Religion & Christianity

If you think (as I do) that Church vs State defines all politics, going back centuries, then today's trending Tweets will make you nod. https://t.co/fcQfnKhqO6

#auspol #covid19 the world already struggled with anti-vaxxers. Imagine the damage that's been done to future vaccination campaigns by the persistence with a clearly risky product, which has traumatised and infuriated even those strongly…

As Sir Humphrey said, it’s not that the Brits hate the French more. They’re just closer. Xenophobia is like a national UK religion, almost amusing that this still ‘shocks’ people, when it’s seen. https://t.co/MhoRn4adTM

A little learning is a dangerous thing. Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring; There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again. Alexander Pope

How the ‘Economy’ changes everything about the world. This is Nordlingen in southern German. About 1100 years old. Urban patterns reflect social patterns. Notice the clear geometric organisation of the town, centred on the church. A very…

Track what libertarian conservatives do across the world. It's a very cosy plagiarism club. In the UK today for example, they're having their own Christian Porter moment. Owen Paterson, a Tory MP, was found to have taken money.../1 #auspol…

Why do we stick with our ideas about democracy as being rule by the public, when we keep voting for people who kill the public? Elected leaders are the tiniest tip of the democratic iceberg. A thread about our current madness. #auspol…

h/t to @RichardfromSyd1 for highlighting this one. The UK infected: - nearly half of its babies under 1 - nearly 60% of its toddlers aged 1-4 - 81% of its children aged 5-14. Something I want to understand. A short thread. /1 #auspol…

Christian Drosten in January 2021, about Germany. 'Pushing the numbers way down', what the wise have said for 2 years, and every politician has ignored except in short bursts. #auspol #covid19aus @RichardfromSyd1 https://t.co/7Uav8gZV8Y

Waleed halfway to the Holy Grail here. We're not acting 'globally' to end the pandemic. But we're not doing that because the 'global' as we think of it, doesn't exist. You can't create international from national. /1 #auspol #covid19aus…

Does anybody remember Moses saying'God gave me some tablets, but I treated them only as advice, let's do something else'? #covid19aus #nswpol https://t.co/X9jnPzD0r0

Similar reasoning Christian Drosten used a while back to argue herd immunity was always a fantasy. We don’t live in herds. We live in hypermobile populations. https://t.co/BLW1XCk942

*bangs head on desk* Just out of a meeting with senior managers in an organisation. 'Thank God' masks will soon be gone, they say. Then, Long Covid implications for business in the UK and US. 'That's just like the flu, some get over it…

Ongoing ANU polling shows how populism fails. The country is clearly unimpressed with 'Let it Rip' Covid, but is powerless to do anything in real time because populist democracy is only constrained by elections. /1 #auspol #COVID19aus…

A friend with kids in a Catholic High School. They will celebrate lifting of restrictions with a whole-school mass. Singing, the works. Small country town. I smell danger, to the entire town.

The inversion of majority and minority in modern politics, as a focus for how we understand both politics and society. A thread. /1 https://t.co/bx410Fao0T The worshipping of the majority in modern democracies paradoxically stems from the…

Another over 200 Australians no longer living with the virus in Australia this week. Let us worship our god Mammon, on this holy day. https://t.co/8T8WL2YKtO

Thanks to @RichardfromSyd1. Remember how the Doherty modelling was used to justify ongoing removal of Covid protections? These numbers were based on a good faith assumption that National Cabinet would keep other measures in place (they…

Lest We Forget. We sang Kipling’s Recessional as a hymn, at school. And…we did forget. Today we’re told lest we forget means to not forget the ‘sacrifice’ of those who died. But Kipling’s poem asked us to not forget the futility of empire…

All elections are now battles for the institution of government. Pollies are a sideshow. If the libertarians continue to win, generations of expertise in government institutions will continue to be gutted. Those institutions are society’s…

