Social media is not just where people share information. It’s a replacement for society itself, and intended to be. The decoupling of societies from their foundations.

Now, a literal de-coupling! This fascinating data will get a range of interpretations I’m sure. /1 Initial analysis shows the trend being driven strongly by women, enabled by their use of software via their mobile phones, to ‘leapfrog’ their usual cultural options.

That sounds extremely plausible. Women wanting a better cultural deal. But I think it’s more than that. /2

For 5 years now many of us have come here to express anger and disbelief that basic things like controlling the spread of a pandemic aren’t being done.

A few years ago I realised doing that is part of the problem. Mistaking these platforms for society. /1 These platforms operationalise a view of society. It’s what IT more generally has always done. Technologies embed a view of the world.

They promote and produce a view of society that says ‘the people’ generate society. /2

The 20th century was a century of revolutions. Russia, China. And we had one too, the 1960s ‘counter-cultural’ revolution.

Like Burke I think all revolutions are disasters for societies. They can be the catastrophes I often say bring the only real change. But…. /1 They’re not good change. They can sweep away existing status hierarchies. But they just replace them with new ones. Orwell’s Animal Farm was about that.

Burke’s reflections on the French Revolution of that time were prescient too. What did that revolution lead to? /2

DH Lawrence was also a primary school teacher. His writings about that experience are remarkably prescient about the world we’re now confronted with.

Thinking is a specialised skill, like plumbing, that the majority of people should (and used to) avoid. /1 Lawrence’s critique of education bears little resemblance to any of the dominant educational narratives today or even of his own time.

His greatest problem with education? That we massified it. /2

We had these books as kids, and would sit for hours absorbing strange locales from around the world.

Now we increasingly all just travel there. Because we don’t understand place, we have no conception of the violation this is. 1/6 If we admire people, for example, we might look at them in the pages of magazines, or online. We admire them, from afar.

If we camp outside their home to get a more ‘authentic experience’ of them, what’s that called?

Stalking. 2/6

The most brilliant windows into our lives as humans are in the most mundane and banal stories. Like this one.

I often post about how, contrary to popular opinion, our sociality and connection is actually the root of most violence.

Let’s see. /1

abc.net.au/news/2024-12-2… Something that seems one of those classic stories of ‘community’, people apparently making the effort to offer the community (whatever they think that means) something special.

Christmas lights. How’d that work out? /2

The basic act of segregating children from adult life in schools caused a violent change to our societies, that we’re still living through (and not understanding).

When you put people together, they form a ‘culture’. That becomes their world.

/1 By segregating childhood off from adult life, we created places where children developed a culture of their own. School culture.

That became their world. When we then universalised schooling, that became all of our world. /2

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 a beautiful concept, rarely used analytically. It’s a rendition of the actual reason societies hold, or don’t.

They’re a semi-stable equilibrium of competing status hierarchies.

/2

Our ‘freedumb’ times. The cultures that have the loosest social restrictions on the planet?

Former communist and Eastern European countries. The countries we would see as ‘authoritarian’, have the lowest amount of social restrictions in play.

What’s it mean? /1 To me it shows what I often say. That societies are 100% social, never political in the way we mean the latter term.

Here’s the paradox libertarians can’t understand. It’s social restriction, that creates freedom. This isn’t even difficult to understand.

/2

The most common assumptions about democracy, what it is or even should be, are wrong.

Democracy is not ‘the people’ running societies. That’s populism. That’s Homer’s car, the idea that ordinary people have the expertise to run a country.

/1 Democracy as we know it was never even designed to be ‘the people’ (never defined) running anything.

Their role is to select others to do that FOR them. Countries are by definition ‘top-down’ and hierarchical. We elect representatives to help operate these hierarchies. /2

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.

/1 Many of these family dynasties were maintained by inter-marriage between blood relations. Up to 10% of marriages in the world to this day are between blood relations.

What weakened this form of status hierarchy was the Catholic Church, with its campaign against incest.

/2

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 3) Big subsidies are given out for house purchases, conversion and maintenance.

4) Big spending on socially deprived areas.

5) Young engaged couples offered interest-free loans to start their lives together.

/2

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 right now. How do societies survive? /1 Whenever a group reaches a certain intensity of rivalry for status, the status game ‘tightens up’, as Will Storr says.

Meaning the status hierarchy is replaced by an angry crowd or mob. Elias Canetti won his Nobel Prize analysing this form of social life. /2

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