Cory is one of the most intelligent and entertaining people on the platform. This thread (thanks @miki_fern)…

Cory is one of the most intelligent and entertaining people on the platform. This thread (thanks @miki_fern) is so important to show a contrast between the view of activist life Cory often shares, and the alternative set of ideas around status I share. Status is winning. /1 https://t.co/imBs1HcmU6

Activist politics is what I call ‘the people’ politics. The belief that populations have some sort of agency. Many know I don’t think ‘the people’ even exists. It’s a catastrophic misunderstanding of how humans think, feel and behave. The belief is destroying democracies. /2

Cory describes research showing that ultimately rich people just get what they want. But this isn’t really about money, though of course money helps. The currency of all human life is status. You can have high status, and thus power and influence, and little money. /3

As he gloriously concludes, the only way we can get meaningful change is by convincing oligarchs to do it. That’s the first law of all history, though. All human groups and societies are driven by status. And because we’re social animals, that status is also our identity. /4

I can’t share Cory’s passion for ‘antitrust’, that American delusion that if you level all of your institutions and organisations, a great ‘democratic’ levelised community of ‘the people’ will rule at last. As Graeber and Sahlins said, ‘popular sovereignty’ is an oxymoron. /5

Yes there’s some pushback from creaking and groaning older institutions against oligarch culture, with antitrust action. It won’t last. I’ve Tweeted many times about how people have even forgotten the origins of the ‘checks and balances’ of democratic governance. /6

They even got a snapshot of it, in 1215. Notice ‘the people’ are nowhere to be seen. Those checks and balances were about the barons (oligarchs) placing limits on the power of the King. The Magna Carta, the root DNA of modern democracy. It was never about ‘the people’. /7 https://t.co/hWMMYfHSG4

It was about the highest status members of a society apportioning their power between themselves. And remember, ‘the people’ isn’t a thing anyway. They all want to be oligarchs and Kings too. They spend all day every day striving to increase their own status. /8

Trump is dismantling a lot of the old checks and balances, and the oligarchs aren’t objecting because he’s also lavishing them with gifts. They’re also too stupid to know the history. But they may re-enact 1215 unknowingly, if they think Trump is in their way. /9

They may go into battle against him with some new form of checks and balances on Trump’s Kingly power. Again they’re too stupid to understand this is what the checks and balances of democracy already were, they see those as ‘red tape’. /10

Overall it’s this belief in ‘the people’ that is killing everything. This refusal to understand that societies are 100% social (not economic, not ‘political’). And that the currency of social life is status. Societies run on desire. And the deepest desire is for status. /11

Because, again, we’re social animals, and to have status is to be somebody’. It’s our actual identity. The explosion of ‘identity politics’ is only this. The destruction of our old checks and balances, and their replacement with uncontrolled status games. /12

Everybody battling to be somebody, to have some form of status. Now mostly through social media, where we transact the personal, professional and political now, almost exclusively. With its structure modelled on high schools, of likes and followers. /13

Because kidult cultures never leave high school, they remake adult life, *as* a high school. Compulsory schooling did it, decoupling the world of children from that of adults. We did this, by accident. With the best intentions. Now only catastrophe will shift things. /14

Because history shows time and again that only the ‘punctuated’ catastrophic disruption of our status quo (it’s in the name) creates real social change. Natural disasters, wars, plagues. Only that creates a ‘we’, which people confuse with ‘the people’. /15

Without that disruption, humans just play status games. All day and night, every day and night. They’re social animals. The only other alternative is to create master centralised status hierarchies in societies, to control status play. /16

Humans did that, with great success, with institutionalised religion and monarchies. That was their actual function, to control status games. Of course there are no utopias. Nothing lasts. But those are the proven options, and why people lap up Trump the wannabe King. /end