Millions believe democracy means letting entire populations opine on things they mostly know nothing about,…

Millions believe democracy means letting entire populations opine on things they mostly know nothing about, with the most popular opinions the ones that then win the day. Social media is now the tool where this farce is carried out. /1

Replacing the institutions that *were* democracy. Democracy always was a hierarchical system, with voting then used to choose who sat near the top of the hierarchy. Electoral politics is now stripping away the hierarchy entirely. Leaving nothing but fads and fashions. /2

Democracy isn’t a break from older hierarchical systems like feudalism. It keeps the hierarchies, but simply changes the selection mechanism for who sits at the top of them. Then that selection mechanism was gamed. Elections are what’s destroyed democracy. /3

It’s a mark of how successful those who gamed this mechanism have been that the same millions believe elections ARE democracy. It’s why complete morons can now lead countries and the world, because they’re good at marketing, at generating popularity. /4

And once there the morons strip away the hierarchies themselves, the institutions that actually run societies and carry the accumulated blood-splattered wisdom of generations of human beings. Replacing them with nothing but daily ‘trending’ outrages and whims. /5

Have a look at what Trump is doing, I’m describing it exactly. Targeting the institutions above all else. His greatest threat. The idea ‘the people’ run societies in democracy is historically just wrong. That was never the idea. /6

That’s the mythology that is destroying the US. It’s not being overrun by ‘authoritarians’, that’s another symptom of the myth, that it sees every attempt to do something hierarchical as authoritarian. The myth of ‘the people’ is destroying America. And democracy. /7

We seriously believe you can run a complex society by allowing billions to have opinions about everything, which you then aggregate. Things they know nothing about. Not because they’re stupid, but because the volume of information required is so staggering. /8

That’s why we have all of the hierarchies in society, of expertise and experience. So we don’t need to know all these things. Nobody can know all of these things. We TRUST others to know the things we don’t. Populists target trust directly. /9

They know making people distrust the institutions that run societies is the quickest path to power. Only popularity can be allowed. All we’re left with is the schoolyard. Gossip, fads, fashions, trends. No attention to complex problems. /10

That’s the final triumph of a culture that transformed adult life into an eternal high school. The jocks are running the show. Nothing is happening, except the jostle for status in schoolyard battles for status. /11

That’s where you’ll always finish up, if you think ‘the people’ is real. Hilariously, those who evoke the people forget that it’s the ‘fascists’ who invented the whole idea of them. Hitler’s ‘volk’. Literal translation - ‘the people’. /12

All tyrants claim to be speaking for the people. It’s a con. An attribution hiding their own ambition and clamouring for status. ‘The public’ is an invention of institutions. The public doesn’t exist without institutions, they create the public. /13

It’s an administrative construct, a constant calculation of collective need. It’s not ‘the people’, nothing like it. The counting of opinions is nothing like this. It’s a status game, schoolyard jocks taking control using nothing but popularity. /end