Have you heard of catastrophe compassion? How people collectively tend to unite and work together, when…

Have you heard of catastrophe compassion? How people collectively tend to unite and work together, when facing catastrophe? ‘Prosociality’? Here’s the thing. That IS ‘democracy’. We’ve always misunderstood its origins. /1 https://t.co/qGSmvZn74k https://t.co/m7JgvvvWOO

Without catastrophe, humans fight each other for status, usually in groups or as I call them ‘teams’. They play team sports, for status. You can see it on the socials. Remember the surge of energy when Covid started, here and on other platforms? /2

The sense of collective threat energised many teams, humans use misfortune as a stage to perform status games on. Misfortune generates attention, and status games crave attention. A whole industry of protest. Protest is the default human state. Complaint. /3

Come spend a day on any switchboard in a large public service organisation. A tsunami of complaint, every day. Or scan the socials. Swarming teams of complaint after complaint. /4

Notice also how people fall away here and on other platforms, like those who (rightly) fought to actually fight a pandemic. The platforms ate them alive. It was good business, a pandemic, status games need and love dissent and disaster. /5

Many if not most have now disappeared, onto ‘nicer’ platforms, which also achieve nothing except unanimity of how bad everything is, that leads to no action. Covid alas didn’t trigger the tipping point of collective ‘prosociality’. The catastrophe wasn’t big enough. /6

It (the status quo is an entire culture, not just evil authoritarians) reconciled itself to ‘living with’ infections, rather than shift. Of course that can’t last, longer term, it’s lunacy. A culture of infinite infection is a suicidal culture. /7

But until the day of total catastrophe arrives, it’ll all just be fodder for the team sport status games. Only true catastrophe ‘unites’ people. That’s how our modern democracies emerged, post the cataclysmic first half of the 20th century. /8

Without that catastrophe, humans just fight each other, for status. They complain, and complain, and complain. And they have much to complain about. But none of it transforms into restorative action, until everything collapses. /9

There is no ‘we’ until the Grim Reaper is at the gate. /end