The checks and balances that actually define ‘democracy’ (elections don’t) mostly derive from the Magna…

The checks and balances that actually define ‘democracy’ (elections don’t) mostly derive from the Magna Carta. Rule of law, limits on power of the King and Church, just taxation, a role for the aristocracy/barons, etc. It was never about ‘the people’. /1 https://t.co/FVPVfMhaYd

It was about the highest status members of societies (the ‘elite’ as populists call them today) reaching an agreement as to their respective powers. Which they of course immediately ignored, it took many centuries to bed the idea of checks and balances down. /2

We’re sort of living in 1214 today, prior to the signing of the Magna Carta. With our ‘elite overproduction’ (a proliferation of barons) fighting around their King (Trump and other ‘authoritarians’). With the churches strategising amongst it too. /3

How did ‘the people’ ever appear in this clearly top end of town checks and balances system? In only one way. Via catastrophes, which damaged the top end of town. Wars, plagues, natural disasters. /4

Elections were gamed by the elites the moment they were introduced, and the populists who rally around them today are just using them to short-circuit the checks and balances. Nothing is easier to engineer than popularity. Once you do that, you can bypass all due process. /5

Catastrophes force societies to rebuild, to survive. Then and only then are the needs of ordinary people taken into consideration. The workers. Until the rebuilding is deemed done. Then the status games return, amongst the high status groups. /6

There is no counter movement of ‘the people’ separately, because the people is not a thing. No group of people is an agency in that way. All groups are led, it’s what forms the group. By about 5% of the group. There are always status hierarchies. /7

The best humans achieve is embedding some form of obligation regime into these hierarchies, a noblesse oblige. A responsibility to all people, derived from a functional recognition of the interdependent material reality of societies. /8

The laughable idea that social media for example allows ‘the people’ to rise up as an independent force? Or protest movements? All that produces is violence between a proliferation of gangs. Mob rule. People torching Teslas. /9

It feels righteous, but it’s just uncontrolled violence. Just look at our world every day now. The proliferation of team sport status games, on *every* issue. Always new gangs, slugging it out. I bought a Tesla, it’s been fascinating. /10

I bought one as an engineer, it perfectly matched my material needs. My options though apparently were to be either a ‘Tesla fanboy’, or an anti-Nazi campaigner. Listen to the childish bullshit dominating our lives now. People bandying around terms like ‘fascist’. /11

The fuck they know about fascism. Trump and Musk couldn’t organise a root in a brothel, to use a great Australian phrase, the 20th century fascists would see them as buffoons. Gangs online and roaming the countryside, like some righteous modern Inquisition. /12

We need to grow the fuck up, and fast. All of this team sports is the problem, not the solution. The more ‘connected’ we are, the more violent we will become, the more gangs will be formed. Sociality is violence. /13

Social media is probably the catastrophe that will ‘fix’ it, by destroying everything. Add the influencers there and the elite overproduction is exponential. Rampant, uncontrolled, fractal battles for status. Everyone a wannabe baron now. /14

I’ve suggested before that the least bad catastrophe that might save us right now, is China, or Asia more generally. With its ‘authoritarian’ regimes. Stabilised status hierarchies, actually building things towards the social good. /15

Because they understand status, and the need to control it. Only that opens a breathing space towards the material well-being of societies. They’re the ‘world’s factory’. The rest of us are just playing games, trying to be top dog, in nations producing nothing. /end