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

If you see a friend come back from an international trip or large event, Covid-free, it reinforces the sense of ‘maybe Covid is a spent force’.

The importance of infection and disease patterns. Covid is not everywhere, all the time. That’s why it infects in waves. /1 Sometimes these waves are seen as the rise and fall of population immunity. But it’s much more likely to be (for Covid) the development of a disease hub, spread from that hub, and then petering out of that spread.

Until the next hub forms. /2

Many express frustration that SARS2 infection seems so arbitrary. For example they have friends taking no precautions who go to major social events, and come home Covid-free.

We need to come back to the dispersion characteristics of this pathogen. /1

bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.11…
This is what you’d expect, for a pathogen with a low dispersion parameter (k). That most people won’t spread it, but a handful will spread it a LOT.

So the event a person goes to may be a superspreading event. In which case there’s a high chance of them being infected. /2

Modern economics is a dry and barren retrofitting of societies with fantastical self-running equilibrium models. Models that are so insanely stupid that ‘invisible hands’ have to be invented to explain why anything happens at all.

Societies run on one thing only. Desires. /1 They’re social. Not economic. Even what we call the economic, is social. Gabriel Tarde described the simple mechanism that drives what we call economic activity, more than a century ago. And in doing that makes what we call an economy interchangeable with our social lives. /2

Civilisations lurch between catastrophes. It’s all that changes them meaningfully. Between catastrophes they play human status games.

These status games have a shared model. People join teams, which then battle for status. It’s the same social model across all activities. /1

There’s a growing perception of social collapse right now, as the teams become more violent and the basic material realities of our lives become dysfunctional. Hidden behind the econo-babble of ‘cost of living’. /2

Covid minimisers (really shills for ‘the economy’) realised they could justify killing people for business by pretending to be rescuing our social lives. They spun socialising.

The health benefits to socialising come from a cause not ever said. /1

summahealth.org/flourish/entri…
What analyses of socialising never say, and what our now obsession with ‘mental health’, also another cause the minimisers co-opted for their Infinite Infection campaign, doesn’t say either, is this.

Socialising is violence. The literal battle for social status. /2

If you read the history of Victorian England, the birth of the modern world, what stands out is how much the focus of their massive engineering innovation was one thing.

The health and well-being of the public. Engineers change the world, what happened to us? /1 Interestingly the engineering leviathan of the Victorians had its origins in the Industrial Revolution that preceded Victorian engineering.

That revolution was mostly about making industrialists rich. That’s much more like us today. But they didn’t win. /2

Soon after the farce of let it rip got underway in workplaces, for Covid, the EAPs were thrust in everybody’s faces daily. Outright abuse of people, mandatory infection, with the inevitable trauma to them re-framed as an issue with their mental health. /1 Similarly while public health measures were in place earlier in the pandemic, some workplaces (such as mine) ran ‘resilience’ workshops, to make sure all of our ‘mental health’ was OK. I actually said to the HR person who invited me to go, ‘are you kidding?’ /2

An important topic. David talks about how ‘we’ are playing with fire, with tipping points. This is where, as with Covid, we need insight into how and why humans think and behave. Which is a social question, not a physical science question. /1

https://twitter.com/drvolts/status/1823071176765407482

You see this all through Covid. This space and others flooded daily with scientific data and concepts, to explain the pandemic.

But all pandemics are social phenomena. Because humans are the hosts, and how they behave determines how a pathogen spreads. /2

A couple of months ago I shared the experience of my elderly mother here, who was admitted to hosptal with serious heart and lung issues. She contarcted Covid while there.

What happened next. /1 I wrote to the Health Care Complaints Commission about the incident, because there were no infection control procedures in place in the hospital, for a very high risk patient.

They flick-passed it to NSW Health. But more specifically, to the LHD. /2

We’re still expected to believe that spending a few months at home a few years ago so damaged our acquired immunity that the whole population is now under continuous assault from a range of infectious diseases.

I feel the worm is turning. /1 I’m the only person masking at my work, and have been that only person for a couple of years now. This winter for the first time multiple people have said to me ‘you know I think that mask of yours might be a good idea.’

People are SO sick. And so *repeatedly* sick. /2

Like many I enjoy coming here to discover new things, including the science of infectious disease.

But if we want things to change, we have to move away from the idea that facts or information run societies. We have to understand how societies work. /1 Not going to re-hash the basic mechanisms again here (have done a lot of threads on that). But the most difficult point I think for people to grasp is that societies simply don’t gradually improve anything.

Only massive disruption brings significant change. /2

Public health action was shut down through a deliberate campaign of highly organised hysteria. ‘Grave concerns’.

By the same people who call hysteria every attempt to do the opposite.

A few notes about the use of hysteria. /1 The extremely fast and effective attempts to shut down all public health action for Covid should have led those rightly appalled by it to think about strategy.

Because those who do it talk out both sides of their mouths. Hysteria on their part, about public health measures. /2

True adult life is the gradual weaning of yourself away from the social ties of friends and even family, and towards pursuing where knowledge says we need to go.

The two cannot exist comfortably side-by-side. Knowledge will always betray social relations, eventually. /1 That doesn’t mean be a hermit. It does mean sociality is a stage that you’re supposed to try to move beyond. And that’s life’s toughest challenge.

It’s easy to see this challenge when it’s the ‘enemies’ on opposing teams. It’s much tougher when it’s those closest to you. /2

At both ends of the lifespan now humans are put into ‘care’. Child care and aged care. Societies are social, what does this mean?

This grandmother calls looking after children ‘abject drudgery’. There’s more to see here. /1

smh.com.au/lifestyle/life… Also in today’s Herald, a piece on the continuing free fall of birth rates. People ‘can’t afford’ to have children, the cost of living is too high.

I want to draw these themes together, as a window into what we are now, socially. /2

smh.com.au/national/nsw/s…

Because America is violent. America is violent because the default state of all societies is violence. Only collective regulation reduces violence.

America hates regulation. Thus it’s violent. And it’s exporting the business model, via social media. /1

smh.com.au/world/north-am…
Not as ‘content’, on social media. Not mis- or disinformation. But by exporting a technology to transact personal and social lives independently of collective regulation.

That’s what social media is. It’s built into the design, explicitly. It’s a libertarian attack weapon. /2

The mythology (the ‘bait’ in its bait-and-switch) of social media, is that it’s like the world’s conversation. Everybody talking to everybody else.

Except it isn’t. The same hierarchical structure shapes those conversations as exist off social media. /1

searchenginejournal.com/top-social-med…
All that social media does is replace existing social status hierarchies off the platforms, with new ones on the platforms.

Often the hierarchies off the platforms simply use the platforms to reproduce their dominance. But over time that fails. /2

I’m fascinated by us, as a culture. Nothing is more invisible to you, than your own culture. It just seems like the natural order of things.

Here’s why I think our culture doesn’t understand Covid. And throw in climate change too. /1 There are two critical things that we are, as a society. (Speaking as a rich Western country.)

1) Post colonialists (where we are the colonisers), and
2) post-war.

War being both WW1 and WW2. /2

If you believe the mythology of elections, entire populations swing from being free market fanatics, to Big State socialists, in only a handful of years. And then back again, ad infinitum.

Nonsense, of course. There’s a much simpler explanation. /1 Elections are performative theatre. A platform for existing social groups to pursue status. But even that’s misleading.

Because the existing social status quo at any time is never going to willingly give an opportunity for others to replace them. /2