When the clear evidence of our senses and experience tell us something is terribly wrong, with our climate…
When the clear evidence of our senses and experience tell us something is terribly wrong, with our climate and with our health in the pandemic, and nothing is done? Not only that, but when many affect joy at doing nothing? This is what team sports/populist politics has done. /1 https://t.co/QXJJVZ7FNt
Reality transformed into endless arguments, that obstruct all resolution and action. That’s completely deliberate, ‘flood the zone with shit’ politics. All of these pointless debates are specifically designed to tie us in rhetorical knots, so that nothing gets done. /2
We’re encouraged to think social media is this, democracy in action. Daily arguments over the most bleedingly obvious things. It’s political strategy, to not only stall emergency action but to monetise that stalling at the same time. /3
Platform owners and their shareholders get obscenely rich from these cesspits of artificial debate. Nothing is more a waste of your time than trafficking in peoples’ opinions. We had mechanisms to process opinion, through our institutions. To filter the wheat from the chaff. /4
There are no mechanisms on social media for that. Total irresolution is encouraged, it drives engagement, and from that profits. This is the danger of the lie that democracy is driven from the ‘bottom up’, by what everybody thinks. It’s not, and never has been. /5
All human groups, including societies, are led to think and act in certain ways. That’s not a sinister process, nobody can know everything, we all ‘follow’ people we trust to know what to do, in every area of our lives. We NEVER spontaneously, collectively, as a group,…/6
…all suddenly agree on something and act in one spontaneous direction, as the mythology about democracy suggests. We follow the leader, on wherever topic. And there’s a hierarchical cascade of that leadership. Despite the libertarian flavour of our political rhetoric. /7
Our political leaders absolutely are top of that hierarchy. They’re most peoples’ foundational framing of everything else. Doesn’t matter what the topic is, they will defer to what political leaders of their team or party say. No amount of science or ‘facts’ will alter this. /8 https://t.co/r6vxhbhhr2
The most social, group-like of all are the political libertarians, who tell us nothing else matters except individual freedom. The most cult-like in their obsessive teaming. The libertarian ideas are just the currency of that group, the social glue that holds it together. /9
Some of them may believe the freedom rubbish, but many are just cynically throwing it out there as political clickbait. They absolutely don’t act as if it were true, they’re the most ‘authoritarian’ in policy and action. /10
https://t.co/3DULl6MCp1
Humans are social, societies are social. That’s ALL they are. There’s no ‘politics’ on top of that, no ‘economy’. Even science is 100% social. It progresses one funeral at a time, as Planck said. Until we start understanding it’s all social behaviour, we won’t change it. /end