I’m already seeing the building passion and excitement for the upcoming Oz federal election. We don’t see…

I’m already seeing the building passion and excitement for the upcoming Oz federal election. We don’t see that this is like the Super Bowl for the team sports of our entire lives. Every issue is a mini-election now, with battling teams looking to win status. 365 days a year. /1

The team sports or status battles that dominate societies now are all connected. The daily wars over Covid and Gaza and whatever else is ‘trending’ is rival groups (teams) battling for supremacy. Elections and ‘politics’ are the Grand Final. /2

Now political analysts ponder why people win landslide elections without even having policies. It’s because none of it is about doing anything, materially. It’s team sports. Winning a game of football won’t fix climate change. Elections are just football. /3

The entire status games/team sports culture is a veneer of hot air overlaid upon the actual material conditions of human life on Earth. The two have no necessary connection whatsoever. One is a popularity contest, the other the actual material conditions of life. /4

It is possible to couple the two, status and material progress. The Victorian empire did it, everybody from the Queen down celebrated the complete material re-working of social life. The Chinese do it right now. The Romans pioneered it. /5 https://t.co/l5YUJQXVl8

Here in the West there’s an almost total disconnect. Status has broken free from any material foundation, it’s a virulent and desperate daily battle for top dog, in every area of life. ‘The market’. ‘Competition’. Not to produce anything meaningful except status. /6

Permission for status games or team sports to be all of life, all day, every day. That is literally what the social and cultural reality of ‘the economy’ is. Humans have been here many times before in history. /7

Unless those status games are stabilised, the only outcome is ever increasing violence. What stabilises them is hitching them to the material conditions of life. So that high status is attached to fixing basic material problems. /8

Try that in the West. Productivity Commissions will come for you with venomous cries of ‘picking winners’. How dare we channel status towards some needed material outcome! If ‘the market’ wants novelty rubber ducks instead of flood mitigation, that’s what it should have! /9

I’m so bored with the daily team sports, here, all the way up to what we call ‘politics’, which again is nothing but the Grand Final of the team sports here. We affect disdain for it, but the 3 years between polls is foreplay leading to our great electoral orgasm. /10

People LOVE it. Never believe they don’t. And they never give up hope that this next election will be the one that finally fixes everything. You can’t vote your way out of the mess voting causes. Popularity/status can’t and won’t solve a single material problem. /end