The truths of life are neither popular, or unpopular. The whole continuum of popularity is a status…

The truths of life are neither popular, or unpopular. The whole continuum of popularity is a status continuum, not a truth continuum. What is unpopular is just popular to another team, in the social melee. Popularity and unpopularity are two sides of a single coin. /1

The most catastrophic belief about democracy is that it’s an aggregation of what is most popular. ‘Majority rules’. Popularity has no connection with the material reality of the world. It’s entirely a currency of social status. /2

Populism is just marketing. Anything can be marketed, made popular. You can convince millions to ‘live with’ pandemics, or that international travel is actually enjoyable and doesn’t destroy the places you visit. Anything, really. Hitler was popular. /3

Democratic elections are only popularity contests. Why all democracies have been in free fall on the measures of their health since universal suffrage became the definition of democracy. It was the identity politics of its day. Status games. /4

The Greeks, who invented democracy, would have laughed at the very idea of what we call democracy today. We think we’ve improved it, modernised it. It’s run aground on all the problems the Greeks saw. /5

True social progress is progress on the material foundations of life. As Latour said, we don’t have ‘object-oriented’ democracies. We have status games. What is empirically, materially true is what is true. The rest is just a pissing contest, for status in social groups. /6

Civilisations that survive put material well-being at their core. Mostly engineering of various kinds. Civilisations that flame out quickly are ones that fight over ‘ideals’, over the status of groups. Over the identity of people. /7

Building stuff isn’t ‘tools’, it doesn’t just give you ‘stuff’. It’s the way societies that survive weave their social bonds. Those bonds are non-human and material much more than they’re human. /8

Once you bind daily social life to the building and maintenance of material things, you sideline status. Status makes nothing work. The building and trade of things is what creates civilisations. Material things, responding to material needs. /9

Imagine a re-formed democracy, where the daily team sports over status of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ was banished until all the material needs of a society had been met. Just imagine that. Those material needs aren’t Left or Right. They’re just material needs. /end