Those sceptical that Western life is really highly school culture should maybe consider this. From an age…

Those sceptical that Western life is really highly school culture should maybe consider this. From an age when humans can only just walk and talk, they go to school. They remain there until they reach adulthood. Throughout their entire ‘formative years’. /1 https://t.co/cAYyNf8WgO

How is it not obvious that the culture of this place they spend so much of their time growing up in will become the culture they know? Not just teachers and classes. All human prolonged gatherings generate an entire ‘culture’. Here comes the biggie. /2 https://t.co/WvqmK8fHIO

I think more than anything else what this culture did to Western societies is fundamentally alter one thing. It shifted a child’s social reference points from being their immediate family, other adults and relatives, to their ‘peers’. /3 https://t.co/E1wlr1y2wz

It’s a defining change. From a culture where custom and tradition, handed down over generations, formed the cultural seedbed for your growth into adult life. To a culture where your reference points became a real-time assessment of position in relation to your peers. /4 https://t.co/dUoHKnkvfj

That real-time assessment is a resolutely present-moment, continuous jostling for status. History and tradition disappear almost entirely. It’s a game that never ends. The team sports of status. Public adult life becomes a life of trends, fads and fashions. /5 https://t.co/OTeETUbK1i

Human civilisation has always been about status, nothing new there. But what our modern shift in compulsory schooling did was decouple that status from any historical continuity or institutional base. From the existing social status hierarchies, evolved over millennia. /6 https://t.co/CBPsmyAFE2

Sure the kids learn about some of that historical stuff in the ‘content’ of their schooling. But that’s a superficial veneer on the actual culture they live there. In adult life, where kids previously grew up, those historical reference points also framed everyday life. /7 https://t.co/UDsOJGsbKb

You didn’t get to freelance new ways of doing things without colliding with that historical status quo. But at school, it’s just stuff in textbooks, in a culture of only kids. This is the origin of make your own facts, folks. Uncontrolled status games, between peers. /8 https://t.co/rHCm6PUqb5

Today’s kidult culture is actively dismantling every remnant of that older adult institutional culture it can get its hands on. At an accelerating rate. Really badly understood as the march of ‘fascism’ or ‘authoritarianism’. /9 https://t.co/rZVhg50SN0

It’s the march of high school culture, in its endgame. The revenge of the jocks, who dominate school but previously had to take a back seat to older ‘nerdy’ adult culture when leaving school. Now that society is a giant high school, the jocks own everything. /10 https://t.co/nMIxAxbUWY

Many decades of this culture we learn in school entering adult life and remaking it has fundamentally flipped Western civilisation. From a culture only of adults, with kids as little adults in tow, to a culture of nothing but adolescents. Fighting for status, in gangs. /11 https://t.co/Ip0lZfCrXC

Social media was modelled on this same culture. A culture of likes and followers. It’s where we now transact life itself, from the most intimate and personal, through to the professional and political. None of our political or economic framings are meaningful. /12

Humans are social beings, living in cultures. Not in economies, or in ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ political teams. Those things are just the names some of the schoolyard gangs call themselves. By the way, that’s Donald Trump in the middle, at high school. /end https://t.co/rSZiVyM4NP