Day after day I watch brilliant people posting brilliant things into the complete void that public life now…

Day after day I watch brilliant people posting brilliant things into the complete void that public life now is. Desperately hoping they can get something to trend for even 10 minutes. None of that will lead to any meaningful, lasting change. Only one thing can. /1

Institutions. You need to distinguish between modern ideas of what that word means, and much deeper meanings. For most modern minds it means bureaucracy. A government department, for example. That’s not what an institution is, though can form part of it. /2

An institution is a slow sedimentation of practices that no single mind could ever design. A sedimentation of what ‘worked’ to solve problems, over generations. Institutions are not designed. They evolve. /3

They are customs, traditions. By definition they act *across* time, across generations. They are humanity’s past and future, acting in the present. They BIND generations. They’re not a contract amongst living individuals, they’re a transgenerational organism. /4

They do the daily work of enacting all of the noble principles humans develop in their status battles between themselves, in the present. They’re societies’ autonomic nervous system. Always active, regardless of lapses in attention and interest in the daily melee. /5

They create an inertia, a resistance to fads and fashions of the present day. The world we now live in, where the most outrageous stupidities can ‘go viral’ and lead to immediate widespread change within minutes, is a world without institutional stewardship. /6

A world without past wisdom acting in the present, to protect the future. Without transgenerational focus in any way. Just ‘living your best (present) life’. Where even the best intentioned have to compete for precious attention space to get anything done. /7

You can’t hashtag social change. Activism is an adolescent fantasy, from a culture of adolescents. The great boomer revolution, the counterculture and its anti-establishment obsessions. Lasting change must be sedimented from a long period of trial and error. /8

Why destroying institutions, customs and traditions, is lethal for societies. You can’t just put them back again, once they’re gone. Like trying to restore extinct species. They took many lifetimes to evolve. /9

Revolutions destroy societies. Most of our modern democracies, or what we call that, stem from recent revolutionary destruction. China, Russia, France, and the West, through its countercultural revolution. /10

All of these revolutions were deliberate assaults on institutions. The revolutionaries woke up the next day, faced with the staggering challenge of running entire societies, and thought what the fuck do we do now? They always do the same thing to try to fix it. /11

They conceive universalist instruments - written constitutions, Bills of Rights, abstract generalisations. They need to act super fast, which is why they go totalitarian in their thinking and action. They need something to desperately hold things together. /12

None of it works, of course, because abstract principles are hot air next to actually keeping the lights on. The enormously sophisticated, evolved customs and traditions that did that, which the revolutionaries destroy, took generations to emerge. And so they fight. /13

Fight about the abstract principles, and how they should apply to the everyday lives of ordinary people. Of course they don’t apply, and so the fights also never cease. Witness America, throughout its entire history. We bucked the trend once in our lifetimes. /14

The astronomically destructive first half of the 20th century, with two world wars, a pandemic and an economic crash, halted much of the status games of present-day human life. Allowing new institutions to be built. /15

I’ll post another time about the enormous institutional building that happened between about 1945 and the mid-1970s. That work gave us the modern peace and prosperity we mistook for ‘democracy’ in action. Like all of our voting did it, hilarious. /16

But starting in those same 1970s, the revolutionaries have been attacking those emergent institutions without pause. And so today we’re living in a social media society, sans institutions, where our autonomic controls are replaced with idiot imitative viral trends. /17

The attention span of a Trump, who unsurprisingly is master of this new domain. Once institutions are destroyed, they don’t get back up again. Only multi-generational time coupled with catastrophe can do it. They need to emerge from those two ingredients. /end