I wince at the memory of the certainties of teen and early adult life, and how forcefully they were sometimes…
I wince at the memory of the certainties of teen and early adult life, and how forcefully they were sometimes presented to others.
That’s part of being young. It brings energy to a society. And sometimes necessary disruption.
But something has changed. /1
Because that’s now all adult life. We no longer think, we line up behind positions, in teams.
It’s often so subtle we don’t even notice ourselves doing it. And the cold-eyed, often vicious zealous certainty it produces is poison to civil and civic society. /2
Social media obviously didn’t invent this zealous team sports. But it’s provided the mechanism to drive it deep into adult life.
It’s an accelerant. Petrol on a democratic fire. /3
There are some issues I don’t discuss here, because I think discussion on those issues here is actually pointless.
So infected by toxic team sports that it’s nothing but trigger words for mutual adrenaline and cortisol boosting parties. /4
We ask why we have ‘revolving door’ elected politicians. This is why. Politicians today were reared in this same culture of team sports.
They look at an issue, and solving it is well down the list of priorities behind various forms of wedging of opponents. /5
Political expertise now is almost entirely methodology to turn any issue into a team sport.
The LNP in opposition for example, as was the case in government, has effectively no policy platform at all. /6
Just a series of slogans, designed to fire up the team sports and vacuum people to their side who normally have nothing in common with them.
Nuclear. Debt and deficit. Stopping the boats. All the drivel conservative parties worldwide have been sloganising for decades now. /7
They don’t want a policy platform because their main belief is that government itself is the problem. They don’t even deny it.
They spend most of their time in government and opposition devising triggers for team sports. /8
And because this is brutally effective politics - populism is political heroin - all sides eventually converge on the same model.
Social media is now more or less running societies. Look at the powerlessness of elected governments to do anything about it. /end