The trick of the ‘Economy’ is that it hides obvious questions. Money, for example, a tool of exchange. Of no intrinsic value at all. But the cost of money, interest rates, still incredibly low, is possibly about to smash us. A 🧵/1…

Many say the Chinese think and plan long-term, across generations. But conservatives do as well, they worked with conservative church leaders in the 1950s in the US to map a long strategy to cripple the secular State, each for their own…

The pandemic is a war about the public. A ‘public’ is not just everybody in a society. It’s not a counting thing. The ‘public’ is about interdependency, about how all of the different characteristics of people and groups are required for a…

The Christian Right must use the King Rupert version of the Old Testament. My King James version says both plagues and usury are very bad things. A usurious plague, allowing a plague to run to protect the Economy? Mammon be praised.

For nearly all of the past two thousand years there was no economic growth. And then around 1950 something remarkable happened. Have a look. A thread about the true infection in our societies, from which Covid was born. /1…

Christian Drosten, mid-2022. This seems to be the continuing debate. Whether this will occur, or whether hyper-transmission will keep generating immune escape and driving further waves. https://t.co/Qm8ctrfWwc

More than two thousand years of church history and more than a thousand or more of monarchy resonated in every moment of the Queen’s funeral service. A deeply impersonal experience, what we sometimes call ‘formality’. A 🧵on why I think it…

Grown ups have fairy tales too, with goodies and baddies. My favourites are characters like ‘capitalism’, ‘democracy’, and ‘authoritarianism’. Good on Stan for saying that something is rotten, because it really is. But it’s not these…

There’s something so important about this photo, a window into most Western countries and why they’re failing badly to do the most fundamental thing - end a pandemic. A thread that’s an update to my pinned thread about how societies are…

Yesterday my son said to me “you know, wearing a mask is the right thing to do. But it doesn’t feel like the right thing to do.” He was talking about being the only kid at school masked, and the social pressure to conform. This is key to…

By #ZeroCovid I mean elimination of wide community spread. In the West we have a God complex where we assume reality will be what we choose it to be. #ZeroCovid is not a choice to make, it’s likely the only way our societies can survive.

I’ve Tweeted about how the ISS shows the enormous degree of inter-relationship and cooperation between countries, at historically unprecedented scales. So why (climate stalemate on TV right now) do we seem to be constantly in political…

For rank amateurs like me, these seem obvious questions about hybrid immunity as an approach to Covid: 1) other diseases which are said to use this model, like colds and flu, are much less dangerous diseases. Do we just accept that each…

Using the G20 to illustrate again that how we think about politics may be upside down. And how those who oppose 'neoliberalism' actually use all of neoliberalism's framings, without even being aware of it. Huge consequences for Covid too.…

Latour was writing about religion here, but also about all of society’s institutions. That feeling now of society collapsing? That’s the ‘ruins’ he’s talking about. ‘Once they’ve been destroyed, institutions don’t get back up’. There’s a…

The people whose politics is heavily about the ‘rule of law’ will at the same time describe Covid laws as authoritarian oppression. They’re bad faith actors, their freedom is literally their freedom, from laws they don’t like. Not from law…

We took so many of our Covid leads from the UK and US, and not from the region that we actually live in. It’s not just nuclear subs which betray the real project of modern conservative politics, the rearguard Judeo-Christian culture war.…

Vox Populi, Vox Dei. ‘The Voice of the People is the Voice of God.’ There is no such thing as the people. The only way you can make it seem like there is, is to remove the voices and turn them into numbers, through simple counting. Then…

Christian Drosten says the population getting infected multiple times is all that will end the pandemic, without mucosal vaccines. But on the other hand he (and others) say don't get infected if you can avoid it. I think this comes down to…

To clarify my interest in Christian Drosten’s musings about hybrid immunity, that’s not a theory I agree with. What interests me is his simultaneous belief that we shouldn’t be getting infected. The two don’t go together, but that (to me)…

