Covid minimisers, climate change deniers, all the loon modern contrarians. I call them social status whores.…

Covid minimisers, climate change deniers, all the loon modern contrarians. I call them social status whores. Because that’s what they’re up to. 1/7

Dewey and Lippmann in their famous early 20th century debates on democracy more or less agreed on one thing. That people never spontaneously organise or agree on just about anything. They ‘come together’ only when they face a problem collectively that they can’t fix. 2/7

Once that problem is being effectively felt by people in their lives, they will band together under some form of leadership, to fight it. But that moment of recognition of a collectively unresolved problem also attracts the status whores. 3/7

Ambitious people looking for a way to ‘make a name’ for themselves. They see the collective attention shifting to a problem, and are attracted to that attention (not the problem) like flies to a pile of shit. 4/7

Having arrived at the pile of shit, they can’t just offer support to the most logical and obvious solutions that may exist or are being proposed. That gives them no differentiation from others, no leverage for their own status. So they’ll offer contrarian positions. 5/7

Often outrageous ‘solutions’. Because they know that will at least shift the already present collective gaze towards them, even for a moment. Which is what they crave. It’s important to recognise that they have ZERO interest in the problem itself or in its resolution. 6/7

What they’re interested in is their own social status. And the resolution of the problem would take away the stage that they’re playing their loon contrarian role on, a disaster. They revel in the problem continuing, because while it does, they can attract attention. /end