The bizarre idea of ‘community consultation’ is a window into our most stupid and destructive beliefs. The…

The bizarre idea of ‘community consultation’ is a window into our most stupid and destructive beliefs. The idea that human groups, of whatever size, have some sort of collective will, a group mind that you need to survey in various ways, to determine what to do. A whole… https://t.co/9dhUoKigl5

It’s almost universally believed that democracy means ‘the people’ running a society. And that community consultation is the way we sound those people out, so that we know how to progress things. I’ve said many times here, ‘the people’ is not even a thing. It’s a lethal…

Humans never, at whatever scale you choose, from a committee through to the UN, become a group mind of some kind, with a ‘will’ to be sounded out. They absolutely do form groups. But LOTS of them, and all competing, for social status. Each aligned around a particular leader or…

Take a ‘local community’, as we see here. The idea is a fiction. Even within a small town the people will be aligned with a variety of social groups, each in competition with each other. There is no ‘community’, there’s only competing social groups. Fighting to be top dog in… https://t.co/IlGSQTNQuh

People form *networks*, with their particular groups being hubs within those networks. All of it is driven by status. The majority in any group are following the lead of somebody, imitating them and each other, to achieve status within the group, and in competition with other…

Societies look like the diagram. Not like the Tweet. All of it is status games. The fight for status, and therefore identity. We’re social animals, status is what gives us identity. /6 https://t.co/3tfcdSgmx2

Yes Minister brilliantly mocked the idea of ‘the people’ running societies by having the leader say ‘I am your leader…I must follow you.’ There are ways in which groups of people can be smart. The sort of thing studied under wisdom of the crowd and collective intelligence…

Neither of those areas of study believes human groups have some sort of collective mind or will. Collective intelligence or crowd wisdom arrives when individuals are able to escape ‘groupthink’. /8

I’ve watched the Trump bull in a china shop at work. I‘m supposed to believe this is a ‘fascist’ takeover of our democracies. Bollocks. Populists like Trump ‘work the crowd’, they don’t waste time trying to sound out what people think and feel. They offer them something.…

Steve Jobs used to say the same thing about business. Don’t waste time surveying your customers trying to figure out what they want. Human desire is fickle. People’s desires shift sometimes within 10 minutes, led again by influencers. You offer people something, and hope they…

THAT will form your ‘people’. You become the greatest influencer in the melee, for a time anyway. The largest hub in the network, if you’re lucky. /end