This is North Brother Island, where Mary Mallon (‘Typhoid Mary’) was held for 26 years to prevent her spreading typhoid. She was locked up, to protect everybody else. There are a few interesting things to learn here I think, about…

Societies have a geology as well as a politics. Deep, tectonic movements. The big political libertarian push of the past 50 years is deeply linked to one of the founding tectonic plates of all human history. The battle between Church and…

The international implementation of ‘Vision Zero’ for road safety I think provides a model for how to think about defeating not just Covid, but other infectious diseases as well. Zero road deaths has been the implemented plan for many…

I wonder if our dogmatic faith in elections as a democratic tool will survive this one. Elections are hopping on a plane, and an announcement saying ‘if passengers could all now vote for which buttons we should be pressing up the front…

We are returning to a ‘normal’ form of life, but it’s not the normal of the post-war years, since 1945. If we zoom out, what’s happening with Covid is part of a much greater historical shift, to unwind most of those post-war years. /1…

We’re probably 50 years too late to rescue the public from political libertarians. They have a big head-start, in destroying it. Every day I see people here desperately trying to come to terms with the loss of a public, that whole…

Anthony Albanese seems to model himself on Bob Hawke, but to me he seems more like Tony Blair. For both though, longevity was key to their thinking and success. But at what price? Here’s Blair’s 2021 piece outlining his ongoing political…

@AlanKohler absolutely nailing the true politics we’ve lived. A theology of small government, to hell with society. 50 years in the making, as I Tweet about a lot. https://t.co/PZ14LARdcW

The same lie that drives “the economy” thinking is what’s also driving our Covid disaster. Old-style butcher shops are one way to expose the lie. Fundamental to the idea of society being an economy, is the idea that people act as…

Something that Covid shows so well is that modern societies who thought they had a base of certainty from which to act, science, have nothing of the sort. Like everything else in life, all truth is contextual. Bertrand Russell’s parable is…

The AUKUS submarines are an Anglo Judeo-Christian last performative gasp, circling Asia, which is busy building the new world. Often for us, outsourced. #InsidersABC

Committing the budget to impossible sums has the (not accidental) benefit of providing cover for further gutting of public services. It’s a death cult, wrapped in flags and bibles. https://t.co/Kvca1tn0a9

The history of how the invention of the ‘public’ from the late-19th to the mid-20th century was deliberately unwound is a fascinating one. Much of it happened in the US, in a coalition between corporate and church interests. We’re living…

I don’t spend much time now appealing to elected leaders to do anything at all. They won’t, the jobs they take on are little more than following a few economic indicators on a spreadsheet. Go against ‘the economy’ and they’re toast. So…

Both Israel and the US are showing that the deepest currents driving political populism are the push for the return of theocracies. Church v State, the motive force of so much of our history, never left. Societies have tectonic plates -…

If you can find a single reference to the public in the economic theory used in our politics, you’ve done very well. And that’s exactly the point of that theory. To get rid of the public, and replace it with a market. Markets also replace…

I so often see people say that to bring about change, you need to mobilise lots of people behind a cause. This is the mythology that lets the bad people win, over and over. It’s the same libertarian political spin that says ‘the people’…

I watched it. It’s a difficult topic to discuss, because like most modern topics the teams are already defined, in the team sports we mistake for understanding anything. If you argue for, you’re a monarchist. Against, and you’re a…

Church services were the original rock concerts. The lights (stained glass), the huge sound, particularly with full choir and a massive pipe organ. It shakes the ground. All deliberately engineered to cement the faith every Sunday. Listen…

The people will not rise up to defeat Covid, climate change or anything else. It’s our ideas about democracy that are destroying it. The bad people organise change, driving ‘the people’ in various directions. Good people wait for the…

I've been a heavy user of social media. But I now think the fastest and maybe only way we can save societies, is to shut it down. Have Tweeted lots about the basic premise of social media, that societies emerge from the 'bottom up'. They…

