Trace every part of a culture backwards to its origins - what we like to do (travel, for example), eat, wear,…

Trace every part of a culture backwards to its origins - what we like to do (travel, for example), eat, wear, say, how we build and decorate homes, etc. At its origin will be a high-status person or group, who millions of others then imitated. To partake of their status. /1 https://t.co/RCkVcvJJwm

I’ve used the example of recreational travel before, how we believe our own guff about this being about ‘seeing the sights’, and having ‘experiences’. It’s nothing of the sort. It arises from the emulation of the aristocratic ‘Grand Tour’ rich sons did when coming of age. /2 https://t.co/zAH015IblI

Travelling through the world, assimilating its sights and experiences as a preparatory taste for running the empire. Recreational travel is absolutely the product of empire and imperial culture. We’re a few generations past the most obvious manifestations of that. /3

But that’s what it still is, colonial jaunts. First empty locations of their resources to feed the empire, then turn them into theme parks for Grand Tour travellers. This goes well beyond travel. Every part of human culture can be traced back to ‘early adopters’. /4

Who millions then emulate. But what drives the emulation is the desire for status, it’s the high status of the early adopter that makes what they do desirable to millions of others. It used to puzzle me why UK homes for example so often have hideous blue and pink carpets. /5

And then the penny dropped. That’s the carpet colours in the old grand aristocratic and monarchical residences. Humans operate by imitation, and they imitate to have status. Because, as social animals, that status is also identity. Without status, you are literally nobody. /6

Societies don’t run on information, they run on status. If you want to fix any problem, like pandemics or climate change, you have to find a way to make the fixing of that problem a high status thing to do. That’s what the Victorians did, in the 19th century. /7

The engineers and scientists who built the massive public infrastructure that we still benefit from today were social heroes, for doing it. Lauded by royalty. Today our heroes are rock stars and social media influencers, who build nothing. Kidult culture. /8 https://t.co/qj0FFsPUqX

I invite you to look at the society we’re living in with fresh eyes, to trace every custom, idea, way of dressing, what we eat, how we build etc., back to some high status origin. Status runs societies. It’s the atomic level of human life, as atoms are for chemistry. /9

Not information, not power, not economics, not ‘Left’ or ‘Right’ or any of the other idiot teams we form to battle for status. None of the -isms are even real, not capitalism, socialism, communism. It’s all just status, with the names changed. /end