Society has material problems with known solutions. None of those solutions happen because they have to cut…

Society has material problems with known solutions. None of those solutions happen because they have to cut through the fog of the completely redundant popularity contests we call elections. All those popularity contests do is weaponise the disasters, for more votes. /1 https://t.co/p4TGCz2BAO

I’ve been watching electioneering in the UK, US and soon Australia. The heated passions, the conviction people have that THE most important thing is that their candidate wins. I don’t think we have any self-awareness at all, at how deeply we’re infected by this process. /2

How many times have we repeated this charade, coming out the other side disillusioned that nothing changed? How many times did we think that next time it would be different, we’ll elect somebody who really will fix everything? /3

How many times did we blame the politicians for this, thinking we just need better politicians? Rather than stand back and think, hang on, maybe this whole process is insane? /4

I scratch my head at the belief that the way to fix well understood material problems, is to say ‘hey, let’s pick the most popular person’. There’s NOT ONE connection between popularity, and material reality. We’re mixing up our social behaviours, and basic engineering. /5

We don’t vote on who’s going to fly the plane. Or who’s going to come and fixed our blocked toilet. We hire people who can fly planes, and unblock toilets. This is obvious. The world’s material problems need material solutions. /6

The parasitic, redundant layer of teams sport popularity games we overlay upon those material problems is *completely unnecessary*. It serves not one purpose. It actively gets in the way of fixing anything. But we won’t see it. /7

Because our deepest way of being human, is social. And that means imitative rivalry. Team sports. All material problems turned into ‘debates’, to allow different teams to slug it out. And so, as I often Tweet about, the material problems become chronic, and then catastrophic. /8

And it’s only then, when the catastrophes sweep away all hierarchies of popularity, that change sometimes happens. I wish there was a way to short-circuit this process. To go directly to the material problems. History suggests there isn’t. /9

We get brief interludes of sanity post-catastrophes, where everybody is focused on survival, and so the team sports is retired. But it doesn’t last. I wish we’d see this enough to moderate our ridiculous passions at election times. It might make the hangovers less painful. /end

(fix*)