Headlines yesterday about this meeting of ‘authoritarian’ leaders. Our democracies are dying because of the…

Headlines yesterday about this meeting of ‘authoritarian’ leaders. Our democracies are dying because of the ludicrous ideas we have about them. That we in the West are led by ‘the people’ while these evil regimes are led by authoritarian tyrants. /1 https://t.co/j5zM1w3RoU

Graeber and Sahlins wrote about the notion of ‘popular sovereignty’ we use as the basis for our own delusional thinking. It’s an oxymoron. Replace the sovereignty of the king or emperor, with ‘the people’. The political science equivalent of an Escher print. /2

The people can’t be sovereign over the people. How is that not obvious? It’s completely meaningless. Even the most basic look shows you that Western democracies really just make a handful of elected people sovereign. Or they even retain the old sovereign, constitutionally. /3

Everything is ALWAYS an ‘autocracy’ in human life. A status hierarchy. It’s not even impossible for things to operate in any other way, you wouldn’t *want* them to either, if you pause and reflect on it. /4

Hierarchy and status reflect quality, not just power. And division of effort. You want there to be a hierarchy of builders, plumbers, engineers, pilots, teachers, child care workers, etc. You don’t want to have to do everything yourself. You can’t do everything yourself. /5

And you particularly don’t want to have to govern the whole chaotic mess, yourself. As a member of the lauded ‘people’. You (and I, and everybody) don’t have the first clue how most of it even fits together. Nobody does. That’s the point, that’s why we have hierarchies. /6

We’re so brainwashed by our own cultural revolution, the countercultural shift mid-20th century, thinking that society and everything in it should be some obscene form of DIY, free of the shackles of ‘the establishment’. Welcome to Trump’s world. That’s how we got here. /7

Our great delusional fantasy that here in the West we ‘the people’ run societies, and everywhere else is reactionary authoritarians, is the reason our own societies are now falling apart. Western culture never stopped being hierarchical. ‘Authoritarian’! /8

We just placed hereditary succession with elections. How is it not obvious our own societies are intensely hierarchical still, even in their most ‘democratic’ structures? Elections just swap the faces at the tip of the hierarchy. That is ALL they do. /9

And no, again, we don’t WANT no hierarchy. That’s the countercultural fantasy. As our electoral democracies have been in free fall since their invention, and everybody scratches their head as to why, here’s a thought. /10

If you replace the King with elections, people will move mountains to game those elections, to ascend to the throne. Again, look around. Isn’t this exactly what happened, across the 20th century and now into the 21st? /11

The leader of the free world is a Twitter President, ffs. Populism is rampant, because without any of the checks and balances of traditional hierarchies, the most popular wins the prize. And popularity is easy. It’s just marketing. /12

It never ends well, because popularity couldn’t take the lid off a milk carton, practically. So we arrive where we are today, endless ‘trending’ waves of mass enthusiasms that wax and wane. If your view of history zooms out from just the daily trending news cycle… /13

The clear governance pattern appears, throughput human history. All of these allegedly ‘autocratic’ regimes today were previously kingdoms, led by Kings or emperors. That’s true for the West as well. THAT’s the model re-asserting itself now. /14

What we call democracy was just a holding pattern, between two aristocracies, to paraphrase Gabriel Tarde. The calamitous first half of the 20th century interrupted the status quo of history - Kings and emperors - just long enough to invent a delusional alternative. /15

The idea that populations would govern themselves. Governance bootstrapping. Cut the head off the King, and some populist idiot will replace them. Again, welcome to Trump’s world. /end