For a few years I’ve argued for what I call reality politics. Galileo’s ‘and yet it moves’ is the motto. This…

For a few years I’ve argued for what I call reality politics. Galileo’s ‘and yet it moves’ is the motto. This is not about plugging some science into what we call politics. It’s something fundamentally different. /1 https://t.co/XHZXCQSke8

‘And yet it moves’ captures it. It’s a politics that says no matter how much humans fight each other for status, reality will be what it is, independent of them. And more, the outcome of those fights for status, our ‘debates’, will be decided by this same reality. /2

This includes even within science itself. It has no special relationship with reality, if anything it’s even more infected by human status games. Reality politics also recognises that we’re not mere observers of reality. We shape it, we’re part of it. /3

In that way our status games do create realities, they’re not entirely hot air. We’re living with a pandemic apparently, a case in point. But reality goes so far beyond humanity that you can go only run with a con like that for so long. We get found out. /4

Debates, the team sports of human status-driven life, don’t decide ultimate outcomes. Reality in that much wider sense always decides. “And yet it moves.” /5

This is also why I say only catastrophes really shift societies, creating meaningful change. History shows that to be true, and this is why. Those catastrophes are reality politics. Reality intervening in our navel-gazing status games. /6

Timescales are important. You can celebrate all manner of apparent victories in the daily fight for human status. The living with Covid folks have been doing that for a while, for example. But if you’re going against the reality of things, you will lose. /7

The brutal, desperate passion we have for our daily team sports, believing that victory in one of these status games will be the thing that will fix everything. Elections are the Premier League of these team sports. We’re so sure we can vote our problems away. /8

We’re groups of people arguing over whether a rock will fall when we drop it. That rock is going to fall, no matter how many teams argue otherwise, or reframe that falling as something else. Zoom out and look at all of our ‘political’ debates. (Really fights for status.) /9

How ridiculous they all are and seem, when you can reframe them in reality politics. The stupendous vanity of humans, to think their debates create reality itself. Reality could not care less about what we think, or about our status. /10

It tolerates us while those debates retain some sort of connection to the way things actually are, in reality. But status games always diverge from that connection. And then reality smashes us. Those catastrophes. That’s the pulse of all history. /11

It’s tremendously calming to step outside all of those status games, and be on the side of reality itself. None of us is a god, none of us really know what reality is, this isn’t a simplistic positivism. But you can still be on its side, by rejecting human status games. /12

You can still live calmly knowing that no matter which loons are currently winning the Premier League of human status, a catastrophe is coming to sit them on their arse. It’s an essential humility towards reality, and our lives within it. /13

To recognise that we don’t create reality. We are not gods. We’ve largely abandoned religion as a result of an earlier status game called the Enlightenment. That led us to create a cartoon caricature of religion as belief in supernatural beings. /14

But the essential insight of religion has always been more grounded than that. It’s just an acknowledgement that reality itself is always greater than any of our human status games about it. There is always a ‘higher power’, whatever you want to name it. Reality itself. /15

It created a humility towards life. An acceptance of our mortality and finitude and limited understanding. You won’t find even the tiniest shred left of that humility now. Especially not in our new social media world. /16

Status games are now everything. From the most intimate and personal, through to the professional and political. Everything is an argument. A fight. Because everybody is fighting for status. To be top dog. /17

Join me, step outside of the bubbles of our status games. Open your eyes to reality again, feel it. Relish not knowing, not caring what others think. Embrace humility again, towards life itself. Watch it smash the status seekers. Enjoy that show. /end