What does Rousseau have to offer us on Covid and climate change? Something pretty mind-blowing, actually. He…

What does Rousseau have to offer us on Covid and climate change? Something pretty mind-blowing, actually. He said that a society has all of its rules at once. What does that mean? Some amazing and unexpected things, about how societies work, and how to fix their problems. /1 https://t.co/7eCX5FUFCK

What Rousseau is saying is that societies don’t exist in pieces at a time. That when you change one aspect of them, it changes all of the other aspects, automatically and at the same time. Just think about the power of what that means. /2

We’re so stuck around ideas of micro/macro, local/global. Convinced that a society is adding up of lots of ‘micro’ things, in some magical and unexplained way. In economics they even coined the concept of ‘the invisible hand’ to try to explain it (i.e. they had no idea). /3

Rousseau’s insight turns all of this inside out and upside down. Anything you do, anywhere, is both micro and macro, local and global, at the same time. While the Earth isn’t flat, society absolutely is. There are no levels, no micro or macro. /4

It astonishes me that we watch our politics, where the tiniest most trivial act can transform the political landscape, in as little as 10 minutes. And not see the fiction of micro/macro, local/global thinking. We are the age of things ‘going viral’, we see it every single day. /5

I Tweeted the other day about how collective change doesn’t come from adding up lots of individual beliefs. But rather from shifts to wide narratives of how everything works, which individuals then adopt to a greater or lesser extent. Often extremely quickly, in a day. /6 https://t.co/lAcmoSYhkf

The power of that difference is what going viral actually means. You don’t need to ‘mobilise’ millions or billions of people individually, changing their individual beliefs to try to shift them. You just need to put a compelling narrative out there, a story. /7

A story that reshapes their view of how all of society works, all at once. That can change everything, in a matter of minutes. Collective action can be as swift as any individual action, if the narratives are powerful enough. And individuals will come to the narrative. /8

You don’t have to mobilise them. You need to get the story out there, sure, but if it’s a good one, they will come to it. Societies aren’t shaped from above, or below. There is no top or bottom. They’re completely flat, with any levels the outcome of these shifting narratives. /9

A fascinating empirical example for these ideas comes from psychology. Professor Ben Fletcher pioneered an approach to peoples’ chronic problems called Do Something Different (DSD). Say a person can’t lose weight, or give up smoking. /10 https://t.co/xlWMLcbPP5.

Traditionally those specific problems are targeted with a range of approaches. But Fletcher says humans have all of their habits at once, they’re connected via a habit-web. (You can see the link to Rousseau’s ideas there.) Every habit is already linked to all other habits. /11

So Fletcher says, if you want to lose weight for example, just do something different. Don’t try to address your weight specifically, change another simpler habit, like which sock you put on first in the morning, or which route you drive to work. Interrupt your habit-web. /12

The results are pretty impressive. These are the simplest of all interventions, and they can have the most powerful effects. All through the recognition that everything we think and do is connected to everything else we think and do. This is huge, and empowering. /13

You don’t need to feel like an isolated tiny cog in a vast social machine, powerless to effect change. Anything you do can go viral, can have widespread and fast collective impact. If you do it creatively, and strategically. And you can see this in another way. /14

Take Covid, where as we know pubic health minimisers managed to disrupt over 150 years of established practice in the management of infectious disease, with simple narratives like ‘just like the flu’, and ‘living with the virus’. Slogans that create an entire worldview. /15

But it goes much further, because everything is connected to everything else. We’ve seen now that this disruption has also flowed through into other public health areas, driving down vaccination rates for all diseases, for example. And concepts like ‘the vulnerable’. /16

Vulnerability has crossed out of Covid territory and into multiple political domains, being used as an excuse now to do nothing in a public way, and just try to assist ‘the vulnerable’ while everybody else is left to cope for themselves. /17

Assistance that rarely arrives, betraying that something else is going on here. None of this is accidental, political strategists know that a good narrative will flow through to everything else we do too. They’re getting huge bang for their buck, with Covid. /18

The libertarian dream of everybody just living as a self-reliant individual, with only the most vulnerable (in theory) supported collectively, is now playing out at an accelerated rate, because of the pandemic. The same narrative changed things well outside public health. /19

All because bad people understand Rousseau, and good people are bogged down in ridiculous ideas about society being millions of individual cogs that have to be each aligned, like doing a massive jigsaw puzzle. Look at what a TINY minority the dominant ultra-conservatives are. /20

And the tiny minority of the population that are their ‘base’. And yet, they’ve been winning in politics comprehensively, for decades. Because they understand that societies are already connected. They just need to tweak narratives, to take control of everything. /end