‘So what can we do? is the common question when I suggest humans can’t escape status games. It’s all about…

‘So what can we do? is the common question when I suggest humans can’t escape status games. It’s all about that ‘we’. There is no we, in status games. ‘We’ emerges in very specific conditions only. /1

When human groups are under threat. You’ll have seen that all the time in your own life. For example you may barely speak to people in your own town. But if the town is threatened by something, suddenly you find a ‘solidarity’ with your fellow human beings. A ‘we’ emerges. /2

You’ll even have experienced that at school, where the groups you were part of often found a reason to exist as a refuge against threats from bullies or other groups. So, the ‘we’ that used to run things like public health, and now isn’t? /3

I’ve traced that history many times. It emerged from the ruins of the 4 great catastrophes of the first half of the 20th century. WW1 Spanish Flu pandemic The Great Depression WW2. Those created a ‘we’ that we then called ‘the public’. And what was this ‘we’? /4

It was the public institutions we used to repair societies, after that 4-pronged apocalypse. Institutions created and enacted the ‘we’. ‘We’ is a continuous calculation of collective need, by *institutions*. Not the idiot populist idea of ‘the people’. /5

Populism will have you believe that any crowd or social media group you can cobble together is ‘the people’ or ‘the community’. But that’s really just enumeration. Big groups of people together is not a we. It’s just a group of people. /6

It’s the continuous calculation of and response to collective need that is a we. Those institutions just ran, they looked out for us. They gave us that sense, now gone, that somebody, somewhere, was looking after things. /7

We saw it with Covid. When the pandemic started, the institutions already knew what to do, they swung into action. In countries with relatively strong institutions, like Australia and NZ, Covid didn’t stand a chance. It got its arse kicked. /8

But the great Anglo libertarian loon countries - the UK and US - had already had decades of damaging their own institutions, in the post-1970s resistance to the post-WW2 rebuilding. The ‘free market’ movement, really just the restoration of status-driven life. /9

A free market is a fiction, they don’t exist. It’s a blatant con to remove institutional input to human affairs, to allow individuals to play status games again. Look at the phenomenal growth in wealth and influence of a tiny handful of people, since that shift. /10

If you want healthy, prosperous, peaceful lives, you need to live under the guidance of institutions with thousands of skilled staff, continuously assessing collective health and altering course as required. Everything else is just status games. The restoration of Kings. /11

And the only thing that will put those institutions in place, is catastrophe. They’re an emergency response to catastrophe. Nothing else ruptures our status quo. The Catholic Church managed many centuries of probably the only alternative, by targeting status itself. /12

They provided an institution - the church itself - built upon the principle of humans surrendering ultimate status to a non-human power. And a specific non-human (Christ) principle of rejecting status games and scapegoating. /13

Rene Girard saw this, that Christ’s taking of the entire scapegoating mechanism of human status-driven life onto himself, in his crucifixion, was the key to the specific genius of Christian societies. It’s what built them, what held status games at bay for millennia. /14

Of course these status games were then reproduced within the church itself. You can’t be free of status, because status is identity, for social creatures. But you can redirect it, which is what they did. That’s the best you can do. /15

Now in social media societies we’re going in exactly the opposite direction. It’s not capitalism or any -ism at work, it’s rampant, naked status battles. If you don’t address status as the atomic cause of all human thought and behaviour, you will never change anything. /end