How we think, how we act, even how we feel, is overwhelmingly defined socially. By our membership of groups,…

How we think, how we act, even how we feel, is overwhelmingly defined socially. By our membership of groups, in battle with other groups, for status. The Welcome Stranger nugget, as a beautiful example. The world’s largest ever alluvial gold nugget. Over 70kg of gold. /1 https://t.co/n9IOr2oD1s

Found in Victoria, Australia, in the mid-19th century. What’s most fascinating about it isn’t the gold or the size of the nugget. It’s that the Indigenous Australian population almost certainly found it long before that. /2

It was found under only a few centimetres of dirt, at the base of a tree. Aboriginal Australians had likely discovered it, and found it of little interest. To many other cultures, 70kg of gold in a single nugget would create enormous excitement. So - why? /3

Because it’s ‘valuable’. But again - why? Who defines the value? The culture does. It’s a social thing. You can make a lot of money from that much gold. And can turn it into beautiful things. /4

But again, and this never changes, both of those are socially defined things. Gold is worth a lot of money because it has a lot of *status*, socially. Its beauty is also a socially-defined thing. And again, it comes back to status. Everything does. /5

Even aesthetics, the most ‘subjective’ of things, is defined by the collective assessment of value. The fight for status, for what’s better or worse. You’ll struggle to find a single thing humans do every day, that doesn’t ultimately reduce to this battle for status. /6

Which in turn is a struggle for identity. Status gives identity, your membership of a group and the group’s position relative to other groups. The modern acceleration of ‘identity’ politics is really just the astronomical escalation of status games. Team sports. /7

In turn largely traceable to the explosion of social media, which has status games as its business model. Just look, at everything around you. Humans imitating each other (currently trashing Tesla, for example), because imitation is the root mechanism in status games. /8

Imitating or emulating is how a member of a team demonstrates that membership. Monkey-see, monkey-do is pretty much all civilisation. And the more you take away shared, collective ways to define status and identity, the more individual ways to do that will grow. /9

The ‘freedumb’ world we’re now living in, glorying in the smashing of institutions, everything from the entire US government, to again Tesla, is a status games orgy. Without institutions, status is not only up for grabs, it’s *all* we can focus on. /10

Without a sense of status and therefore identity, we spend all our days and nights trying to repair that cataclysmic void. None of us want to be a ‘nobody’. And are you part of the mob, glorying in institutional destruction? /11

The reason the pile-on on Tesla disgusts me, isn’t that I support Musk’s lunatic politics. It’s that we don’t see that mob smashing of institutions is social collapse, not progress. Trying to inflict maximum pain on another team and its leader is bog standard team sports. /12 https://t.co/PUEu58OpT8

Righteous activism is just status games, the same games the supposed enemies of ‘the people’ use to destroy societies. You’re not fixing team sports, by doing more team sports. As always institutions that are incredibly difficult to establish and maintain are the victims. /13

130,000 brilliant people work at Tesla, for example, producing brilliant technology, much of which is critical to our transition to renewable energy economies. None of that is of interest to the righteous. They just want the team leader of the opposing team brought down. /14

Like the vandals who travelled the countryside smashing beautiful churches in history, in iconoclastic outrage. In modern times this is a pathology shared by several cultures and nations. Iconoclasm. It’s destroying the US right now. /15

Smash the institutions! The impersonal guardians of collective health and wealth and peace. But they get in the way of the team sports, the status games. They’re ’red tape’. Put there when previous status games erupted into total violence, in wars and other catastrophes. /16

If you think ‘the Right’ (or Left) is taking over the world, or even the ‘far-Right’ (or Left), you’re just playing team sports, together with the people you’re defining as far-Right. You’re all in it together. Blind to basic material reality. /17

Obsessed with being top dogs in the status games, to take total control of societies. While the actual material needs of those societies are ignored, or used as fodder in the idiot status games. Even Teslas, and Tesla batteries. Wonderful machines. /18

Now cannon fodder for the team sports. The mob outrage will fade, the mob is easily bored. Some new outrage, some new smashing, will replace it soon enough. Some new institutional remnant of civilisation will be pulverised instead. Until there are none left. /end