If you doubt that modern politics is just a continuation of battles between Church and State. And that modern conservatives are either directly engaged in that battle, or are sponsored and assisted by those that are. https://t.co/l3gW66BHpS

Remember the orgasmic populist surge of Johnson’s landslide? When will we learn that popularity is a false god? In just 3 years he went from hero to zero, because he was a lethal, clueless populist. Hundreds of thousands of Brits died on…

History shows that people mostly don’t change their minds. Belief systems and the social groupings that rally around them will continue to the point of catastrophe. Only the deaths of the holders of the beliefs brings change. Only one…

Society is social, it’s not a deficit of facts we’re suffering from. It’s a deficit of trust, of respect. We can’t do basic things like public health because millions get in the way with their opinions, people who have no background or…

The Electoral Commission mentioned this one. You can see how much of the libertarian rubbish firing up many Australians now is actually driven from overseas. Social media is an unlocked door to our own democracy, eating it from the inside…

The faith in competition is an intrinsic part of the substitution of society with an economy. Scale brings economies of scale. The problem isn’t scale, it’s lack of regulation. Competition is the libertarian ‘invisible hand’ i.e. bullshit.…

Societies of adolescents worship friendship. Here's why that's so dangerous, using Covid and climate change as examples. Friendship is a developmental social stage. Extending it to the centre of all adult life leads to social collapse. /1…

The idea that ‘the people’ run democracies is destroying them at an ever-increasing speed. Fanned by bad faith foreign actors through social media. Dip your toe into any of the multitude of community oppositions to anything right now, for…

It’s unpopular to criticise social media. (Imagine that, popularity platforms taking offence at unpopular things.) The platforms build out a model of society that strips away all social hierarchy and existing connection, and replaces it…

The ‘United Nations’ was always a project with no understanding of history. It assumes nations are like the atoms of collective life, the raw material. The word ‘inter-national’ shows it, the idea we create a global community by getting…

At face value libertarians seem to be anti-institutions. But the origin of this movement is Church v State. They want no *secular* institutions. Their ‘small government’ push is a Big Church push. Billy Graham et al did some of the…

We're sadly relatively close to a time when there will be no living Beatles, Paul and Ringo now both into their 80s. Why I think there's a lot more meaning to this socially and culturally than is often said. /1 https://t.co/yshh7YOhfn Yes…

Church v State remains the engine room of our history. It never went away, and while I have zero skin in this battle, in purely historical terms secular States are not really a success. So it's not a simple Good v Evil fight.…

A story to challenge the narrative that a majority wanted to move on from fighting Covid. One of the causes of this rise in road toll is the large increase in the number of people avoiding public transport, to avoid Covid. People still…

For those interested in how churches became major strategic assets in the conservative political revolution from the late-1970s, there’s lots out there. The story not told as often is that this is a reactivation of Church v State battles…

In an economy, you celebrate the birth of Jesus. And the next day you stock up for the celebration of his death and resurrection. That way you can skip all the good deeds in life part, that damage the economy. https://t.co/tXrqAYTzt5

In conversation with a very learned professor friend over the past few days, about Covid. And it highlighted for me the magnitude of the damage to public heath that's been done in the past 4 years. Because he's firmly in the cooker camp,…

Watching prominent Covid minimisers move onto other libertarian causes reveals which ‘team’ they were always fighting for.( Not the public health team.) It’s worth asking, what fires up these libertarians? Short thread on how peculiar that…

For our ancestors it would have been a violation of the Sabbath. Religion fought plagues, and enforced time-off from work every week. But now we’re in an economy, and that silliness has been replaced with the right to shop 24/7, while…

I know many people who despair at the challenges we all face as societies, and that little is being done about them. There is comfort I think in understanding what’s going on, putting it in context. None of this is really new. About why…

Many with expertise came to Twitter to network, when public health mechanisms were sidelined. I’m noticing more of them becoming silent and even disappearing from here now. Some no longer even take the precautions they advocated for, for…

