The paranoia about any sort of directing central force in a society almost defines American politics. The…

The paranoia about any sort of directing central force in a society almost defines American politics. The founding mythology of ‘the people’ ruling themselves, what Graeber and Sahlins called the contradictory notion of popular sovereignty. /1 https://t.co/miuFjZfArv https://t.co/NPXjBWevvV

One of my constant themes here is to reject not only the notion of popular sovereignty, but more fundamentally the idea of ‘the people’ itself. That idea is destroying democracy. It’s a ludicrous fantasy. /2

Humans don’t act as groups, at any size of group, from a soccer club or committee, through to a nation State or the UN. It’s not physically or even logically possible for them to act in that way. We don’t think enough about how ridiculous the idea is. /3

That somehow groups of people act as a single will, a single group mind, called ‘the people’. Humans are SOCIAL creatures. and sociality itself is intrinsically and intensely hierarchical. It’s driven by status, the atomic root of all human life. /4

Yes humans form groups, collectives, but these are not a level or flat structure, they’re hierarchies of status. Members of the groups engage in rampant imitation, of each other and of higher status members. Imitative rivalry is status rivalry. /5

Humans copy. That’s all human life. And they copy to gain status, because to have status is to have an identity. To be somebody, rather than nobody. We’re not driven by status out of vanity or a lust for power. But as social animals, to be something, rather than nothing. /6

To go back to this modern American paranoid obsession with the avoidance of any ‘authoritarian’ impulse. To label any sense of people being led or shaped by individuals as ‘fascism’. This to me anyway is more a symptom of the sick and failed idea of democracy, in America. /7 https://t.co/bpbK3u5S9A

Totally out of kilter with the reality of humans and how they associate. We’ve seen multiple analyses of the ideas of Yarvin recently, and an entire industry focused on plotting Trump’s apparently fascist takeover of America. The vanity of it, for starters. /8 https://t.co/8tXNNyZknO

The idea that humans just install some sort of regime, like they’re installing an operating system on a computer. Not one pause to reflect on whether there are certain immutable characteristics of humanity itself that may drive how our societies operate. /9

People who follow me know that I believe, following the work of many scholars, that a sort of feudalism, topped by a King-like figure, is THE default state of human societies. It’s the model humans will create and recreate, always, just with different names for things. /10

So this idea that Yarvin and his followers for example might impose a monarchy on the US is just nonsense to me. The people of the US are appointing their own king. That’s why we have Trump. They were sick of the idiocy of ‘the people’ ideas. /11

Ancient Rome flirted with ‘the people’, with its Senate-driven republican process. It filled the streets with endless rivers of blood. It was only when replaced by emperors under the Pax Romana that relative peace returned. /12

Not because this or that person imposed this structure on the Romans. It was the natural evolution of their collective life. Gabriel Tarde once called democracy a pause between two aristocracies. Meaning the same thing, a brief pseudo-levelling, between two hierarchies. /13

A transition between hierarchies, rather than any sort of sustainable model in itself. And the most modern, complex democracies are intrinsically, deeply hierarchical. Voting deludes us into thinking otherwise. /14

Remember that voting merely gives people an option to choose which people will serve on the highest rungs of the *existing hierarchies*. Not to institute some impossible process of millions of people somehow running anything, as a group. /15

It’s time to retire all of the cartoon Nazi and fascist memes and grow up. I come from a family who grew up literally under the Nazis. Fascism is just the desperate movement to restore kings, that happens automatically in every society. /16

It creates Trumps, a useful idiot to our deepest anthropological behaviours. People want their kings back. They always will. Humans will always restore status hierarchies when they’re disrupted or broken. Often renaming the constituent parts so we miss the equivalence. /17

We should see the American paranoia about fascism as more a symptom of their own dysfunctional ideas of what democracy actually is. ‘The people’ is a lethal myth. Evoked by tyrants throughout history, to rationalise their ascendancy. Hitler’s ‘volk’. /18

Democracy is a status hierarchy where status attaches to the satisfaction of collective need. It’s not and never will be ‘the people’ running anything. /end