Kings are back. It’s not authoritarianism or fascism. It’s royalism. The dominant social model throughout all…

Kings are back. It’s not authoritarianism or fascism. It’s royalism. The dominant social model throughout all history, except since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which created ‘sovereign’ nation States. That Westphalian model is now in tatters. Kings are back. /1 https://t.co/TRDwzXZEWo

This isn’t a bad or a good thing (though is likely more good than bad). It’s the default organisation for human society throughout all known history, re-asserting itself. Our populist tyrants are just re-activating the old King model, which never went away. /2

This week two of the other modern kings - Xi and Trump - got together. Kings act in personal networks of allegiances that cross our Westphalian State boundaries. /3 https://t.co/NnWoBNMvz8

As Dave Graeber and Marshall Sahlins describe in their book ‘On Kings’, kingship is like the baseline for all human existence. Even our vaunted ‘democracies’ replicate kingship, by simply putting a fiction called ‘the people’ on the sovereign’s throne. /4 https://t.co/Ylzb7N6iVK

You can find modern scholars making the same leap here, describing the emergence of ‘neo-royalism’. https://t.co/ou4eUZgk2b An international network of ‘hyper-elites’. All societies are *always* run by elites. Our fiction of ‘the people’ blinds us to what’s happening. /5

Societies are always run by elites because human life operates via social status. Those who win status games are by definition the elites. I’ve Tweeted a lot about how you can’t remove status as the operating principle of human life. You can only manage or control it. /6

Will Storr analysed ‘success’ status hierarchies, how status was used in Victorian England and the wider Republic of Letters, to couple status to collective progress, through knowledge and engineering. Without that coupling, you just get an empty, brutal populism. /7 https://t.co/8lSTO8ajXJ

I’ve also Tweeted before the two main institutional ways that emerged, in that Burkean understanding of institutions as emergent responses to social threat, to tame status. Monarchies and religions. Both centralise status games in a managed central status hierarchy. /8

With a God and/or a King at their top. Transcendent status figures, that suck the oxygen out of widespread social status games. You can’t be a King or a God, so give up trying, etc. And this is likely what we’re seeing now, with the resurgence of royalism. /9

Emergent structures to tame the chaotic, exponential increase in status games, largely through social media. Our new kings are the emergent way societies are trying to tame that violent chaos. It may fail, it’s not a project by any person or group. It’s emergent. /end