Church v State is the defining framework of most Western history. It’s not clear why we thought it was over. https://t.co/PlVHHYTgwG

Easter provides more raw material to see the lumpy, networked structure we (wrongly) call a society of ‘the people’. If you travel in regional areas, you’ll see old churches. ‘The Church’ more broadly pioneered network structures, over…

Physicists are so often scientific arseholes. There’s a God complex sort of thing going on in physics. It often sees itself as the most fundamental science, and therefore the root of all human knowledge. It isn’t either of those things.…

I’ve had a discussion over years with a close friend, a university professor. About our modern idea of ‘the market’, and ‘the economy’. /1 Whenever I discuss the idea of a market with anybody, it becomes clear that it’s one of those slogan…

This is the fight all governments need to have with all social media platforms. On all issues. Bad faith actors are using these platforms to bypass democracy. They’re libertarian attack weapons. https://t.co/7HzFiKzRrD

If you had to do a portrait of 'society', it would look something like this. Very clumpy, a small number of networked hubs. What drives the creation and maintenance of these hubs is social contagion. Imitation. Fads and fashions. /1…

Is sovereignty the framework of thinking needed to solve Israel-Palestine fighting? The two-State solution proposed is old thinking, as was used in Ireland and India, both fraying. Sovereignty itself may be the problem. /1…

For those who believe democracy = elections. There’s not one objective way in which this race should be close. Close to two decades of abject incompetence from the LNP, and they’ve provided no policy in Opposition. 1/4…

Did the French Revolution usher in a new golden age of freedom for the liberated masses? It created an Emperor even more powerful than the royalty and aristocracy it beheaded. Being non-conformist rigidifies conformity further. /1…

What we’re seeing in Gaza is the default state of human societies. Violence. Rene Girard saw this. Like all of our existential challenges right now, we’re not understanding it because we’re using the lens of peace and prosperity that…

So many critiques of AI say machines can’t think like humans. But most of what we call human thinking is actually the social process of imitation. Social conformity. Even the process of peer review is largely the enforcing of social…

#Insiders debating the LNP and ALP condemning The Greens for their stance on Gaza. The usual hot air of all our politics and commentary. The actual reality is whether the Greens pitching to young voters on Gaza is worse than the LNP…

Over time I’ve watched many great public personas and thinkers prosecute great causes here. And then fall away, as they recognise that micro-blogging doesn’t change the world. Or they become entranced by the economy of likes, with surging…

Covid minimisers and their followers always use the same argument to say the pandemic is over. ‘Nobody is paying any attention to it.’ This is a very important window into the dynamics of our situation. /1 You can see clearly that their…

One of the great Covid minimising tropes was how ‘lonely’ people get if they’re not allowed to mix socially. Our culture is always in plain sight. Sociality is our default. Being alone is the reality of all life. Even when being social.…

The Supreme Court being used as a battering ram in the US, through expertise-based institutional processes. Church v State never ended. What they may not have thought through is unfettered royal power (Trump) vs the Church. He’s very Henry…

The common response to the useless team sports of electoral politics to take action on anything important, is to mount campaigns of righteous indignation against the system. Often from the crossbench. These campaigns also don’t produce any…

Populists don’t see how Deep Church interests use them. From the days of Billy Graham, much conservative strategy has been written by Church strategists. They have millennia of experience in mobilising people. Their long game is Church v…

Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat. (Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first deprives of reason.) Karma is coming for populism. It’s a long road, but reality always wins. Only reason puts you in touch with it. Republicans have now…

"The professors are the enemy". Republicans are not seeing their own self-destruction. Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first deprives of reason. Understand the aphorism. Popularity victories (elections) are not victories. Reality/God…

Bad faith actors take our ridiculous idea of democracy as everybody saying and doing whatever they like, and use it to destroy us. We’re doing this to ourselves. We are not free. We’re slaves to the tyranny of absent leadership. Death by…

