I’m reminded of DH Lawrence’s Letter from Germany, written between the world wars, when observing public life…

I’m reminded of DH Lawrence’s Letter from Germany, written between the world wars, when observing public life today. The shift to righteousness, to proliferating and pulverising team sports. Even those who previously seemed moderate now baying for destruction. /1

Trump’s victory accelerated this shift. The greater the violation of the checks and balances of democratic life he and Musk inflict upon the US, the more intense the performative outrage becomes. Everyone is a fascist now, or a Nazi. Apparently. /2

If you’re stuck in a public life comprising entirely various teams battling for supremacy, particularly online, then only the biggest, meanest words will do. It’s childish schoolyard name-calling. I’ve spent years tracing the shift of adult life to kidult life. /3

Adult life now feels like an enormous schoolyard. Not by analogy, it is literally, culturally that. Adults with no conception at all how to progress material change in their societies. /4

Except to sling insults and to ‘cancel’ other teams and team members. That’s 100% schoolyard, exact in every detail. Performative outrage, white hot righteousness. I saw somebody abused while driving their Tesla in a small remote town supermarket car park yesterday. /5

Through an open window a guy in a Wankpanzer called them a ‘wanker’. The anti-Tesla crowd cheer this sort of stuff on. They think it’s changing the world. They have no idea at all of the dangers of shifting public life towards mob rule. /6

Mobs, again, do not discriminate. It starts out looking like a victory for the team, against another team. But it quickly becomes indiscriminate violence. The Simpsons even did an episode on it. Lawrence saw this shift years before it erupted into WW2. /7

By boycotting or cancelling, we’re not mini Ralph Naders shifting politics as ‘consumers’ of governance. We’re a team, lashing out at other teams. Allow that to become uncontrolled team sports, and the next step is the mob. /8

The mob is not so much a team, as the dissolution of all teams, towards collective, uncontrolled enthusiasms. Those enthusiasms eventually are narrowed to one thing only, violence. Rene Girard saw this. It was his life’s work to describe it. /9

The community feels increasingly dangerous to me now, in very dark ways similar to what Lawrence felt in Europe between the wars. The moderating, calm operation of societies via its public institutions replaced by open vigilantism. /10

Somebody being abused in a remote country town’s supermarket car park is apparently helping get Trump and Musk out of the White House. Seriously? Are people now so deranged that they believe this stuff? /11

I’ve Tweeted before how the sign of this collapse is not the spread of misinformation or disinformation. Societies have never run on information. It’s that people are interested in and discuss things that were previously of no interest to them at all. /12

People in their teams now prosecuting tribal warfare over the basic operating system of societies, basics like public health and transport and anything else the teams latch onto. Like a human trying to take over their autonomic nervous system. /13

When public institutions ran societies, people could have different, even crazy, views about the world. It didn’t matter so much because collective life was regulated separately to it. Now those views are in car parks, harassing other members of the public. /14

I’ve lost respect for those who until this point in the status games appeared to at least have retained some semblance of old-style adult life. Where it was obvious that you didn’t harass or assault people, you didn’t shoot them or commit acts of arson. /15

But it appears some team sports causes are just too much for them. The magnitude of Trumpism for example has led them to join the mob. Burke saw that mobs are worse than no change at all, during the French Revolution. They usher in even greater tyrannies. /16

An orgy of intense, violent outrage releases some of the anger of the team sports, but it just destroys, and kills. And the new tyrant then has no checks and balances at all. An indicator of a shift towards the mob is escalating, intense imitation. /17

Because status games are games of imitative rivalry (Girard), the more intense the rivalry becomes, the more social life becomes uncontrolled imitation. Manias, irrational enthusiasms. Burning Teslas becomes a copied behaviour. /18

Justified of course by the righteousness of the supposed cause. But really blind, righteous imitation. That’s what a mob is. Most of those committing violence and destruction in a mob are unaware of the details of any preceding’ ‘debate’ at all. They’re just there to smash. /19

Glorying in the destruction, publicising it in an escalating game of who can smash better. Like teenagers stealing and trashing cars for TikTok follows. The millions who flock to Taylor Swift concerts, or whatever the latest mob trigger is. Manias are imitation unleashed. /20

A society where public life is replaced by what’s trending. Imitation completely decoupled from any material reality or historical check or balance. Uncontrolled, violent imitation. Social media pouring petrol on this fire, a dramatic short-cut for trending stupidities. /21

Those who recognise that the team sports of popular elections isn’t delivering for democracy, now think that taking the team sports to the streets will fix it. As Lawrence said, apparently it wasn’t to be helped. The die is cast. /end