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

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