‘Chinggisid’ sovereignty is what I Tweet about in describing the perennial love of Kings. Trump-type populist leaders are this sovereign form, in modern clothing. This extract has so much to teach us. /1 https://t.co/HzabNd0V4Y…

Every outrageous injustice is a window into a truth we’ve not been seeing. Why can Israel act with impunity in Gaza? Because what we call Western democracies have always been Judaeo-Christian status hierarchies, with new names. AUKUS too.…

We’re all complicit (though not responsible) in the collapse of public-focused government. As a culture we support the idea of using popularity as the sole doorway to ultimate power, through elections. That’s game over. /1…

Every day it should be clearer that what we call 'capitalism' or 'neoliberalism' all along has really just been a resurgence of the Church, in Church v State battles. The oldest of all battles for status. https://t.co/aV7Al0FGCg

This is the Eastern Brown Snake. Lethal. Causes about one death per year. We’re being led to believe that because a lethal virus isn’t causing huge numbers of deaths, it’s not lethal. Games of minority and majority. /1…

Somebody asked me if it’s depressingly pessimistic to say meaningful social change only comes from catastrophe. It’s neither pessimism or optimism. I don’t project feelings onto reality. It’s an empirical observation of history. /1 A field…

We inherited a framing of religious questions from the Enlightenment, in the West anyway. That religion was just one other way to know the world. Like an inferior science, based on ‘belief’ and ‘faith’. That framing is the same idea that…

This is a catastrophic lack of understanding, with implications extending well beyond the pandemic. Groups of people and societies do not think or act. I Tweet about that regularly. They are *led* to feel or act in certain ways. /1…

Laughable. What destroys trust in government is deliberate activism, by tiny minorities, usually now on platforms like this. This sort of 'inquiry' now mainstreams that activism. /1 https://t.co/ivqBoFbYg3 https://t.co/ESyNtCk9jX Activists…

So we should apologise to anti-vaxxers. Where is the loss of faith in government being driven from? (SKY, apostrophes aren’t hard. For journalists anyway. Hire some. ) https://t.co/X2kR3RmXO7

Obama won during the GFC. Biden won during Covid. Only catastrophes shift status hierarchies. God, King/Queen and country are the default. https://t.co/1tqn3J0r6A

In the post-orgasmic euphoria and devastation of another election, I invite people to zoom out and see the farce we’re trapped inside. 5 outcomes here from the annual review of the state of democracy, worldwide. /1 https://t.co/uLWtQnaUyL…

"The public health responses to COVID-19...have been based on the faith that this coronavirus is a one-time, short-term event, and that after a period of lockdowns and facemasks, vaccines will bring about a return to normal. This faith is,…

As the UK and US disappear down Anglo fantasies of lost empires, Asia is taking over the world. Paul Keating tried to align Oz with Asia, but met fierce resistance from the Queen and Country remnants here. It won't last. /1…

Societies don’t run on information. They run on status. It’s very common to think of information or ideas in this way, as connected semantic bubbles. (from: https://t.co/k9sdX5FYtW) But each of those bubbles is a status game. A team,…

One of the most important parts of status as the mechanism of all societies, is the scapegoating mechanism that Rene Girard talks about. The relentless battles for status - status games or team sports - lead to chaos. We’re seeing that…

Stop me when you figure out which country and government this is. 1) Government comes to power and within 3 years has built 3,500 km of high quality new roads. 2) Within that same 3 years, tens of billions spent on job creation schemes. /1…

Status runs societies, and historically that status was concentrated in families protecting their ‘line’. We still have dynasties (Murdochs, anyone?), but something in history profoundly weakened them. It’s not what you expect, I will bet.…

Anglo nations are living a Judeo-Christian last gasp wet dream of symbolic culture warring irrelevance. Victory for Trump is total victory for China, and Asia more generally. Countries that build things societies need. We only focus on who…

