House of Eratosthenes

From here. Elsewhere, I’ve seen a lot of legitimate question put to this video, in terms of is this real or is it an act. My experience growing up in a college town blinds me to the evidence, or edifies me, depending on your point of view. No, it’s not an act. They prattle about how strong they are, they get mad, they cry, they cringe, they hug, they prattle some more. That’s the cycle.

Another OWS protester, or sympathizer of same, blames “religious fundamentalism” for the 1% being so much wealthier than the 99%. Hey rocket scientist: Whenever people come up with complaints against fundamentalists and the complaints actually manage to resonate, they have to do with the fundamentalists working too hard to make others more like them, which when you noodle it out for a second or two, is the polar opposite of creating a stratified society with a 1% and a 99%. Begone and take your fail with you.

I see the New York Times is putting a good amount of elbow grease into dredging up a new scandal, inferring that “bankers” express different opinions about the OWS protesters in public than they do in private. If this is true, it seems only reasonable, to me. Whenever one speaks in any proximity to a corporate emblem, and the association that could be made is in fact a substantial one — the speaker is on the corporation’s payroll — it is wise to remain extremely guarded, lest the comments be construed as an official position. This, for example, is actually a muted tone version of the thoughts going through my head about it:

“Most people view it as a ragtag group looking for sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll,” said one top hedge fund manager.

If I worked on Wall Street, there’s no good that could come from me saying what I really thought about OWS, out in public. I’m sure some people from the New York Times would love it, but it wouldn’t be helpful to anyone else.

But I don’t want to talk about these three items, per se. I want to talk about our response to them and our response to the situation that has caused them.

What it all has in common, I think, is this mistaken perception that something is broken and the cure for it is more unity. One cannot help but sympathize; it’s in the name of our country, is it not? And so if we have a fractious phenomenon taking place, the unthinking primal instinct is to move forward, see what we can do to glue the fine China dinnerware together. Get everybody united again.

It is to our credit. It is something hard-wired deep within us, not as a species but as a nation: Someone’s got a beef? Let’s see what they have to say. Give it a fair hearing. They can’t live here the way things are? Maybe we can improve. What does it take, to absorb them into our expanding and evolving culture, so they can learn from us and we can learn from them. We seek to be a growing, sentient entity, as a nation. And why shouldn’t we? We’ve made it work.

But this is also, I think, the point where a more vigorous method of thinking would improve the situation.

Everything cannot be united with everything else. The harmful deception that permeates the Occupy Wall Street movement, which never is challenged since it is never put to voice or to ink, is that all this protesting is a necessary step toward building something big, functional, and beneficial to all. Those who announce their support for the movement, whether they say so or not, predicate that support on this premise. But the protest itself has been an endless procession of behaviors not to be carried out in job interviews, which says something when you think about it, since much of the angst that launched the protest is supposed to have something to do with the difficulties involved in getting a job.

So the energy we’re seeing on parade here is not creative or preservative energy; it is destructive. It seeks to bring moving, functional machinery to an indefinite halt. That’s the point, isn’t it? Occupy Wall Street…so that Wall Street can’t get anything done while it’s being occupied?

This is nothing new. Ever since the protests in the sixties, America has been blitzed by one “protest” after another after another, enshrouded in this unspoken, glittery, translucent narrative that this is a disruption necessary to a larger process of building something big that will help everybody; such disruptions have received a lot of support throughout the decades, presuming the truth of such a narrative, and it has never once actually been carried through. The closest we’ve ever seen it come is the election of a lot of fringe-radical leftists to political offices, and the damage came in the wake of that. Now, we see it come full-circle — the last White House Chief of Staff and current Mayor of Chicago actually came out and said a crisis is something you shouldn’t let go to waste. So the leftist/anarchist damage, manufactures the crisis, the crisis leads to the protests, the protests now & then manage to affect an election and the election leads to more damage.

Everything cannot be united with everything else. Oil and water cannot occupy the same space. Insert them in a common vessel together, and they will separate; put ’em in a blender and turn it on puree, you’ll get a frothy mixture that isn’t good for anything, and then the contents will settle never having truly emulsified. And that’s the way it is with creative and destructive energies. They don’t mix. It may make us feel good to fantasize about some big sit-down where all the differences get talked out and somehow reconciled and we end up square-dancing at some big picnic, but it isn’t gonna happen. These are people who have problems with it if they see someone making money. No, I’m not about to make less money to make them happy.

Does this mean I want them marooned on an island somewhere? No, there are too many of them. That might be a good idea for some of the organizers though, some of the die-hards, the ones who will never rest until there’s a national salary cap in place. They don’t want to live with anybody else anyway. I mean, think about it: They go apoplectic when they find out someone made more money than they did, how could they live in any populated, advanced society? But, of the “99%” we see, 99% of the 99% fits the description of the unnamed hedge fund manager. They want to meet girls and smoke weed. They’re followers.

The solution is not to unite, nor to ostracize, but to dissipate. If they really think they want to overthrow capitalism, they should be granted the right to speak their minds, freely — so that others can see what they’re about, and the movement can be discredited as it deserves to be. And then incentives can be applied for them to show up, participate in a process that already has been built and might benefit incrementally from their contribution…so they can contribute to it in this incremental way, without completely dismantling it and starting from scratch. See, that takes a lot of maturity, and that’s the problem. Riding in like a hurricane and saying “This is all messed up, we need to tear it apart and start over, the way it needs to work is like this” — that doesn’t take anything. Somehow, these children have been given a massive incentive to live out their entire lives this way. Maybe their professors are all socialists, maybe it’s the hormones talking, maybe they weren’t raised right. I vote for a combination of all three. Whatever it is, that’s how they’re looking at life: Nothing exists before I come along, and if something does, then it needs to be wrecked so I can make things the way I want them to be.

Rather than uniting with their cause, the solution is for the rest of us to give them an incentive to do things the mature way. Clock in, shut up, see how things work, find out where you can make your contribution and get busy.

The point is, we’re going into our second half of a century now, uniting with every crackpot cause that’s come along — none of which has sought to reciprocate, to be part of any unifying effort. Unification does nobody any good if it isn’t paired up with intelligence, and in order to make intelligence useful you have to see what’s going on and respond to it. Where we’ve really been falling down is in our determination to treat adults like children and children like adults. We’ve treated constructive people like they’re destroying something without defining exactly what it is they’re supposed to be destroying, and we’ve treated destructive people like creators without inspecting too closely what it is they’re trying to create. Maybe this is the point where we finally learn the lesson we’ve been needing to learn.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

Unite With This?Saturday, October 15th, 2011

Unite With This?
Saturday, October 15th, 2011