The problems facing us should mean societies are on a war footing. Climate change and a pandemic are both…

The problems facing us should mean societies are on a war footing. Climate change and a pandemic are both MUCH bigger problems than those we go to war for. We’re not even close to being on a war footing. About our social status hierarchies and their refusal to shift. /1 https://t.co/RFilbTvFmA

This diagram (link in ALT text) is from a paper on PET - Punctuated Equilibrium Theory. A theory deriving first from evolutionary biology, where some biologists noted that evolution seems to have long periods of stasis, ‘punctuated’ by massive disruptions where change happens. /2 https://t.co/X2XlW8NoKT

And then it was realised that this applies to social relations between humans as well. PET is the working through of that realisation. It’s the thinking I share a lot. That societies only change via catastrophe. Most of the time they exist in a type of equilibrium/stasis. /3 https://t.co/6CNTxb6ekm

During those times the dominant social hierarchies, what some call ‘vested interests’, control all change, meaning there’s very little of it. Just continuous reinforcing of their status. An appearance of change through the continuous team sports of imitative rivalry. /4

Where various groups battle for status. But this produces no real change, it’s literally sport, applied to all social life. Like all of our elections, which many realise produce no meaningful change. Or climate change and Covid debates. Again, little real change. /5

It’s that continuous debating or team sports between groups that CAUSES the stasis. The unmoving status hierarchies. It’s the team sports that generate the hierarchies. The more of them, paradoxically, the more unmoving the hierarchies become. /6

Until you reach a point where the actual reality we live in is so far removed from our daily team sports, that catastrophes occur. What some come call a ‘Great Compression’. Or PET would call a ‘puncturing’ of the social status hierarchies. /7 https://t.co/QZPwjEyY2I

Those rapid upward lines on the graph. Where suddenly after years, even generations, of social status, massive changes occur. This it seems is how all social change happens. We need these catastrophic events for change to occur. /8 https://t.co/tDy985tLUF

Without them our social status hierarchies, produced and continuously reinforced by our team sports imitative rivalries, are way too strong. That’s us right now. Facing the greatest existential challenges in all of human history. And what are we doing? /9

As good as nothing. A type of gradualism, where a bit of meat is thrown to each group or vested interest, to try to nudge them towards change. It won’t work. We’re already seeing in every area how they’re refusing to really budge. /10 https://t.co/wqIkpZOi2Q https://t.co/FthfqE9bUB

China is interesting here. In many ways it IS on a war footing, on issues like climate change, and has been for some time. How does our team sports culture see that? As them being ‘anti-competitive’, acting against the ‘market’ with ‘subsidies’. ‘Authoritarian’. /11 https://t.co/F2dvdsMBPp

The market and its supposed competition is just code for team sports battles. Competitiveness is the actual mechanism of those battles. Despite their PR about being the major agent of change, economic markets are the greatest engine room of social stasis. /12

Of course they react with hysteria to Chinese economic war. It threatens our status hierarchies fundamentally, a potential punctuated equilibrium. And yet China here is doing the real social evolution. Responding to existential threats with existential action. /13

This massive Chinese investment represents a punctuated equilibrium for our societies. One we desperately need. Our replacement of societies with economies will resist this to our last breaths. Because those economies were only ever social status machines. /14 https://t.co/70goOY793M

Designed to hide the real social team sports at play, behind modern jargon. They were the way old-style social hierarchies recaptured societies from their post-war disruptions. The disruptions where we rolled out massive interventions in areas such as public health. /15

Our ‘lockdowns’ were another disruption in that way, massive investment for the first time in decades in public goods. They had to be resisted at all costs by existing status hierarchies. In economic terms, because economic terms are status hierarchies in disguise. /16

Competition is the imitative rivalry of team sports. A social thing, which we’ve dressed up as a technical ‘economic’ thing. The economy always was intended and brilliantly effective as a massive reinforcement of the status quo. /17

Only massive disruption to those economic fantasies will bring us the changes we now need. Right now the old-fashioned Yellow Peril commies are the only light at the end of the tunnel. /18

The Thwaites glacier may be another. The catastrophes that will punctuate our social hierarchies again, to allow us to evolve. /end https://t.co/1tDkFDD5Vp