So often even the most committed to public health have told me they eventually gave up fighting Covid because…

So often even the most committed to public health have told me they eventually gave up fighting Covid because they didn’t want to deny themselves or their families a proper life. Another window into kidult culture. The assumptions around sociality. /1

The people who say that are part of a majority who feel it. That a proper life is a social life. One with total freedom of association, lots of mixing with other people, lots of travel and displacement. I don’t think we see how much that almost defines kidult culture. /2

I’ve Tweeted many times how sociality is violence. These assumptions we have that somehow sociality *is* the most full and lived life are actually both bizarre and dangerous. Sociality is violence because imitative rivalry is the basis of all civilisation. RIVALRY. /3

Left to themselves humans will always, in every situation, compete for status. That’s what social animals do, because status is identity. It makes you somebody, rather than nobody. The more social we become, the more violent we become, as societies. /4

In our hypersocial social media world today, who doesn’t see this? How even the tiniest issue generates conflicts, a proliferation of teams fighting one another, competing for status? That’s the schoolyard, folks. I’ve Tweeted the empirical way that shift happened. /5

How we created two separate cultures, child and adult, when we invented compulsory schooling. All humans create cultures when forced to co-inhabit a space for an extended period. And then as those children left school, they re-made adult culture, as school culture. /6

That’s what kidult culture means. Everything is now a school. It’s all the kids knew when they left school, so of course they re-made life using all the social and cultural characteristics of schooling. For a while older adult institutions resisted. They had some inertia. /7

But that dam broke some time ago, beginning in the 1970s. That’s all that ‘neoliberalism’ was, the overcoming of our post-WW2 institutional culture with school culture. Kidult culture. The institutions we built to repair our civilisation, post-WW2, became the target. /8

Because kids hate school, and their kidult culture is mostly formed in opposition to it, and to all adult institutions. We give political and economic names to these shifts, but they’re just social changes. Kids re-making adult life, as child life. /9

Sociality is a critical component of that school life, and why today everybody seems to agree that sociality is the foundation of all happy and rich life. Horseshit. The path to true adulthood has always been towards strong individuality, moving through social experiences. /10

Through into self-determination, into the expression of true individuality. Into greater comfort in being alone and not dependent upon others. Not lacking social interaction, but also not *needing* it so much. The pathetic narratives about loneliness, for example. /11

Like feeling alone is a terrible thing, rather than a symptom of coming to adulthood. We don’t see this as a clash inside kidult culture itself, with our own true nature. The rush to restore hypersociality in the middle of a pandemic is the tragi-comedy of kidulthood. /12

Learning to ‘live with’ pathogenic viruses, because otherwise we’ll all feel too alone and not be able to travel and eat out, and do all of those things that adolescent culture has traditionally worshipped. The neediness, the clinginess, of that sociality. /13

I taught adolescents, teachers know this culture well. That neediness is born of fear, ‘peer pressure’ is kids using sociality to begin to form some sort of adult self. It’s them learning to fight for a position in a world outside their family. It’s violence. /14

All sociality is violence. Now living our personal professional and political lives entirely through social media is magnifying and extending this violence into every tiny part of life. EVERYTHING is now a battle. For status, identity. /15

True freedom is the freedom to be alone, and to enjoy that aloneness. It’s coming to your true self, comfortable in your own skin. Not clamouring to emulate others inside teams, at war with other teams. The populism that dominates politics is, again, just school. /16

Popularity is the currency of school culture, we know that. When adult culture becomes school culture, it becomes the currency of adult life too. Likes and followers. Social media life *is* school life. /17

So I continue to resist infections, because they’re bad for me. If it means being less social, who the fuck cares? I’m an adult, most sociality is tedious comparative grandstanding anyway. It’s violence. Let’s all leave school, once and for all. /end