the specific delegated tasks of government. To build and maintain roads, schools, hospitals, armies etc. We need to drop this idea we vote for people to ‘have power’ over our entire lives. /18
They don’t have that, even if they wanted to. It’s a misunderstanding of how government evolved and what it does. It’s literally nothing more than a long list of practical, specific tasks. Tasks the group wants done, for them. We delegate roads and schools etc., to them. /19
Both the libertarians who whine about State control and those who promote it as a good miss the point entirely. The State is not a thing, in that way. It’s just that list of delegated, practical tasks. That’s literally all that it is, in reality. Populism obscures this. /20
It makes us think we’re voting for either Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker, to have control over everything that happens. But populations control everything that happens, they’re totally flat, there are no levels. They decide who ‘rules’. But that rule, again, is not rule. /21
It’s a list of highly specific, delegated tasks that a society wants done, to provide a workable collective life together. If we could strip our politics back to just those specific, practical tasks again, these pointless debates would evaporate into their own hot air. /22
If instead of cheering on various leaders in our daily team sports, we ignored all of that and focused only on which specific things aren’t getting done, like roads not being fixed, and dirty air in buildings. Then sanity would return. If we de-mystified ‘power’. /end