In the West ordinary folk are discovering the total lack of agency that has been the daily life of most of…

In the West ordinary folk are discovering the total lack of agency that has been the daily life of most of the world, for centuries. Facing existential threats that receive no action, or even a sympathetic ear. But this has always been ordinary folk, even in the West. /1 https://t.co/VBR1X9oQK8

The sense of agency ordinary people have had in the West is the wake of catastrophes that befell our societies. At no time did our societies suddenly begin to actually care about the fate of ordinary people. /2

Their needs were suddenly met because the safety and status of the higher status members of those societies was suddenly threatened. Whether cholera from common untreated sewage, or the need to get a workforce up and running after the world wars, the motivation was status. /3

It wasn’t us all electing lots of governments that created this shift. Elections change almost nothing. It was higher status members of society feeling genuine existential threats. Only that will ever shift the locus of collective activity, towards ordinary people. /4

Fast forward to today and scroll your timeline here as an example, every day, and you’ll see and feel that sense of lost agency, from ordinary people. That disbelief that obvious corrective actions aren’t being taken for massive threats, like climate change and Covid. /5

So often hitched to an idea that politicians and other leaders are letting us down, not doing their jobs. That was never what they saw as their job. It was never our democracies that lifted the tide for all of us. /6

It was catastrophes that threatened high status members of society. It is the *only* thing that will make status hierarchies shift. That or totally destroying them. I wish campaigning to politicians would fix Covid, or anything. It won’t. It never has. /7

We’ve all grown up in a historically unique time. That first half of the 20th century, with a world war, followed by a pandemic, followed by another world war, was calamity upon calamity. At least 150 million people died, in just a few decades. That’s our foundation today. /8

We who grew up from the second half of that century grew up in the middle of a unique historical project. The invention of ‘the public’ as an idea. The rebuilding of societies, in ruins after those early century calamities. Their status hierarchies killed or smashed. /9

It was only that which led to the feeling we’re being looked after, our needs met. That all of those elections and political leaders were looking after us. They were just running popularity contests over the top of the material realities of the re-building. /10

The massive public institutions that re-built and then maintained these repaired societies, freed from the status games. Over 150 million had to die, to get there. The whole world had to go to war. TWICE. And be decimated by an influenza pandemic. /11

‘The public’ is a construct of those institutions. Not of parliaments and elected leaders. That’s just us never leaving high school, cheering on our teams. When you ask that ‘we’ fix things like Covid and climate change, you’ll realise it’s a void you’re screaming into. /12

Nobody is there, listening. There never has been. You can’t vote the problems away, that’s just the team sports, the thin veneer of performative battle over the top of our actual material realities. We got to the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries. /13

With some of that institutional re-building momentum still in place. Attributing it hilariously to the people we elect. But you’d have to have been living under a rock to not see that all politics since about the 1970s has been an assault, on those institutions. /14

People wanted their status games back. Once the institutions had provided relative peace and prosperity, they were cast aside, in favour of the team sports battles, for status. What we call ‘the economy’. And that’s us right now. Social media is that shift, on steroids. /15

It’s not cynical to say it. When at school did the high status ‘cool’ kids ever say ‘ok, we’ve had our go, now the rest of you can be in charge?’ Hilarious. When is fashion ‘just wear whatever you like’? How often do politicians attribute successes to others? Heh. /16

All societies are 100% social. Not political, not economic. They’re the battle for status. In teams, led by leaders or ‘influencers’. The cool kids will let you fight Covid, when they feel threatened by it. Or if they’re wiped out by an asteroid. /end