The more social life becomes the winning of pointless daily team sports status battles on social media, the…

The more social life becomes the winning of pointless daily team sports status battles on social media, the more we stop seeing repeated historical patterns. America has arrived at its next Gilded Age. Veblen wrote one of the guidebooks. /1 https://t.co/SygSqaFcRR

At the end of the 19th century, American life was dominated by robber barons. Rockefeller, Carnegie and Vanderbilt in particular. To connect to my wider posts, what preceded the Gilded Age? Total catastrophic destruction. The American Civil War. /2

Only catastrophic destruction to a status quo creates significant change in a society. Nothing is more powerful or resistant to change than a status quo, the current state of play of social status games. Humans never voluntarily relinquish status. /3

The Civil War left American society wide open to rapid escalation of status by a small number of players. The status quo had been terminally damaged. And thus the robber barons arrived. And with them, Veblen, and guess what was at the centre of his analysis? Status. /4

Veblen clearly saw that social life is driven by status, and that economic analysis needed to recognise this. He saw the emergence of these robber barons as the re-emergence of older feudal forms of social life. Driven by status. /5

If any of this is beginning to sound eerily similar to life in America today, it should. We’ve had many decades now of idiot economic analysis of social life has a great self-regulating economic machine. A ‘market’. Veblen would have laughed. He saw the status games. /6

He saw the repeated patterns of human social life, in history. The robber barons were there back at the signing of the Magna Carta almost a thousand years earlier. And well before that too. It’s the model of all human social life. The forming of status hierarchies. /7

Topped by a King-figure, with his associated ‘court’ of nobles. The robber barons. Most of what we see as the checks and balances of democratic life derived not from any consideration of ‘the people’ at all. They were checks on the King, imposed by powerful barons. /8

That’s what the Magna Carta was, a tentative agreement between the king and his barons, a setting out of relative authorities. Here the barons are, surrounding the King, forcing his hand. Most democratic ‘systems’ in turn derive from the Magna Carta. /9 https://t.co/mdRnsgjrhn

Democracy never was a movement of ‘the people’, it has always been a temporary, imposed restraint union Kingly power, by members of the King’s court. It doesn’t last because the barons never mobilise together for long. They want status individually, not collectively. /10

And again, if you can’t see the same pattern playing out again today in the US, with their current robber barons circling Trump to try to get the greatest share of their own status, then open your eyes. We’ve arrived at the next Gilded Age. Try some Veblen. /end https://t.co/KZEQyKPFBL