Trumpian populists don’t get that the institutional checks and balances he’s running aground on *are*…
Trumpian populists don’t get that the institutional checks and balances he’s running aground on *are* democracy. Populists want democracy to be just elections; they can game those.
But the rest of us forget where the checks and balances come from.
/1
https://t.co/saWRUVj6bs https://t.co/P0UuxjRV3z
They’re a remnant of the Magna Carta. Which in turn was a truce between a King, and his barons. This is the important bit.
Democracy has NEVER been about what we call ‘the people’. It’s been about a battle for supremacy at the very top of human status hierarchies.
/2 https://t.co/LETEDbgI9M
Even today, while we should cheer on courts and the law standing in the way of the great tidal wave of orange stupidity, remember why they’re doing it.
Not for ‘the people’, an empty, meaningless concept. Existing businesses want certainty back for their trade.
/3
That’s the status quo resisting a shift. And let’s face it, that status quo is better than the idiot populism of Trump.
But don’t be deceived into thinking this is a battle for ‘the people’. Nothing is ever that.
/4
Human societies run on status. Those with high status don’t oppress those with low status, those with low status want to be people with high status.
We need to ditch these good versus bad binaries, to stop looking for our own personal Darth Vader in the Death Star.
/5
When we do that we really just want somebody else to take that high status position, including ourselves. We want our team to be the winning team, instead of the current winners.
All human-centred schemes for governance will become status games. Team sports.
/6
Only connection to the empirical *non-human* realities of existence can interrupt these status games. Plagues, natural disasters, ecological collapse.
Science is supposed to be the conduit for these material realities, into human societies.
/7
Except it’s just as saturated with status games as any other human activity. It progresses one funeral at a time, as Planck said.
Right now people trained in science tell us we can live with pandemics, because it boosts their status.
/8 https://t.co/daQWgiOwZ2
Imagine the Old Testament written today. Where God launches plagues upon our sinning ways. And we shrug and say ‘we’ll live with it, you do you, God.’
That’s how insane societies become when status games are allowed free rein.
/9
This is social media society, today. Social media is not about our society, not a place to ‘connect’ or discuss society.
It is society. It is where it’s all increasingly transacted. It’s a giant digital high school of likes and followers.
/10
Our stories already imagine a world hijacked by evil machines. We think that’s AI.
It isn’t AI. It’s social media. Now replacing our public institutions. Targeting our deepest DNA as social animals.
Insanely addictive, because of that targeting. We can’t look away.
/end https://t.co/vgIrQLlKOb
