Why aren’t we fighting climate catastrophe and a pandemic? Politics is a hopeless framing for understanding…

Why aren’t we fighting climate catastrophe and a pandemic? Politics is a hopeless framing for understanding our adult lives. The same social mechanisms apply across all life stages. The same social problems kids have are a window into the dysfunction of the adult world. /1 https://t.co/Ix4OmRRD7I

I saw this article by chance yesterday, and it’s a very common problem kids and their parents face. Trying to ‘fit in’ to social life. Notice the assumption here, also common, that what’s important IS to fit in. /2 https://t.co/Vz6TZ6qMyg https://t.co/6FlAIW0ESh

The assumption that social life is the normal life that all of us need to find a way to fit into. Even further, and we see a lot of this rhetoric in the anti-lockdown believers, the idea that without that social life, peoples’ health (mental and physical) will become damaged. /3

Like ‘the economy’, all of these ideas have been said by so many for so long, that they’re seen as reality itself, unchallenged. But social life is THE most brutal part of being human. The image of it as the nourishing context for our lives is fundamentally wrong. /4

So wrong, that in reality these articles should be about how to help kids to free themselves from the demands and pressures of social life, to allow their individual selves to develop and flourish. Of course we all need to associate, at all ages. To live and work together. /5

But it’s a much bigger and wrong claim that this association is vital to our individual psychological and emotional well-being. Nothing could be further from the truth, nothing is more damaging to that well-being. Our social lives are functional. /6

We need to work together on things, to have lives that are easier, through distribution of effort. To make our *individual* lives easier and better. This is the fake binary the libertarians forced upon us. Between individual freedom and collective effort. /7

Humans only ever were individual, through collective mechanisms. Without that collective life, individual life is just toil, subsistence. There’s no binary here. Collective life created individual freedom. But none of this is about our emotional and psychological well-being. /8

That social, collective life is the most challenging thing for emotional and psychological life. A brutal imitative rivalry. Imitation is how individuals act in collective ways, and they imitate what they perceive as having high status, which creates social hierarchies. /9

We call it ‘peer pressure’ for kids, but the same mechanism operates throughout life. It’s why for example we’re doing nothing against Covid, because our high-status individuals are doing nothing, so that doing nothing is what others then imitate. /10

They do what everybody else is doing, they imitate them, because otherwise they violate the social status hierarchy. They no longer ‘fit in’. Scratch the surface though of most people doing this imitation, and you won’t find people happy to ‘live with’ Covid. /11

They fear it. They fear those infected with it. But that fear isn’t strong enough to overcome the social status hierarchy. Nothing is. People will rather die than not fit in. We’re social animals, that’s our most fundamental behaviour. /12

If you’ve ever taught in schools, or had kids, you’ll have seen just how brutal this social world is. How many kids are ruined by the endless need to fit in. That need is important for work, for getting things done, collectively. It’s a disaster for everything else. /13

For the kids’ emotional and psychological well-being. Having to constantly negotiate the social status hierarchies, to fit in and feel validated, as an individual. Paul McCartney made the insightful comment about fame, that it’s really about feeling validated. /14

That it’s about being ‘recognised’ (literally) as worthy for who you are and what you do. Affirmation that whatever you is, is affirmed by others. You can see how all of our adult problems are the same problems kids work through every day. /15

And how we give fancy grown-up political names to these social mechanisms, like Left and Right and capitalism and whatever, when in reality people are still playing the same social games they did growing up, at school. ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ are gangs, like groups at school. /16

Teams you can add your allegiance to, so you fit in. The only way human societies have ever escaped these social games is when catastrophes befall them of a magnitude that disrupts or even destroys social hierarchies. Like the Spanish Flu, WW1 and WW2, in the 20th century. /17

Those catastrophes in quick succession broke the hierarchies. And led to the development of the only thing that makes us all act differently. Institutions. Really just expertise-based social activities that transcend individual lifespans. /18

Only institutions can ignore the need to always fit in. Their focus is not the present-day, it’s historical continuity, things like plans and enacting those plans. And if you work in institutions you know imitation social games do all they can to disrupt that basic task too. /19

Get too far from catastrophes, and those games of imitative rivalry will reassert themselves, destroying institutions from within. That’s what we’re living right now. Institutions sidelined, while populist imitative hierarchies reassume control. The world of Trump. /20

If you have kids or know some who struggle with fitting in, I think it’s worth remembering that the real problem of any life is the opposite. It’s how NOT to fit in. To assert your individual self, to allow it to be what it is. As free as possible from imitative rivalry. /end