Lord of the Flies was a great window into our assumptions about how societies work. The idea that without…

Lord of the Flies was a great window into our assumptions about how societies work. The idea that without wider social life, we become savages. In reality this is completely backwards. We know from real life experience: https://t.co/pgzVhVym2J /1 https://t.co/A8PmGsSljm

The actual experience is that humans, when faced with existential challenges, as these real boys were, are more united than at any other time. It’s when they’re separated from existential threat, in social environments, that they become most dangerous and violent. /2

We live in a teen culture, structured like a giant high school. 9.5 out of 10 people you ask would tell you that socialising is the key to a happy life, and ‘loneliness’ is the worst fate. That’s high school culture in a nutshell. In reality sociality is always violence. /3

The violence of imitative rivalry Girard wrote about. Do we not remember the continuously contested space of adolescence and high school? The constant fight to ‘fit in’? The more social we make adult life, the more it becomes high school life. The battle for status. /4

In societies that live actually inside social media, the violence becomes endemic. Ask anybody who does a public-facing job right now about the dramatic escalation in aggressive behaviours. Or drive on any of our roads. /5

Violence is not just physical assault. It’s aggression, rivalry. Who doesn’t feel the growing tension of that every day now, on both public and personal life? Who doesn’t see the signs in businesses saying ‘abuse won’t be tolerated’? /6

The history of civilisation itself is the history of the restriction of sociality, the deliberate suppression of crowds. Not (as we like to think) as part of various tyrannies or authoritarian schemes, but because without those restrictions blood flows like rivers. /7

You can see this all in real time on social media. Watch how previously unproblematic projects in your local area become battlegrounds for warring social media groups, who weaponise it for their imitative rivalries. Adult life is learning to be less social. /8

To learn to be resilient and true to your individual nature, rather than adjusting everything you think, feel and do to ‘fit in’ with social groups. The more we socialise everything, the more we destroy adult life. And the more violent and less resilient we become. /end