Civilisations lurch between catastrophes. It’s all that changes them meaningfully. Between catastrophes they…
Civilisations lurch between catastrophes. It’s all that changes them meaningfully. Between catastrophes they play human status games.
These status games have a shared model. People join teams, which then battle for status. It’s the same social model across all activities. /1 https://t.co/msy90oozHg
There’s a growing perception of social collapse right now, as the teams become more violent and the basic material realities of our lives become dysfunctional. Hidden behind the econo-babble of ‘cost of living’. /2
Only the actions we take after major catastrophes, focused on the material realities of saving societies from extinction, really achieve social progress.
That sense of ‘we’ from our lifetimes, of things being looked after, is a legacy of the post-WW2 rebuilding. /3
Three major catastrophes in quick succession, WW1, the Spanish Flu and WW2, forced direct material action on collective survival.
Only catastrophes have the power to interrupt the social status games. We had 50 good years. By the late-1970s, the status games were back. /4
Hidden behind the Trojan Horse of status team sports. ‘The economy’. Really just a set of statistical indicators with no causal social model. Keep those indicators within certain ranges, and the social status quo is safe.
Really it’s just code for ‘don’t touch anything’. /5
That’s all a ‘market economy’ is, social life with a stringent prescription to not interfere with ongoing human status games. No planning, no intervention on material realities.
It’s the most brilliant con in history. /6
Leaving the field wide open for certain teams to swallow most of society’s resources for themselves, as their status skyrockets.
Elected leaders have never addressed material realities. Those realities are just fodder for the status games of elections. /7
You can’t elect material problems away. Sometimes there’s some minor shift in the material realities as a result of different teams being elected. Their use of the material problems as election fodder does impact those problems.
But that quickly fades to something else. /8
They invent fake problems instead, that are much easier to manipulate for the status games. Fake hysterias over immigration for example. Nothing that requires them to fix any actual material problems.
You’re whistling into the wind expecting an election to fix anything. /9
Elections are team sports, not by analogy. It’s the same social model we use for actual team sports. It’s certain teams advancing their status at the expense of others.
Only when decades of teams sports neglecting material realities leads to catastrophe do societies change. /10
When the catastrophe sweeps away the status hierarchies, forcing direct action on the underlying material realities.
We were still living off the fat of the post-WW2 rebuild. But that fat is now gone, which is why nothing is being done to fix anything. /11
We’re now ‘living with’ pandemics! You can’t make this up. Everything is turned into fodder for team sports, while nothing actually gets done. Masks, energy, the types of car we drive, our sexuality, whether we use heat pumps. Watch it happen every single day. /12
Every problem that arises will be immediately transformed into a team sport between opposing teams. Usually on these platforms.
Nothing will happen with the underlying material reality of the problem itself. Just days or even weeks of team sports battle. /13
Social media pours petrol on this fire, astronomically accelerating the shift to societies who do literally nothing except battle in teams every day, for status.
Nothing gets done, to the underlying material reality. We’re all permanently at the game, cheering on our teams. /14
I feel most sorry for those who wait for somebody (usually ‘we’), to fix all of this. I’m sorry that history shows that never happens. Only catastrophe forces us out of our status games.
You can’t elect your way out of the same problems elections cause. /15
When your team wins the grand final, the ground is a total mess that you leave for somebody else to clean up, and you go home with a momentary rush of euphoria, to the same material realities you had before the game.
/end