We share our thoughts on social media, we gain followers and views, its all part of the online community life that has grown to impressive proportions. People barely talk to each other and are staring at their phones even when they are together. Its clear the phone offers a better experience than the companions. It may be a bit like the lure of money, the paper or number promises the world, more than actual items which depreciate.
The social communities have allowed a new type of reality, which existed earlier based on location and wealth. People like to separate out based on behaviour, so if you are poor and can’t behave as someone that likes to be served in expensive restaurants, you will become separated. Even if you are together you can separate based on whether you are polite, know the customs, your dress decisions, hair style, etc. etc. All these things define groups. IF you keep your home tidy, if you have a nice garden, if you bought the last newest lawnmower. If you had a steak from the Saltbae.
These groups are self sufficient and do not mix. They are bubbles. We choose them and it seems very simple : If you can behave the way you like to, and you can eat and drink and find shelter doing it, then you lose interest in alternatives. You close your bubble. You may remember a time that your situation was different and hold on to people, this means you can see friends from before you became poor or rich or moved or entered a club, your bubble is not hermetic, but its getting there.
Todays politics is all about bubbles. We have the old generaton with money, they need to be kept in their bubble, we have the old generation without money, they need to be kept in theirs. We have students, they need to be occupied with life and debt and challenges, we have working families, they need to be occupied with carrers. They don’t really know each other or help each other, except when its family, but family is so 20th century. The economy maximizes cashflow by creating and maintaining bubbles.
To exist economism needs a strong right wing mentality, one that says “I did it all by myself!” ignoring the effect of fossl energy you have not contributed to at all. Ironically you can only proof value by being helpfull to others, which is counter economism, as evident by the growing number of poor people it creates. The right wing bubble is to heterogeneous to be one bubble though, this is because you have people born rich, people making themselve rich, and people without money that think they should be or will be rich one day. So there’s the old conservative bubble “we rebuild this country”, the business owners (who sometimes get crushed by industry but have to be on the side of banks to maintain good relations), and the young crazies thinking they are Napoleon. The Right is often associated with a strong sense of ownership (leading to xenophobia), but that’s the other way around, a strong sense of ownership serves the banks who own almost everything.
On the Left there are several bubbles, but it doesn’t matter without power. The Left has not realized all it is is against banks and fossil, as soon as it is for banks and fossil it will find its ideas shift to the right. Yet nobody on the Left in Holland has ever explicitly said this. This means the Left doesn’t really exist (except for the Party of the Animals), it does not know what it needs to be to be a viable challenge to the ‘Right’.
At the left side you have bubbles based on socialism, environmentalism, anti-Right-ism (useless), sadly because banks own most homes, rented or bought, most businesses, most universities, everyone on the Left needs money and a steady income. If you serve banks you are on the Right. One move they should make would be to create their own bank, which can only give out renewable energy credit from sources owned by that bank.
The Left and Socialist bubbles are quite strong, these people don’t read much and are often highly social not able to separate themselves as the rich can. It is a mess though because no unifying principle. The religious bubbles are unaware of their right wing nature, they ignore the source of thier wealth, the nature of the production cycle it seems. They are so anxious to perform in their complex ideological bubble world they can be coopted by the Right without much problems.
If would be interesting to map out the beliefs of people in their respective bubbles, who is your primary news source, which people do you trust, are you a maker, a consumer, how much debt have you consumed? Showing the sometimes contradictory nature of the positions some groups take in politics and what would work for them. This field of Bubble psychology would be interesting to follow and give handles to pierce bubbles if the inhabitants are dangerous to others. We have Covid denier bubble, a climate denier bubble etc. Sadly banks don’t give a shit about climate change, and they like to confuse us by allowing any group that does not harm them. We in the mean time are stuck in our bubbles, thinking we can’t cooperate with others outside it. We can and we should.