My great friend @DavidJoffe64 taught me about dysautonomia. When your body’s automatic functions suddenly go…
My great friend @DavidJoffe64 taught me about dysautonomia. When your body’s automatic functions suddenly go haywire, as he sees sometimes in Long Covid.
There’s a social correlate of dysautonomia. Populism is social dysautonomia. /1 https://t.co/JCxrtZsFtU
Your autonomic nervous system regulates things like your blood pressure, breathing, heart rate, digestion and sexual function.
These are things you absolutely need to be running automatically, without your help. /2
Imagine having to manually control all of those things yourself. You’d be dead in minutes.
Over millions of years your body developed an automatic system to deal with all of this for you. /3
If we cross over into the social domain of human life, and not just by analogy, societies also have autonomic nervous systems.
Their institutions. Edmund Burke is probably the guru in understanding those, the great 18th century statesman. /4 https://t.co/WR8Ww1SxN9
When we talk about institutions today, we look through a lens or framing generated by vicious anti-institutional libertarian propaganda.
We see them as ‘bureaucracies’. ‘Red tape’. Political libertarians have been hammering that framing for decades. /5
But as Burke explained, institutions are really just the emergent outcome of ‘what works’ in a society.
They’re the practical, operational mechanism that actually ‘runs’ the society. /6
They’re not just organisations or bureaucracies. They’re things like customs, and traditions, and beliefs.
What Burke called the ‘latent wisdom’ of a society. They’re not created by some individual or group in the present day. /7
They emerge over generations, from the outcome of lots of trial and error, focused on what works to keep society running.
And in that way they are EXACTLY society’s autonomic nervous system. /8
It’s they, and not politicians, who really ‘run’ societies. In the same way your autonomic nervous system keeps you alive by running your key bodily processes.
They’re mostly invisible to us, because like your autonomic nervous system, they run automatically. /9
The complexity of a society far outstrips the capacity of any individual or group to actually run it.
This obvious point seems to always be missed in our laughable idea elected leaders run anything at all. /10
A society is the most complex human thing we have. Nobody has a clue how it all works really.
But institutions know. Our social autonomic nervous system, that evolved through generations of trial and error. /11
And this is where populism is so lethal. Its main enemy is these institutions.
It’s social dysautonomia. It’s leaders saying they should run things like pandemics, not their public health institutions. /12
They of course don’t have a clue how to do that, nor any actual intent to do it. As we’ve seen.
It’s like you trying to ‘run’ your own blood pressure, heart rate, digestion etc. You’d be dead in minutes. /13
And that’s why our societies are in an accelerating rate of collapse, under populism.
And kind souls think if they just elect somebody better, things will be fixed. /14
I’m sorry, but no individual will be better at running your blood pressure and heart rate and digestion.
Only your autonomic nervous system knows how to do that. /15
If you fuck with institutions, societies die. It’s that simple.
A symptom of social dysautonomia is how knowledgeable we all are now in things like epidemiology, and virology, and PPE. /16
Isn’t it wonderful, the things we’ve all come here to learn? To try to survive.
It’s not wonderful. It’s an unmitigated disaster still unfolding. Our institutions, our social autonomic nervous systems, used to do that stuff for us. /17
Us trying to do it ourselves is, unsurprisingly, not working. Covid is winning, smashing us.
Populations trying to individually do the things their autonomic nervous system (institutions) used to do for them? /18
That’s like you trying to run your own digestion and sexual functioning, breathing and circulation.
It’s a terminal condition. /end