Expanding upon @doctorow’s concept of enshittification, the corporate targeting of switching costs to trap customers and then progressively empty their bank accounts. Reading that process socially and even more important *materially* gives…

It’s emotionally satisfying to imagine that action against things like climate change and Covid is being blocked by a small cabal of evil [insert chosen baddies] people. The reality is more banal, and more difficult. /1 The ‘status quo’ is…

There is still a faith that if journalists would just report horrible things, corrective action would follow. Societies don’t run on information. They run on status. Only disrupting status hierarchies brings change. Only catastrophes…

Negotiating the world of alternative social media platforms. It’s one of those things where I think we need to zoom out and reframe the entire question. Before we focus on technical characteristics of each platform, do we really understand…

When I first started posting about how Left/Right are meaningless categories, and really populism is about reinstating some form of King, and re-floating Church vs State, some thought I was mad. Hi to them. https://t.co/ZbwKLfyJlk

The checks and balances that actually define ‘democracy’ (elections don’t) mostly derive from the Magna Carta. Rule of law, limits on power of the King and Church, just taxation, a role for the aristocracy/barons, etc. It was never about…

“Man is not only ruled by evil passions; but his rational capacity is severely limited as well. Without the warm cloak of custom, tradition, experience, history, religion, and social hierarchy—all of which radical man would rip off—man is…

For a few years I’ve argued for what I call reality politics. Galileo’s ‘and yet it moves’ is the motto. This is not about plugging some science into what we call politics. It’s something fundamentally different. /1 https://t.co/XHZXCQSke8…

The euphoria of victory in team sports taps into something that goes well beyond sport. It’s only one manifestation of a deeper cultural framework. Girard said, the root of all society is imitative rivalry. Team sports. In sport, but also…

Putnam is one of the pre-eminent historians of social change. He recognises the alternating swings between ‘freedom’ individualism and collective ‘we’-based politics. The ‘upswing is triggered by catastrophe, destroying freedumb…

Nichols Gruen’s chat with ChatGPT brings up many of the themes I raise here. For example, the Magna Carta, the underlying framework for modern democracies, never had a thing to do with ‘the people’. It was a truce between Kings and barons.…

Only institutions can act for our collective long-term good. Everything else will always be status games. Institutions emerge from crisis, they’re the response to a crisis. They invent and embed procedures that act well beyond the lifetime…

Once you understand that societies run on status and not information, you also see that most problems are much smaller than they seem. The worst things in your life are controlled by a *tiny* number of actors. /1 https://t.co/dzeYRMqVXm…

‘So what can we do? is the common question when I suggest humans can’t escape status games. It’s all about that ‘we’. There is no we, in status games. ‘We’ emerges in very specific conditions only. /1 When human groups are under threat.…

Trumpian populists don’t get that the institutional checks and balances he’s running aground on *are* democracy. Populists want democracy to be just elections; they can game those. But the rest of us forget where the checks and balances…

The distinction between tailoring and designer clothes in this thread is fundamentally important culturally, going well beyond fashion. Tailoring is expertise-based style. Designer clothes are about status. Our entire modern world is in…

I don’t think debate is really a worthwhile thing to be engaged with. Our fantasies about what democracy and free speech mean lead us to believe debating is some sort of winnowing process, to produce optimal outcomes. I call bullshit. /1…

Cory is one of the most intelligent and entertaining people on the platform. This thread (thanks @miki_fern) is so important to show a contrast between the view of activist life Cory often shares, and the alternative set of ideas around…

The Anglo world affected a shift to ‘democracy’ in its wars of Church v State. But nothing actually changed, they’re still Judeo-Christian status hierarchies. That’s what Gaza means. It reveals the reality behind the spin. Societies are…

I’ve watched sport over many years, as a window into a culture we’re still not seeing or understanding. Victory now creates utter euphoria. Defeat has professionals in tears, with crowds either silent or overwhelmed with euphoria…

