For all things there is a root cause. Reality is not multi-factorial. A root cause isn’t reductive, when…

For all things there is a root cause. Reality is not multi-factorial. A root cause isn’t reductive, when chemistry realised atoms were the root cause of all matter, it didn’t prevent matter (or chemistry) being endlessly complex. The lives we live also have a root cause. /1 https://t.co/dlWIW7CbrB

That root cause is status. Status is the ‘atoms’ of our lives. Everything we use as explanation instead, like power and politics and personal psychologies, are ‘chemical compounds’ of status. It’s the key that unlocks everything. /2

And as with chemistry, this doesn’t prevent our lives being endlessly complex and colourful. But underneath all of that complexity is a simple mechanism. The workings of status. Our social periodic table. /3

I Tweet often why this is. Status is also identity. Without status, we are literally, individually and collectively, nobody. Having status makes us somebody. We are unrecognisably anything, without status. /4

Status games, the ongoing battles for status, what I call team sports, to capture the essential group-based mechanism we employ, are pretty much our whole lives. It’s so complete as a mechanism that we often don’t even realise this is what we’re doing. /5

You will struggle to find a single thing humans do that doesn’t reduce to the imitative rivalry (team sports) of these battles for status. All of this matters because without root causes our lives spin endlessly in fictitious secondary manifestations of status. /6

All the -isms and Left/Right framings and today hashtag-ontologies that are really just status games. Us in our groups or teams, fighting to be top dog in the social melee. Mistaking the message with the medium. /7

Try the framing today, as you scroll through Twitter. Find any posts or threads that aren’t ultimately somebody or some group jostling for status. For their identity to be the dominant identity, to be ‘recognised’ by others as dominant. /8

Find one thing humans do that wasn’t originally something a high status person or group introduced, which was then imitated by others. Like our rampant travel culture today. Do you know its origins? It seems the most ‘democratic’ expression of human desire. Bollocks. /9

The idea of recreational travel, travelling to ‘see the sights’, derived from the Grand Tour aristocratic families provided for their sons when they came of age. Now emulated widely by the rest of us peasants. /10

I bet you can’t find something in human society that escapes this root cause, that is outside our social periodic status table. Once you see it, the world unfolds before you like a large-print book. /end