This extract from Will Storr's book on status is required reading if you want to understand Covid minimisers.

For 'events', let's use 'anti-lockdown crusades'. /1 "Events like these are often described as moral panics. Whilst this is surely correct in some cases, our investigation suggests an alternative possbility:

that much of their explosive energy can derive not form panic, but desire for acclaim." /2

“In free governments, the rulers are the servants and the people their superiors and sovereigns.” (Benjamin Franklin)

This is the American political DNA.

It’s also impossible nonsense, that is destroying the world. /1 ‘Popular sovereignty’ is the system of government of modern democracies. A system of government where ‘the people’ are sovereign.

The problem with that whole idea is that it’s both a logical and physical impossibility. /2

One of the things to understand about China is that it plays ‘the long game’. In the West we’re hopelessly glued to meaningless short electoral cycles, which have degenerated into perpetual populist posturing aimed always at the next election.

China thinks much longer term. /1 It’s partly a cultural thing too, to take a long-duration view of the events in our lives.

I saw a demographer argue on the weekend that ‘we’ in the West need to take a more preventative approach to public issues, rather than reactionary. /2

This latest election has reinforced even more strongly for me that societies cannot be saved from election bubbles.

100% of the emotion and analysis has been either elation or despair at the relative success of the two teams, Red and Blue.

Oz is next.

/1 ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ was a Bill Clinton phrase. This headline indirectly refers to it.

Has anybody stopped to contemplate what the phrase means? /2

Under populism, political leaders attribute all election victories to themselves, as do commentators. It's a popularity bubble.

In reality, people vote mostly according to the material conditions of their lives. This is a critical distinction. 1/5 A politician who slaps themselves on the back for winning an election doesn't understand they were voted in to fix the material conditions of peoples' lives.

When they don't do that, retribution is brutal. 2/5

Most of my career I’ve worked in governance in one form or another.

One thing that amazes me is the belief that people engage in the details of politics. They overwhelmingly don’t.

Why this matters, fundamentally. /1 People aren’t stupid, as a whole. Nor are they lazy. They just have their own lives to get on with.

Despite all our rhetoric about ‘the people’ running democracies, they just don’t. They were never meant to. /2

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

idea.int/gsod/2024/ Voting is not democracy. And it’s failing and continuing to fail globally, as a mechanism of governance.

It’s team sports, masquerading as government. /2

Nobody who believes societies are economies has the first clue why we get things like ‘cost of living’ crises.

The same problems recur in our supposed economies, with the same ideas useless to prevent them.

Can status explain it? You bet. /1

abc.net.au/news/2024-11-0… Societies are not economies. Economies don’t exist. Think about just how ludicrous the idea is that societies run as a sort of objective economic machine, with tweaks to things like money supply and interest rates, and budgets. /2

At the start of the pandemic I wrote about the strategy with National Cabinet, how it was nothing about ‘all working together’, or any of that nonsense.

National Cabinet was the key weapon to destroy the public health response. Time to revisit, as the ‘Inquiry’ refused to. /1 Scott Morrison knew that the federal government had very little constitutional role in fighting a pandemic. That role belonged to States, and their health departments.

He desperately needed a way to deal himself into the equation. National Cabinet was that way. /2

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

abc.net.au/news/2024-10-2… This is the exact equivalent of saying that a landslide election victory for a certain party means it’s ’unlikely Australians will ever vote for another party.’

Inside 3 years societies will often vote for a party that is fundamentally opposite to their landslide choice. /2

For 1-2 years, delusions like ‘hybrid immunity’ and ‘immunity debt’ survived because enough people seemed to be getting on with normal life to make them plausible fantasies.

But now the evidence that these are fantasies is right there in front of everybody. /1 Friends and work colleagues are in a state of health you might normally only see in hospital wards. Workplaces have become hospitals in the home.

Horrendous coughs that never go away. So much MCAS, with rashes and red eyes, hives, wheezing. /2

The hidden story of chronic impacts of infection. Those who followed Queen’s career sometimes noticed how Freddie Mercury’s live performances deteriorated after 1982.

