Lawrence’s Letter from Germany in the late-1920s was a novelist’s perception of a dangerous shift in human…

Lawrence’s Letter from Germany in the late-1920s was a novelist’s perception of a dangerous shift in human social life. It was prescient of what happened next. That danger is back. Mostly we see it as the danger of one or other teams in our social status team sports. /1

That is in itself the danger. Not that this or that team might introduce authoritarianism (seriously the stupidest and most overused word of our time). The danger is the team sports themselves. There is no arbiter of collective good except last team standing. /2

The danger is not ‘authoritarians’ taking over our democratic freedoms, defined as ‘the people’ calling the shots. The people are calling the shots. They wanted Trump. He won two elections. /3

As Sebastian Hafner ruefully noted living through the growth of Nazism, it was the sudden shift in the entire culture that created the catastrophe. The loss of social reference points, all hierarchies replaced by a single rush towards anti-authority. /4 https://t.co/Wmw8fPikDW

As a culture this gutting of all hierarchy has been our culture for more than 60 years. And we’re suddenly surprised we’ve arrived at Trump. The ultimate populist, channelling this hatred of hierarchy, to create a master hierarchy. It’s how it’s always done. /5

I feel the danger Lawrence wrote about every day. But not because I play childish Star Wars type games of thinking ‘authoritarians’ are invading our previously functioning democracies. I feel it in the idiot adolescent culture we’ve all been living for decades. /6

Where nobody defers to anybody else. Everybody is righteous, turned up to 11. Where FOI requests in public institutions cripple their capacity to do any meaningful work for the public, bogged down in endlessly righteous campaigns of ‘exposing’ the institutions. /7

All trust collapsed, and that collapse celebrated, *as* democracy. Where the closest members of your own family spew chapter and verse Trumpisms at you, because they’re living inside social media bubbles isolating them from their own communities. /8

Even in small regional towns thousands of miles away from Trump, increasingly the elected are really living inside social media, emulating him. The town is only where people plug in. Most towns are now rival social media groups at war. All attacking local institutions. /9

Lawrence’s dark currents of social life are not in the fate of any of the idiot teams currently fighting for supremacy. They’re in the total surrender of social life to those team sports. /end