The narratives around mis- and disinformation are a fundamental misunderstanding of how societies work. They…

The narratives around mis- and disinformation are a fundamental misunderstanding of how societies work. They never run on information. They run on status. Or put more simply, the overriding reason people do what they do, is because ‘everybody else is doing it’. /1 https://t.co/pQofZoiikZ

With Covid (or climate change) we didn’t move from a society running on facts, to one running on lies. Societies never run on facts. They run on people imitating what other people are doing. That imitation gives the person status in a social group, and therefore identity. /2

We all know this, we all went to school, where this is the entire mechanism of life. ‘Peer pressure’. Why do we not see that it continues into adulthood life? It gets even more intense there, particularly now that it’s lived mostly through social media. /3

The business model of social media is imitative rivalry. It’s entrenching schoolyard peer pressure *as* adult life. Not an analogy. I see so many look at the appalling collapse of public life, and blame ‘the people’ for it. The people are stupid, they need more facts! Etc. /4

Bollocks. People are doing what they’ve always done, and should do, copying other people. It’s how social animals work. It’s actually a huge advantage to social animals, it allows for rapid change in response to threats. But it can be gamed badly. /5

Because ‘the people’ (a completely empty concept), when they copy, copy somebody. A small number of high-status people. If the currently high status people in a society are sociopathic idiots, society will become sociopathically idiotic. /6

Which is what we’re seeing right now. America elected Trump *twice*. QED. You can’t blame the people for this, because people never act as a collective group in that way. They individually ‘follow a leader’. They imitate, they emulate. Because they want to ‘fit in’. /7

It’s the beheading of the leadership function in societies by the politics of ‘the economy’ (which deliberately replaces all leadership with a fictitious self-regulating ‘market’) that is destroying our civilisations. Not ‘the people’ needing education. /8

Democracy as we call it never was the people running anything. They can’t, groups of people never act as a single agency. They always follow a very small number of people, within the group. We need to focus our attention on the basic fact of ‘what everybody else is doing’. /9

That’s what drives societies. The most authoritarian, and the most democratic. They’re all using exactly the same social mechanism. The imitation of high status people, by lower status people. ‘Doing what everybody else is doing.’ /end