This is a pivotal story, those dedicated to the team sports status games of ‘politics’ won’t understand why.…

This is a pivotal story, those dedicated to the team sports status games of ‘politics’ won’t understand why. Note the Trump administration’s immediate response, calling out ‘unelected’ judges. The worst insult to a populist is ‘unelected’. /1 https://t.co/y1ZqCXHXm3 https://t.co/qsGbGI5jWv

Everything we see in our modern Western societies is the result of us substituting adult (institutional) life, with high school culture. I’ve shared how that happened, the use of compulsory schooling, which split a single adult culture, into a child and adult culture. /2

Then because everybody went to school, and learned the culture there, when they left school they remade the old adult life, as a giant high school. It was all they knew. That substitution was complete some time ago. Social media has absolutely entrenched it. /3

Social media’s entire mode of operating is the schoolyard. It organises everything according to likes and followers. Popularity. That’s the schoolyard, we all experienced it at school. We don’t see that’s now adult life too. /4

Social media *is* our societies now. It’s not ‘about’ them. It’s not about content. It’s the place we transact our societies. Public policy was replaced with what’s trending. Our collective attention span is now about 10 minutes. /5

People say ‘that’s a great analogy’. It’s not an analogy. This is *literally* what’s occurred. Our entire societies now are giant high schools. Kids at school and adults through to the elderly are all sharing the same cultural/social spaces. /6

These platforms. The medium is the message. How these platforms are designed IS now our societies. ‘Influence’ replaces expertise. Half-witted publicity whores transform their social media followings into actual seats at the table, in government. /7

And remember at school, that loose distinction between jocks and nerds? It’s absolutely real, and populism is the revenge of the jocks. Previously they lorded over people at school, but were mostly swallowed up by mature adult life. They ended up in shit dead-end jobs. /8

Meanwhile the ‘nerds’, who actually studied the culture the civilisation was passing down over generations, slotted into institutions after leaving school that continued implementing this culture. But now the jocks are running the world. /9

You can hear it, yelling at you, in the endless sneering now at ‘elites’. That’s the jocks from school railing against the teachers and nerds they always despised. Trump is one of those Prom Kings from high school, now having his revenge against the nerds. /10

(Except I doubt he was ever that popular, he’s the spoiled rich kid everybody hated, who bought his way through school and life.) Same hatred of the nerds. The great hatred of the ‘unelected’ is so obviously a war cry to make popularity the metric to run everything. /11

That’s why I hate elections, they entrench popularity as the ultimate currency of power. Combine elections with social media and you demolish millennia of civilised progress. Trump is the Twitter/Truth Social President. Are we blind? It’s so obvious. /12

Our institutions are all that oppose this transformation of all life into high school life. For now they’re holding in some places, and not in others. Public health as an institution was swept away alarmingly fast in the early pandemic. /13

Powerless against a tidal wave of social media and electoral jock-power. They wanted their adolescent eternal lifestyle travel and eating out lives back. We can’t vote our way out of this mess. Voting is one of the root causes OF the mess. /14

Institutions, as Burke said centuries ago, are what run societies. They emerge in response to catastrophic need, and embed procedural habits that cross generations. Like our own autonomic social nervous system. Populism is political dysautonomia. /15

We have to stop packing the stadium of all of our team sports substitutes for institutional life, stop our obsessive focus on X v Y, in every facet of life. Those team sports are literally just a game. They have no connection with material reality at all. /16

Only our institutions, which nobody made but emerge through generations of trial and suffering, keep us alive and healthy and prosperous. Go Harvard. Go US Law. Kick the orange fucker to the kerb. /end