Somebody asked me if it’s depressingly pessimistic to say meaningful social change only comes from…
Somebody asked me if it’s depressingly pessimistic to say meaningful social change only comes from catastrophe.
It’s neither pessimism or optimism. I don’t project feelings onto reality. It’s an empirical observation of history. /1
A field of study now, not just my idea. Sometimes abbreviated as PET - Punctuated Equilibrium Theory. I add various other layers to it though, for example I think this theory is true because of some basic social facts. /2
https://t.co/aWxSFKjLeP
Most importantly, that social life is governed by status. All the things we use to explain it, like politics and economics, are really just status re-badged.
That’s also why the main mechanism for social life is imitation. Imitative rivalry. /3
Each group following some leader aims to promotes its status over others. That brings it into rivalry with other groups doing the same. What I call ‘team sports’. I like the word teams, it captures much better the essential rivalry this is about, more than groups. /4
Imitative rivalry was the core of Rene Girard’s work, when he invented mimetics. Girard saw that this rivalry never ends, history shows that to be empirically true.
In his view all that ever mitigated it (in the West) was Christianity. Because it did something novel. /5
It replaced the status-driven rivalry with a transcendent status (God/Christ), that provided an arbiter separate to the battling teams.
Of course this required the creation of institutions, churches, inside which the rivalries re-surfaced. There are no utopias. /6
But it’s not an accident that this model led Western culture for millennia. Our modern secular idea of letting all the teams slug it out in ‘markets’ is barely a couple of centuries old, and is floundering.
That’s all market ideas and ‘the economy’ are, literally. /7
Inventions to re-assert status battles as human life. To never allow a restriction on that rivalry. ‘Competition’, the buzzword of this whole stupid system.
It leads to nothing but eternal violence. Sociality not tempered by a status hierarchy is just rivers of blood. /8
These platforms implement that same stupid model. Which is why they’re a sewer. Thousands, tens of thousands (or even more) of battling teams, more every day.
We’re freedom fundamentalists. We don’t want to accept one basic truth. /9
That human life is hierarchical. If you don’t provide healthy hierarchies, humans will invent unhealthy ones in the void that remains. That’s how we got Trump, from years of market politics ripping down our established institutions. /10
The PET work is also why I say only catastrophe shifts any of this. Without it (or the approach Gerard said Christianity pioneered), humans just battle for status.
It’s all they do, all day, every day. The battle for their identity, the same thing. /11
We all lived that battle at school, we just failed to recognise it continued unabated into adult life, until death.
The post-WW2 world most of us grew up in provided some breathing space from these status games. /12
Those mega-catastrophes of the first half of the 20th century, WW1, the Spanish Flu, The Great Depression and WW2, smashed our status hierarchies comprehensively.
Allowing a focus at last on basic social provision. ‘The public’, in education, health, housing etc. /13
We re-built societies, with that public focus. When that work was largely done, in the 1970s, the status games fought back. The shift to economic politics of free markets in the 1970s. A cultural shift.
To re-assert imitative rivalry - status games - at the centre of life. /14
Every time every side of politics and commentators drone on about ‘the economy’ today, they’re really regurgitating this resurgence of status-driven life.
It’s why our public infrastructure and culture has collapsed. /15
You can’t build a bike rack now without ‘mobilising’ thermonuclear team sports. Look at it online every day. The tedious, never-ending whining and toxic argument and assault.
Without a healthy status hierarchy coupled to actual social good, this will be our world.
/end