I think one of the most striking things to observe when here or when looking at public debates anywhere, is…

I think one of the most striking things to observe when here or when looking at public debates anywhere, is the hubris of control. The idea that humans determine their own fate. Societies are like ecosystems in evolution. Evolution tends to happen TO organisms. /1

Similarly, nearly all of the meaningful change in societies is forced upon them by catastrophic disruption to their status quo. Without that disruption, humans will just battle each other for status, via imitative rivalry. /2

Pleas every day that ‘we’ should fix this or fix that. There is no ‘we’, until existential threat creates one. Without that threat, there’s just various social groups fighting each other to be top of our status hierarchies. Social progress is mostly emergency action. /3

The panicked response to threats to our existence. The really alarmingly funny idea that ‘democracy’ is humans working together in non-threat times to guide social progress - what planet are we living on? We’re the rump of an historically unprecedented 70 years. /4

From about 1945 until today, that’s our baseline for understanding social life and social change. No other time in history was like those 70 years. It’s created an enormous, damaging distortion in the framing of our lives. /5

Those 70 years were re-building the cataclysmic years between about 1900, and 1945. Two world wars, a global pandemic and an economic collapse. That created a genuine ‘we’, of a magnitude history had never seen. The cataclysm did it. Not ‘democracy’. Horses and carts. /6

That we is effectively now dead. It’s too long since we’ve been confronted with that level of existential threat. Nothing disciplines human thought and behaviour towards collective ends except cataclysm. /7

Many might say we’re heading for an even larger cataclysm today, with climate change and other pressures. That’s entirely possible, even likely. A ‘we’ may then re-emerge. /end