The myth of ‘the people’ and its power refuses to die in the US. The data shows it to be a myth. I don’t…

The myth of ‘the people’ and its power refuses to die in the US. The data shows it to be a myth. I don’t agree with the rest of this thread from Cory, about ‘groundswell’ politics. Anti-trust. That’s the great American political delusion, that is destroying the country. /1 https://t.co/4hzT6hDnXW

All societies are really feudal aristocracies. Not because ‘the people’ are always duped or screwed, but because that’s what most people want. Hierarchy. Hierarchy comes from status, which is the currency of all societies. People crave it more than anything else. /2

Because status is also identity. It makes you somebody, rather than nobody. Nobody wants to be nobody. This is the basic behaviour, social behaviour, of humans as social animals. All of our politics ignores it. /3

What we even call politics is this same behaviour, re-badged and misunderstood. Elections are massive popularity contests, long ago hijacked by status games. And there’s also nothing wrong with status per se. /4

Recognising something as better than something else - hierarchy - is the most basic moral and ethical behaviour. The choice isn’t between status hierarchy societies, and democracies, the supposed ‘groundswell’. /5

There is never a groundswell. No groups of people, of whatever size, ever act as a single agency. They’re always led by about 5% of the members of any group. That’s a figure I got from the analysis of Korean POW camps. /6

Where deliberate removal and killing of that 5% amongst American POWs rendered the rest of the prisoners helpless. They just died, in record numbers, offering next to no resistance. I did a thread about it: /7 https://t.co/xs9uVL1sY8

The choice is between different types of status hierarchies, as Will Storr’s brilliant book on status discusses. The massive gains in social life in the past few centuries had a lot to do with making that progress itself a status game. /8

The Republic of Letters was that status game. Success games, as Storr calls them, where status was allocated to the scientific and other work directed at social progress. Victorian England was one manifestation of those new status games. /9 https://t.co/sh93E3uo37

Not a ‘groundswell’ change led by a fictitious ‘the people’. ‘The people’ is a myth made popular by fascists in the 20th century, Hitler’s ‘volk’. All human life is led by status. All hierarchical, because hierarchy reflects a deliberate distinction between good and bad. /10

If you need a plumber, you want a good plumber. Not the most popular plumber, selected by ‘the people’. You want a plumber who knows how to do plumbing. Sometimes those are the same thing. But there’s nothing that makes that anything other than fortuitous. /11

American democracy is dying because of the mythologies it lives, about democracy. It’s simple, democracy is not and has never been, nor ever could be, a movement of ‘the people’. It’s governance *for* the people. But not BY them. ‘The people’ is a count, not a thing. /12

It’s government via public institutions, that bypass all the popularity piffle of daily team sports. Those institutions only tend to exist and have authority to the extent the status games of everyday life are suppressed. /13

I’ve Tweeted often how they came to be in our lifetimes, via 4 catastrophic events of the first half of the 20th century. WW1, the Spanish Flu, the Great Depression and WW2. Those catastrophes destroyed status hierarchies. Allowing breathing space for public institutions. /14

Institutions set up to rebuild societies after those catastrophes, post-1945. What the Republic of Letters did for the Victorians, catastrophe did for us. That’s mostly how history works. Only rarely does status get aligned with social good. /15

The Republic of Letters was anomalous (but could be repeated). Mostly humans just play status games decoupled from the social good, until societies collapse. Mostly catastrophes create the only progress. Punctuated equilibria, the equilibria being human status games. /16

Those who sang about power to the people in the 1960s are now worth hundreds of millions of dollars. They’re high status. The great mythology of the people will destroy democracy. /end