I don’t think debate is really a worthwhile thing to be engaged with. Our fantasies about what democracy and…

I don’t think debate is really a worthwhile thing to be engaged with. Our fantasies about what democracy and free speech mean lead us to believe debating is some sort of winnowing process, to produce optimal outcomes. I call bullshit. /1

Just as ‘the people’ is not a thing, groups never have active agency in that way, they also don’t collectively percolate ideas in some delusional ‘free market’ way, to sort the wheat from the chaff. We all know those who speak loudest for free speech already have it. /2

They’re invariably already the megaphone voices in our public spaces, hogging all of the oxygen. They love the status of being heard over the din of the mob. They just want even more. Status is an unquenchable thirst. /3

@JamesSurowiecki did his wonderful book on the wisdom of the crowd. That was never about some magical way groups of people all suddenly thought with a group mind. It was how, in highly specific conditions, individual thought could aggregate to create collective leverage. /4

Almost none of what we call ‘the people’ thinking and acting fits any of the conditions for that wisdom. It’s pure imitative rivalry, as Rene Girard saw. A tiny handful of people with a tiny number of ideas ‘influence’ millions of others. Including the free speech zealots. /5

Most of what passes for debate here and elsewhere is the team sports I Tweet about often. Battling teams of people where members have aligned with their influencing ‘hub’ person or set of ideas. You can see it clearly, “oh, he’s from the Left”, “she’s a transphobe”, etc. /6

No real engagement with ideas, it’s positioning on a battlefield, recognising friend and foe. Ideas are banners the groups march under, they don’t interrogate them. There are hot topics I don’t even bother joining in on, here or elsewhere. The team sports is too feral. /7

You make no progress in those hotbeds of identitarianism. Because that’s what team sports is really about, imitative rivalry is about achieving status, and from that identity. We are social animals. Status *is* identity. “I Stand With [insert cause]”. “#[insert cause]” /8

Those fake debates quickly degenerate into the policing of rules of team memberships. Nobody can be pure enough, in the end. What does change societies then, if not debate? What is democracy? /9

‘Influencers’ do. And catastrophe does. 5% of any group leads what the group thinks or does, in all fields of human life. Catastrophe forces all groups to shift, it destroys them. /10

Catastrophe is the real progress in societies, because it represents external empirical reality imposing reality upon us. Without it we just play status games, all day, every day. Team sports. /11

Rarely we align those games with external reality, like the Victorians did with things like public health. Or the Catholic Church when it institutionalised a meta-level of status, to take the fuel out of human status games. Christ’s sacrifice was that, as Girard saw. /12

A way to place the ultimate status and the scapegoating that always goes with status games out of reach of mortal humans. It built Western society. Of course it was flawed in all sorts of ways too, status games entered the church itself. There are no utopias. /13

The best you can do as an individual is be an influencer with at least one foot in reality, rather than in status games. That’s extremely rare, despite nearly everybody assuming that’s them. /14

To introduce reality into status games makes a person deeply, violently unpopular. If you don’t see that or haven’t experienced it, you’re still playing status games, even though you may feel you’re fighting the good fight, for truth. The truth is never popular. Never. /end