I think we need to completely reframe how we think about regulation and laws. They’re our greatest source of…

I think we need to completely reframe how we think about regulation and laws. They’re our greatest source of freedom, but of course today’s politics wants you to think the opposite. That they oppress you. Let’s unpack that bullshit. /1 https://t.co/JOMCPKVTSu

We have the pandemic as a glorious empirical case study here. The ‘lockdown’ and mask wars. Not really wars, like everything today mostly a social media team sports battle between tiny minorities of loons online. Political libertarians prominent in these battles. /2 https://t.co/aoqYEH2yzt

How many of those are there? Not many. But social media magnifies the beliefs of tiny handfuls of people hugely, inside the SM bubbles we now all live in, creating an impression of ‘the people’ (everybody loves using that phrase) believing certain things. /3

In reality, and as I Tweet about a lot, all societies are always 100% social. Never ‘political’. What we call politics is just more social activity, but re-badged with various team names. Societies are built and maintained by imitative rivalry, between groups. /4

All the nonsense about ‘the Left’ and ‘the Right’, or the ‘Zero Covids’ and ‘Infinite Covids’, or pro and anti-maskers etc. Just the same team sports used in every facet of human life. Social groups trying to boost their status in relation to others. /5

The ‘content’ of what they talk about is irrelevant. This is also the catastrophic mistake in thinking the problem with social media is mis- and disinformation. Societies never, ever, run on information. They run on status. Groups battling for status. /6

In Australia the ‘Right’ at the recent election ran a Soviet-style policy of nationalisation of energy, to build and run nuclear reactors at vast public cost. The same party that has opposed (supposedly) public anything, for decades. /7

That policy was a way to allow that social group to maintain and build its status, against groups promoting renewables. Groups happily switch between fundamentally opposed beliefs in very short periods of time, if it gives them an advantage in status games. /8

Back to laws and regulation. The success of social groups promoting libertarian ‘freedom’ from law and regulation (‘red tape’) is well known, since the late-1970s. ‘Deregulation’ is used universally as a near-assumed good now. That social group won that battle. /9

Who are that social group? Mostly high-status, wealthy and powerful people, who run into what feels like the barrier of regulation every time they try to expand their influence. At the same time they always have a love of very strong regulation on other social groups. /10

Welfare recipients for example, or unions. Their declared belief in the evils of regulation are clearly self-serving. That’s social status games. They want you to believe societies are made up of millions of free individuals. Because that *is* mostly their life. /11

Being wealthy and powerful (high status) means that is how their lives mostly play out, free of restriction from most boundaries. But societies are never that. Societies are 100% social. They’re networked hierarchies of status. /12

And this is where the true function of regulation and law appears. It’s not there to *restrict* free individuals. It’s there to FREE those individuals from the oppressive yoke of status games. To give *permission* to people, to act outside the status quo. /13

The history of government and regulation/law clearly shows this. The Magna Carta for example, the foundation of much modern democracy, was really an instrument to give barons the freedom to act without arbitrary exercises of power from the King. /14

This is what regulation and government was always designed to do. To create freedoms for individual and groups, in relation to others who would otherwise use their status to oppress everybody. This is History 101. /15

The libertarian shift in politics in the past 50-60 years is just the highest status members of our status quo pushing to have even more status. ‘Market economies’ are a fiction. They’re societies with regulation removed to allow unbridled status games to flourish. /16

The market economy is a SOCIAL invention, a Trojan Horse con to restore naked status as the sole determinant of who gets what. Humans never, ever act as ‘markets’ or groups of ‘free’ individuals. Humans always live in status hierarchies. /17

When you saw these mandates in the earlier pandemic, were they oppressing you? Ridiculous. They were giving you and everybody else *permission* to act in a way that wasn’t the status quo. They gave you freedom. The freedom to protect yourself and others. /18 https://t.co/Rejq38VxhS

Without such mandates, people will just do what everybody else is doing, led by current status hierarchies. If those hierarchies find masking and public health onerous, it means nobody will do either. And that’s where we are, right now. /end