Russia and Chinese are seen as leading ‘authoritarian’ cultures in the world today. As if a culture decides…

Russia and Chinese are seen as leading ‘authoritarian’ cultures in the world today. As if a culture decides ‘hey, let’s be authoritarian’. Older cultures seem that way because they survived by having strong restrictions on much social behaviour. /1 https://t.co/KcXYS4Y8pf https://t.co/0ZwdKvJF7k

And no, this isn’t to applaud everything happening in Russia and China right now. What’s happening there is the result of a collision. Between those much more ancient, restriction-based cultures, and catastrophes they collided with. /2

The CCP and Putin both derive from earlier revolutions. Revolutions that were freedom movements. Freedom movements that drew heavily from Western ideas. But they had none of the Western infrastructure to go with the ideas. They got the software, without any of the hardware. /3

Which created the catastrophes of both of those revolutions. Mass death, starvation, killings, oppressions. That’s what rampant populism - democratic software without democratic hardware - always produces. All societies need to be controlled. /4

Just as all infections need to be controlled. It’s adolescent fantasy that the world functions in any way with people having the ‘freedom’ to say and do whatever they like. Humans have ALWAYS regulated societies. The societies that didn’t haven’t survived. /5

If you don’t regulate and control social behaviour, you create a sociopathic killing machine. Sociality is violence. I think there’s a misunderstanding of the difference between collective action, and sociality. They’re absolutely not the same thing. /6

The idea of a ‘public’ is collective action. Where public institutions do things like enact laws to ensure people are fed, their sewage is processed, they have clean water and healthy food, people get an education, etc. That’s collective action. Not sociality. /7

It’s done by officials and legislators, and public servants out there clearing sewer lines and doing food inspections. Vaccinating and controlling infections. Sociality is the imitative rivalry of social groups, competing for status and identity. A completely distinct thing. /8

Collective action is practical keeping the lights on stuff. Sociality is…socialising. Duh. Populism is the confusion and conflation of the two. Where suddenly we try to use socialising, to keep the lights on. Where all practical action is routed through social status games. /9

Which, as we see right now, leads to none of the practical things being done, and everything being used as fuel for the status games. Social media is the technology that is driving sociality into every pore of our societies. We won’t survive that. /10

It means nothing is being done, while the levels of violence and anger are magnified many times over. Because sociality is always violence. Competing desires, the battle for identity and status. For belonging. /11

When we lecture Russia and China in our clueless superiority, about their supposed determination to oppress people and be ‘authoritarian’, we’re selling our own dysfunctional teenage culture as an alternative. They’ve been down that path. They’re ancient cultures. /12

Full of a deep understanding of the need to control and regulate social behaviour. We’re so ignorant even of our own history, where we did *exactly the same thing*, for nearly the entirety of recorded history. Our modern freedom fantasies are only decades-old. /13

And those fantasies are in terminal decline. Reality isn’t fooled, democracy as we now conceive it, as anything goes, is failing everywhere. In an accelerated fashion, everywhere social media is allowed to operate. /14 https://t.co/kOOUco4meP

Everywhere committing the suicide of trying to run a society, with sociality. Rather than with the calm, simple, practical collective activities of keeping the lights on. The stuff boring bureaucrats and people in high-vis clothing do. /15

Sociality is controlled through hierarchies of status. If you don’t provide those, with monarchies of some kind and their associated cascading hierarchies of aristocracies, humans will just reinvent them in more toxic forms. You’ll get Andrew Tate instead of Charles III. /16

Constitutional monarchies are the most sophisticated attempt yet to try to manage these two competing, critical human processes. Sociality/status, and collective ‘keeping the lights on’ activity. Republics dream they can focus only on one of these. /17

In Rome that led to the centuries of nothing but blood and war, under the Republics. Only soothed by the Pax Romana of the restoration of emperors. In republican modern America, we have a Presidential system far more monarchical than any surviving monarchy. /18

Societies have ancient tectonic plates, just as continents do. Deep patterns of recurring behaviours and controls on those behaviours. In our adolescent culture stripped of all time, of all custom and tradition, we can’t see it now. We’re focused on ‘living our best lives’. /19

Focused only on the present. Maximising ‘fun’. Like an eternal teenage party. ‘Authoritarianism’ is coming for us. All societies that don’t control social behaviour, that are populist, end up authoritarian. To save themselves. To try to restore order. /20

It doesn’t have to be that way. But it will be that way, because sociality/populism is Pandora opening her box. Nothing stops it, except catastrophe. Authoritarianism is always the last gasp attempt to save us. /end