How is everybody going with ‘the people’ running societies? Our own ideas about democracy are what destroys…
How is everybody going with ‘the people’ running societies? Our own ideas about democracy are what destroys it.
What those with highest status did was use this whole idea of ‘the people’ to absolutely dominate everybody. /1
They know that by pretending societies run from the ‘bottom up’, they get to own everything. That the most basic way humans behave as groups makes a lie of the whole idea. They game that lie, every day. /2
This was the true origins of the idea of a ‘market economy’. The idea that societies didn’t need leaders, that ‘the people’ jostling amongst themselves would be a type of ‘invisible hand’ to steer societies.
It’s why I say ‘the economy’ was a social invention. /3
To strip away existing status hierarchies, at that time embedded mostly in public institutions focused on collective need, and replace them with themselves.
Under cover of ‘liberating the people’. From their own public institutions, like government. /4
It’s breathtaking really that this balls-out con ever succeeded. But here we are. They tapped into the status games humans can’t resist, and we’ve been flying at warp speed from any sort of collective sanity ever since. /5
Look at these platforms every day. At all the suffering people crying out that ‘we’ aren’t doing anything to fix clear and critical problems.
That ‘we’ is dead. It was only ever those public institutions, which the market crowd gleefully burn. Replacing with themselves. /6
They monetise the smoking ruins. Services that used to be publicly provided are now user-pays, with the proceeds going to the market crowd.
Silicon Valley society, you can’t do a thing without detouring through a Valley roadblock. Even pre-social media this was true. /7
Lower status people, which is most of us, can form our little groups here every day and think we’re fighting the good fight of ‘the people’, righting society’s wrongs.
High status people watch and laugh. They invented these platforms to monetise our basic social lives. /8
All they produce is endless warfare between an endless proliferation of groups and sub-groups. All monetised for the benefit of the high status owners.
Those owners now have positions at the top level of government. They’re creating ‘efficiencies’. More revenue for them. /9
We can’t avoid status hierarchies. But we can make them much more focused on collective good than Silicon Valley/financial quant status hierarchies.
Success status games, where success is actual social good. Like the Romans and Victorians did. /10
Pretending ‘the people’ are running the show will just produce what it is producing. Wave after wave of ever-increasing violence, as groups battle for status, and thereby identity, in a social world stripped of it.
/end