The reverse proof that all human life is driven by status games, is to look at what happens when all status is stripped away. That experience is humiliation. The most toxic and destructive of all human experiences, far surpassing sadness,…

‘Living with’ Covid is the privatisation of public health. In cultures that had already privatised transport, education, healthcare, jails, water, energy etc. Privatisation had already largely failed in all of those other critical areas of…

Those who zoom out of daily trending obsessions will see patterns. Democracies are collapsing, under assault from populism. Which is really just uncontrolled human status games. We’ve been here before. And misunderstood it then too. 1/5…

No amount of social media posturing in our various battling teams about ‘authoritarianism’ and ‘fascism’ makes the slightest difference to the collapse of the US. Lewis and Usmani offer us a glimpse as to why that is. In this one chart. /1…

I sometimes get accused of being anti-democracy. But my position is that there are no ‘systems’ of government in the first place. Societies are not systems. They’re humans, acting socially. Then labelling this behaviour in a variety of…

The 19th century was a century of rival kings. Here they are in 1815 carving up Europe, after the defeat of Napoleon. “The Cake of Kings.” Most of the two millennia of modern European history were alternating empires and rival monarchies.…

America is falling apart not because it’s been hijacked by tyrants, but because its culture was constructed to see anything that comes between a man and his God as a tyranny. ‘Tyranny’ is the lowest of low bars there. It’s pretty much…

I looked at debates between infectious disease modellers and evolutionary biologists, about endemicity of Covid. ‘Dynamic endemicity’ just looks like endemic epidemicity. A never-ending epidemic disease pattern. The belief (faith) is that…

Government activity as a proportion of GDP exploded in the 20th century, due to the rebuilding of societies, after two world wars, a pandemic and economic depression. From about 10% at the beginning of the century, to up to 50% by 1975,…

The sovereignty of individual countries was the sovereignty of Kings, in opposition to the Pope and Emperor, at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Nations are led, by Kings. Even if they’re called something else. ‘The people’ is a myth.…

A few years ago I shifted most of my posting here to target one thing. Status. Status is the root cause of all human thought, feeling and behaviour. Without understanding status, you understand nothing about human life. It’s also the core…

The rapidly escalating pettiness of Trump's fights. He's doing us a favour, making visible the mimetic crisis that is the true threat to our societies. Humans desire what others desire. The object of desire is irrelevant, the toy here. We…

Because institutions ran our societies (brilliantly) for much of the last 70 years, most of us in the West have a level of knowledge of basic governance along a continuum from non-existent to childish. Take this latest purge. Both Xi and…

The entire history of humanity is one of continuous imitative rivalry, for status. With some controls emergent over time, like monarchies and religions, mechanisms to attempt to control this status rivalry. I have zero time for bleating…

Thanks to @kamomatou for pointing out there’s a term to describe how majority opinion on a topic, like control of Covid circulation, may not match individual, private feeling and belief. In this way bad faith actors can claim ‘the people’…

It fascinates me that Girard came to believe in a deity not through any faith, but via his study and analysis of the scapegoating mechanism in societies. He thought it was so deeply entrenched, that Christianity’s targeting of it…

Rationalism is a type of religion, the belief that human concepts are the root cause of all things. You don’t even need to be religious to see the vanity in that, as if all knowledge and meaning in the world comes only from the human mind.…

Gods reminded humans that their fates were largely out of their hands. It put a brake on human status games and focused attention on the material realities of life. Without restraint on status, humans just fight for it. All day, every day.…

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…

America has never been a secular democracy. It’s always been a post-revolutionary plutocracy, with lashings of Christian piety. It’s not being overrun by fascists. It’s maturing to its essence, as a culture. https://t.co/4YCjuLaqEE

Advocates for electoral democracy always assured us that compulsory voting would stop this shift in Australia. But Australia may be just one of the last legs of the Trumpian populism world tour. The Left-Centre-Right (LCR) hokey pokey is…