Only institutions can act for our collective long-term good. Everything else will always be status games.…

Only institutions can act for our collective long-term good. Everything else will always be status games. Institutions emerge from crisis, they’re the response to a crisis. They invent and embed procedures that act well beyond the lifetime of the people who work within them. /1

That’s what an institution is, a collective embedded memory, a set of habits, that continue to act after those who set them up have long gone. They’re the only long-term-focused stability that can defeat human status games. /2

To the present day they always seem like a lead weight. ‘Red tape’. ‘Bureaucracy’. An irritating inertia. That inertia is all that allows societies to survive. Of course it will sometimes clash with urgent need. /3

Just as your body’s accumulated systems sometimes push back against your immediate desires and needs. They force you to sleep, for example. The further an institution gets from its originating catastrophe, the more likely it will be hijacked by status games. /4

We saw that with public health and Covid. In Australia when Covid arrived, the institutions worked exactly as designed after previous catastrophes. They kicked Covid’s arse. But then the demands of present-day status games fought back. /5

It had been too long since the invention of public health for enough people to remember why it’s important. Too long since the last disaster. Surely we can live with a pandemic, the status games said? This is all just hysteria? /6

This same cyclical pattern repeats throughout all of our history. Equilibrium of status in better times (the ‘status quo’) allowing dreams of god-like life free of all restriction. Punctuated by the catastrophes the status quo generates. Generating new institutions. /7

Creating new periods of comfortable ‘free’ life, a new status quo to ignore the empirical link we have to wider realities. Generating new catastrophes. Etc, ad infinitum. /8

Institutions are humanity’s memory, and will always seem like an obstacle to the present day. The ‘restrictions’ of customs and traditions. They’re the ‘we’ that many have noticed has now disappeared. It’s they who do the constant assessment of what ‘we’ is and needs. /9

They’re the mostly silent and invisible actors looking after things, keeping the lights on. Without them it’s all up to you. That’s what the ‘cost of living’ crisis really is. Forget all the economic explanations. It’s the collapse of that calculated ‘we’. /10

That continuous calculation is what keeps people healthy and safe and solvent. When it’s removed in favour of a fictitious ‘market’, humans just play status games to try to survive. Welcome to 2025. /end