Thread by @RageSheen

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 thing bucks this trend. /1

Institutions. I mention them a lot, because they’ve been maligned by decades of libertarian politics. But an institution is the same social groupings, *with knowledge added*. An institution forms around knowledge. Orthogonally to social status games. /2

Every time I mention institutions people pile on with examples of institutional failure, of abuse and oppression overseen by some institutions. As if there always has to be a utopian perfection. There are no utopias, there are just better or worse ways of doing things. /3

You will never, ever, create stable societies using only the social status games between people. The attention span of that sort of collective can be as short as a few minutes, as they cycle through endless fads and fashions. But an institution crosses generations. /4

Sometimes centuries, or even millennia. The Catholic Church a classic example. I’m not a Catholic or even ‘religious’ in the way that term is now used, but I can see there are no real institutions before the 17th century, that aren’t the Church. That’s our foundation. /5

Including science, which amazes many. As Michel Serres says, the monotheism of Western Christianity was the framework inside which the ‘objective truth’ of modern science grew. The positing of a single, virtual truth independent of our human, social affairs. /6

The same science-based believers today who mock the church use exactly the same framing of an independent objective regulator of all things. Whether you call it God or scientific truth, what matters is that its independent of social status games. /7

It was the church who set societies free of endless warring social status games, and on a pathway of institutional progress. They used God to do it. All of that is now hopelessly lost in the Enlightenment fog of whether you ‘believe in God’ as some being ‘up in the sky’. /8

But the introduction of that higher principle, no matter what it is, was the historical genius of the church. Science inherited that, centuries of taming of social status-driven chaos by religion. It brought even kings and nobles to heel. /9

And even more importantly, the nations we all live in today, which battle and war with one another, were descended from a universal Church, during the peace of Westphalia in the 17th century. We were international centuries before were were national. /10

The Church made a universal, international, global institution the foundation of much of the human life on the planet. If you want to know why nations can‘t agree now to act even with global catastrophes, it’s because you can’t unscramble an egg. /11

We have it backwards. Nations aren’t the fundamental unit of collective social life. They were gifts of the church and monarchy, which had lost control of warring parties and used sovereign allocations as appeasement. Only some sort of universal principle can unite us. /12

Knowledge became that, with the decline in belief of a God. It’s why our modern institutions are stuffed full of knowledge-based experts. The same institutions the venal have been assaulting now for the best part of 70 years. Labelling them as ‘bureaucracies’, with contempt. /13

Those bureaucracies gave birth to the greatest genius of all human history. ‘The public’. An entirely administrative construct, a sophisticated and nuanced continuous assessment of social inter-relationship. Not a ‘majority’, a mere count of hands. /14

That’s the nonsense elections have foisted upon us, making us mistake the public with an electoral majority. The public is the product of expertise and data, constantly assessed and analysed. You can’t see it anywhere, it doesn’t exist in that way. /15

It’s the study of how we interact, all of us, every last person. It’s not a number. (It’s lots.) Public health grew from this, the ongoing analysis of how those interactions shape health. Now cast aside in favour of electoral majorities keen to get back to annual ski trips. /16

Knowledge is our only hope. Hitched to our social lives through institutions. That’s all institutions are, schoolyard social groups but with knowledge added. You can find examples of individuals perverting institutional culture. It’s not an argument against institutions. /17

There are no utopias. But institutions give us continuity across centuries, not electoral or news cycles. It’s why the Chinese invented them too, to bring expertise into governance. And why we then copied them. The UN and WHO are often pilloried for their failures. /18

But they’re victims of our having this backwards, set up by nations, to try to create the international, from the national. Like trying to unscramble an egg. Without a higher principle or authority of some kind, nations will always just be large schoolyards run by bullies. /19

Come back to Spinoza, in this picture. He represents knowledge. The crowd excommunicating him in the background, in their social schoolyard status games. Give up trying to mobilise crowds, that only creates fads and fashions. Knowledge, coupled to institutions, is our hope. /20

Social media decouples knowledge from institutions, so is a poison in this necessary shift. It mobilises belief in anything, untested in any way by centuries of accumulated knowledge and expertise. As do elections, where being popular is the only test of suitability. /21

We can’t vote our way out of our mess. Only knowledge can save us. /22