The question many ask here is the one I also ask myself, every day. What does or can an individual do, when…

The question many ask here is the one I also ask myself, every day. What does or can an individual do, when facing so many critical issues that are being ignored? Covid, climate change, mass slaughter in Gaza etc. A thread about the disappearance of ‘taking care of business’. /1

Because that’s the loss I think people are feeling. The sense that somebody, somewhere, is taking care of shit that happens. Now it all just seems to happen, and nothing is done. And ‘personal responsibility’ seems an obviously ludicrous response. /2

What can an individual do when faced with these massive problems? For starters I think it helps to see that only the most privileged people in the world tend to frame things this way. Us here in the West, mostly. /3

Individuals facing impossible challenges is pretty much how most of the world has always lived, forever. So in that way what we’re experiencing right now is us coming back to the pack a bit. A correction of sorts after many decades of glorious holiday from existential threat. /4

A holiday created mostly after World War II, when Western societies built public institutions to manage most of those existential threats. Institutions which the politics of the last 70 years has relished dismantling again. I won’t revisit that history again here. /5

At the same time though I think it helps to understand that people who have been excluded from this existential holiday don’t conceive the world in this same way. They don’t frame things as individuals facing existential threats. Privilege creates that individual viewpoint. /6

The anger and frustration we feel and express here about inaction on critical things stems *from* previous action on those things. We were used to somebody taking care of business, and we’re angry that they’re not, any more. /7

The political libertarians actually celebrate this as a return as they see it of personal responsibility, rejecting the Nanny State. Except they live the most privileged lives of all, the name gives it away (only the privileged have nannies). /8

They live their whole lives freeloading off the work of others, and passing responsibility for their failings to other people. They’re the ultimate ‘let them eat cake’ people, living comfortable lives that they think happen all by themselves. /9

I think it’s important to understand that individual and collective never were two things. I’ve used the example of solar panels a few times to show that. How putting them on your house is an individual and collective act, at the same time. /10

And I posted a few times about how tabloid media really understands this, how its focus on specific cases takes an issue and collapses the distinction between individual and collective. The collective meaning or message from a tabloid headline IS the individual case shown. /11

It individualises the universal. The universal *is* individual. The law knows this too, every case can set a universal precedent, even if incredibly individual and specific. The poor and powerless are more likely to see the shit that happens in life as a universal thing. /12 https://t.co/F0xLh3llsE

Not as an individual thing. Not as ‘why isn’t anybody fixing this for me?’ But as ‘shit happens’. It’s been their universal existence, forever. It’s not a great thing to have as a universal experience, obviously, but how we frame these things matters. /13

We need a much more realistic appetite for shit than one that has us yelling into the void every day demanding that somebody fix it. What fixed it in the past was so much shit happening, that societies collapsed and emergency institutions were created to fix them. /14

That fixing process never was ‘mobilising’ lots of people to fix it. ‘Building awareness’. Protesting. All that relies upon a stupid conception of democracy, as built from the ‘bottom up’. It never was, it’s a con. It was emergency action, in the face of social collapse. /15

The ‘public’ was created by those emergency institutions. Not by politicians, and absolutely not by voting. Those are just team sports games we all love, which we played while wallowing in our existential holiday from threats. The time is now here to become universal again. /16

To think and act universally, *as* an individual. To stop separating those two things. I still believe the single greatest way any of us can change *all* of our problems, at once, is by putting solar panels on our roofs. Energy is the lynchpin of our societies. /17

The energy industry drives political opposition to all the things we want fixed, including Covid. Your solar can really fuck them up. You don’t need to mobilise people, just get an installer in and within 2 days you’ll be sticking it to the man. /18

And in everything else you do, ‘go viral’, just another way of recognising that individual action is also global action. Find a way to tell your individual story that makes it a universal story. That’s what takes anger to scale, conservatives know it. They invented tabloids. /end