One of the indicators of entrenched privilege is a really pretty bizarre idea that you can change the world…

One of the indicators of entrenched privilege is a really pretty bizarre idea that you can change the world in some immediate way. I’ve spent a few years here detailing the mechanics of social life and change. And how deliberative human action plays very little role in it. /1

This angers quite a lot of people, who have grown up in Western cultures used to finding a fairly rapid pathway from their individual challenges, to collective society-wide solutions. That pathway is privilege. Western cultures are the existing (now failing) world empires. /2

If you’re the empire, what you want tends to be what you get, at multiple scales of social life. That’s what being an empire means. The majority of humans on the planet have never experienced this. They’re the people our empires take advantage of. /3

They’ve always been forced to ‘live with’ war, plagues, crime, loss of land etc. Those things are ‘endemic’ in their lives. The shift now to making all of these things endemic to Western life too they would see as Westerners rejoining humanity. /4

The more technological you make societies, the more resistant they become to the whims of social status games. Technologies need a significant amount of status battle-independent expertise to build and maintain. They act as a stabilising social force. /5

But it won’t be enough in the longer term to save an empire. Ask the Romans, a superb and prolific engineering culture. It was the secret of their longevity. But Rome still fell. /6

The quality of life across the globe has on average increased in the past 2 centuries. It would be disingenuous to say otherwise. Scientific and technological change has had a profound impact. But it won’t be enough alone to prevent the collapse of societies. /7

History tells us this, over and over again. Part of wisdom and true adult life is to recognise the fragility of it, and to think and act accordingly. Right now thinking Westerners are mostly stuck asking why ‘we’ aren’t doing important things. /8

Why aren’t ‘we’ (never defined) fighting pandemics, and climate change, and Trump. Things that in the past just seemed to happen, they were taken care of. Our institutions did that taking care of, for us. The ones we built post-WW2, to rebuild broken societies. /9

We had to break, to change. This is a reset for the Western mind and the people in Western cultures, to rediscover the fragility of life. To have humility again, before some existential realities. /10

The greatest art and science and achievements of our history mostly took place knee-deep in existential catastrophe. Archimedes was run through by a Roman sword at his work desk, ffs. That’s the default. We’ve lived an incredibly anomalous 70 years, post-WW2, in the West. /end