The Icelandic parliament first sat in 930. The English parliament convened in 1215, with the signing of the Magna Carta. It's an old institution. Patriarchal. Aristocratic. Built on the notion that the few *should* rule the many. But not too few.

It has at its core the notion that ideas *should* be debated. That from this debate arise the best possible solutions. And these debates were contentious and adversarial - like any contest of wills, fought to be won.

Rules made by men who killed their own food and fought their own battles.

Refined over the years to become a gentleman's sport, politics was *always* a club. The notion of representative "for the people" democracy is new, in the big scheme of parliamentary things.

I've always thought it very odd that we have fully adjusted our expectation of democracy (for the people) without having similarly adjusted the manner in which we conduct it.

Anyway. That's not the point I'm aiming at. I'm annoyingly parenthetical, I know.

That parliamentary behaviour worked inside the clubhouse. When it was just men yelling at each other in a room no one else was in, it was fine to call each other names and bullshit up your claims and grievances. Part of the drama, the ceremony, the ritual. Birds dance. Men yell.

Grand stuff, right?

Today the clubhouse is on tv every moment someone is yelling or bullshitting up a grievance or making an outlandish claim. And then they talk directly to us, in the same way, on our phones, tvs, radios, computers and, FFS, on our watches & inside our glasses.

And they say the same stuff. This adversarial, dramatic, ritualistic bullshitting, exaggeration, fear mongering and manipulative *stuff*.

Right to us. Directly. Look us right in our eyes and spin stuff. And we smile and say "thank you, sir".

It's a super dumb game to play outside in the public square. We all get swept up in the game and stop paying attention to the issues. We stop understanding what is true. We start feeling hateful and angry and beaten.

And there are many people simply not equipped, for a variety of reasons, to sort through it all to get to the facts they need to form their own opinions and thus be useful members of a democratic society.

So I have always wondered why we don't ... you know ... fix *that*.

Modern society - society with social media - cannot survive unless it addresses the manner in which it allows its public servants to conduct themselves.

It has to find new rules that aren't based on a time best described as barbaric.

There's an illogical disconnect between the things we pursue as a society (fairness, equity, opportunity) and the way we go about managing and stewarding it (lies, manipulation, ritualistic puffery).

I mean we *do* make our own rules, don't we?

#insomniarant