Nichols Gruen’s chat with ChatGPT brings up many of the themes I raise here. For example, the Magna Carta,…

Nichols Gruen’s chat with ChatGPT brings up many of the themes I raise here. For example, the Magna Carta, the underlying framework for modern democracies, never had a thing to do with ‘the people’. It was a truce between Kings and barons. https://t.co/0kpBT99ukr /1 https://t.co/md23pRwpl3

The checks and balances of modern democracies, that Trump for example is attacking, were never introduced as protections for the people. They were introduced via that truce, as a way for the barons to keep monarchical power in check. /2

Democracy is just feudalism, re-badged. Its origins are monarchical, and to this day we still live in feudalist, monarchical societies. We just call the Kings Presidents or Prime Ministers, and the barons ‘oligarchs’. Sometimes we even still have Kings, directly. /3

Societies are always led, they are always hierarchical status hierarchies, with a King or equivalent at the top. That King will always have a ‘court’ of barons, like Trump’s current gang of billionaires. These aren’t analogies. /4

Overwhelmingly the undoubted progress in peace, prosperity and health we’ve seen in the past century didn’t come from any of this. Not from the checks and balances. Not from voting. Not from activism of any kind. /5

That progress came from catastrophe, the 4 horsemen of the apocalyptic first half of the 20th century. WW1, Spanish Flu, the Great Depression and WW2. Those catastrophes smashed the feudal status hierarchies. Societies were nearly destroyed. /6

Rebuilding them required a collective ‘we’ to emerge, a ‘public’. That public isn’t ’the people’. It’s an administrative construction, from the institutions set up to do the rebuilding. A continuous calculation of collective need, to guide the rebuilding. /7

That work was deemed more or less done by the 1970s, which is why at that time the status games exploded again, this time under cover of ‘economic’ fantasies. That societies are really economies, markets, of freely-acting individuals. It was and still is a con. /8

It was status games, back at the centre of our societies, as they always have been, for our entire histories. The idea of an economy deliberately gives permission for every single person to attempt to gain as much status as they want. ‘Aspirational’ politics. /9

Free of any idea of public/collective anything. That was all re-badged as red tape, bureaucracy. In Gruen’s chat, ancient Rome and Greece are said to have tried to avoid ever having that monarchical, hierarchical, King-led structure. /10

That’s codswallop. The Romans tried the people-led (Senate) thing. It was their period of most intense violence and bloodshed. Only when they then shifted to Emperors (Kings) did they enter Pax Romana. 200 years of relative peace and prosperity. /11

In our team sports times of continuous status games, people read something like this and immediately try to figure out what ‘team’ you’re on. ‘Oh you’re an authoritarian’, etc. I’m not on any team. I think societies have objective material realities. /12

Material realities that are oblivious to any of our status games, our debates. Humans are social animals that function in certain objective ways, and they will function in those ways no matter what other order you try to impose. They will form status hierarchies. /13

Topped by a king or equivalent (at every scale, from gangs to countries). With an aristocracy of barons, a cascading series of hierarchies throughout the entire society. The only thing that will ever disrupt this objective material reality, is catastrophes. /14

External or even internal events, that destroy existing status hierarchies. Only that opens up a space where a collective focus can flourish, for a while. None of the guff about checks and balances or ‘the people’ does it. That’s just status games. /15

Rene Girard said only Christianity gave a more permanent alternative, where Christ (or some higher power or principle) supplanted all status games and their scapegoats. It’s not a coincidence that the Holy Roman Empire more or less built civilisation as we know it today. /end