So often in modern history the sane way forward for human progress is sidelined by the metastasising global…

So often in modern history the sane way forward for human progress is sidelined by the metastasising global impact of the latest American billionaire, in this case Rockefeller’s cheap oil at the turn of the 20th century. This is a problem with US culture itself. /1 https://t.co/BOQ0wReQSz

The US is a revolutionary society, it exists in a state of permanent revolution. The dream is to launch the next revolution there, to upend any settled social arrangements and become rich beyond all historical sense. That IS the culture. No coherent sense of public good. /2

The disproportionate fortunes this creates, concentrated in the hands of a tiny number, have global impact. Disruption can be a good thing, if it replaces an entrenched status quo pursuing the wrong collective ends. Tesla for example came from this social ecosystem. /3

Tesla still has the capacity to help lead the world in revolutionary changes to its use of energy, which is its ostensible mission. But it’s lumbered with the same cultural artefact, the latest US celebrity oligarch, perverting the disruption. /4

Revolutionary societies can’t think or act outside the desperate passion to upend everything, all the time, to raise your own head above the chaotic melee of a society without any embedded sense of purpose. To try to become kingpin, to escape the melee. /5

Life in other countries now is the experience of being smashed from one direction to another by competing US oligarchs and their latest attempts at world domination, mostly through the IT industry. The US is a machine for the overproduction of elite rivals. Turchin. /6

It can’t form any sort of stabilised status hierarchy at home, and it exports that social dysfunction globally. We all become bit players to that rivalry of US elites. Only societies that stabilise status rivalries survive. I’ve Tweeted often about how that’s done. /7

The Europeans historically did it with monarchies and churches. Judaism does it with knowledge, embedded in a rabbinical tradition. The US sees no need to do it at all. The French, Russians, Chinese etc. had their own revolutions. /8

Their pre-existing institutional mechanisms to manage status rivalries though managed to rein revolutionary impact in to some extent. The US is revolution, all the way down. It began as a revolution. It’s not clear it can ever escape that modality of being. /end