The band toured in 1984 and 1986 (for the last time). Something wasn’t right on those tours. 1/5 They were of course hugely successful and lauded tours. But objectively, musically, Mercury had changed.

Some estimate Mercury contracted HIV in 1982, during the band’s world tour. Listening to Mercury perform between 1980-1982 is a revelation. 2/5

Many can escape the pandemic already. They can just refuse to socialise. Yes if they have kids, if they need hospitals or aged care (for example), they will have enforced high-risk situations.

But quite a lot of people are not in that situation. A short thought experiment. /1 I’ve lived a fairly normal life, without catching Covid, for the entire pandemic. That’s because social life (including travel) has never been a great desire.

I’m not a hermit. I have lots of friends. But I don’t crave social events. /2

What do you do, in a world where public services like public health have been destroyed?

This is the question for every day. Most of the world never had those public services. So we’re now returning to the pack. I think we sometimes forget how privileged we’ve been, and why. /1 We should absolutely expect public-focused governance to be the norm. Though we’ve never done very much at all to extend that model to the rest of the world, who must look on right now and chuckle.

Welcome back to humanity, they might say. And rightly so. /2

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 of study now, not just my idea. Sometimes abbreviated as PET - Punctuated Equilibrium Theory. I add various other layers to it though, for example I think this theory is true because of some basic social facts. /2

ncchpp.ca/docs/2018_Proc…

Just back from a short holiday. The country is awash with travellers, and as vast numbers are now retired or retiring, it’s getting worse.

As a culture, a dominant desire at retirement is to ‘see the world’. Even the world at home. It’s a window we need to peer through. /1 Of course people don’t wait for retirement to get out there and travel. It’s an obsession now for all ages. But retirement is treasured because it can then become a near perpetual activity.

It’s always our most common, habitual things that hide our deepest secrets. /2

A friend took delivery of one of these yesterday, a magnificent BYD Seal. What happened next is a real window into what’s happened to us, as a society. /1 He’s a bit of a revhead, has always loved his cars. So him buying an EV at all was remarkable. I’d been talking about it with him for a couple of years, and suddenly he just up and did it.

He’s completely blown away by the car. Astonishing performance and premium comfort. /2

My contention is that societies are created by a single mechanism - status - and not by economics or politics or anything else.

The content of public debates is almost completely irrelevant. You’re missing the wood, for the trees, by arguing the content. 1/8 Individuals and groups will co-opt any issue, any content, to further the status quo of themselves and their teams. You can see that right now in climate debates.

The quite funny interest pro-pollution folk have discovered in the health and safety of birds, for example. 2/8

When catastrophes disrupt societies, it often triggers a desire to rebuild the world through a mythical utopian shift. Often a bucolic ‘tree change’ or ‘sea change’.

Areas of Natural Beauty (AONB) in the UK. How I think they teach us about our current Covid times. /1 The Cotswolds, designated as an AONB in the UK. Those who follow me won’t be surprised to learn when the AONB idea was invented.

In 1945. At the end of that wave of 3 mega-catastrophes. WW1, the Spanish Flu, and WW2.

(Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC BY-SA 3.0) /2

The disgusting emptiness of much Western culture now is all there in the idea of ‘revenge travel’. This is why we refused to keep fighting a pandemic.

Our entitled travel in the world was interrupted. So we took ‘revenge’ on that interruption. /1

forbes.com/sites/geoffwhi…
You can’t really be for the control of Covid and also for the hypermobility of travel culture. That’s a square peg in a round hole.

We blame politicians and minimisers for destroying public health. They definitely led that destruction. All change is led. /2

In the West ordinary folk are discovering the total lack of agency that has been the daily life of most of the world, for centuries.

Facing existential threats that receive no action, or even a sympathetic ear. But this has always been ordinary folk, even in the West. /1 The sense of agency ordinary people have had in the West is the wake of catastrophes that befell our societies.

At no time did our societies suddenly begin to actually care about the fate of ordinary people. /2