The common response to the useless team sports of electoral politics to take action on anything important, is…

The common response to the useless team sports of electoral politics to take action on anything important, is to mount campaigns of righteous indignation against the system. Often from the crossbench. These campaigns also don’t produce any meaningful action. /1 #auspol

Many countries are seeing a surge in independent candidates, and success for these candidates. Democracy in action! More like democracy inaction. Independents rarely achieve any meaningful outcomes. Still the same team sports, just with more teams. /2

It’s like Formula 1 racing, a couple of teams keep winning most of the races, but you get a slew of minor teams following the winning teams around the track every week. The hope in politics is, if you elect enough independents, you’ll get real democracy at last! /3

Actually you just get Italy. Parliamentary chaos, as national, collective goals get pulverised into ever smaller grievances and their barracking teams. The solution to team sports governance isn’t adding more teams. This is humanity’s biggest challenge. /4

How people act socially is completely unfit as a mechanism to run their societies, materially and practically. It’s why history shows that significant change has come only when catastrophe has forced that change. When those catastrophes interrupted the team sports. /5

Despite the modernist bad press, as Girard saw Western societies only ever found one way to bypass this fact. Through Christianity, where the essential scapegoating mechanism of team sports was de-fanged by absorbing that mechanism within a transcendent God, made flesh. /6 https://t.co/EpbFYMgIhS

Or in other words, through a tradition that said stop all of that ridiculous gameplay between your groups. Nobody is the winner or the scapegoat here, I’ll be that for all of you, up here on this cross. You don’t have to be ‘religious’ to understand this innovation. /7 https://t.co/VPBktIMDfu

To suck the life out of the team sports, by redirecting it to a transcendent principle/person, a God made flesh. Now there was an arbiter of our team games, that wasn’t any of us. It worked for centuries, we made slow progress at last. /8 https://t.co/UYKqyrFHCU

Today of course that innovation is much less powerful, that message not just less effective but even unknown by many. Very many don’t grow up with that tradition, and like everything else it’s been transformed into team sports. What might replace it? /9

The planet might. Its refusal to support the basic conditions that allow us to live, through climate change disruption. We either adapt, or we die. As Michel Serres once said, morality has become objective. The right thing to do has become the thing we must do, to survive. /10

Unfortunately that will be more catastrophe-led change, the type that history shows is all that ruptures our team sports societies. Maybe there’s a version of planetary crucifixion that could step in to ease the shift. /end