Complex, malleable, uncertain, passionate, misunderstood, confused. These are all words that come to mind as I ponder the "occupy" movement. I have many thoughts about what is going on in New York and around the US (and now Canada). With regards to those thoughts, what stands out to me is how much my thoughts have changed and morphed day-by-day as this protest continues to unfold. My emotional responses have ranged from cynicism to self-righteousness to support. I have yet to settle into one opinion. I think I am just as amorphous as the movement itself, I am unable to pick a side. Picking a side, well one can hardly do that with a movement like this because it does not have the same sides of the debate we have grown accustom to in our civic dialogue.
There are no sides. As I read a number of articles tonight and pondered what is occurring in the world around me I began to dwell on the concept of choice. As a result of my pondering, I am proposing that the heart of the issue is the desire to choose. I believe we were created for choice, it is innate within us to want to choose. Whether we are good at choice or not is beside the point, we all choose. This desire to choose, for a long time, has been satiated by the binary mode of thought we have grown accustom to in the west. We choose to be liberal or conservative, white collar or blue collar, religious or non-religious, we are products of the either/or. But we are entering, and have been entering for a long time, an era where the choices are less well defined, a movement into the both/and. We are in a time of challenge. A time where our post-modern outlook on life challenges the binary choices. When this occurs we often discover the choices we have been making are not really choices at all, or at best have been limited choices. We are forced to consider that the limited choice offered by both/and is just that, limited. One chooses democrats or republicans only to find they are more similar than they are different. One chooses Mac or PC, but they are both computers. One chooses to buy x or y only to find there is no choice in the system. Both/and is beginning to feel like a non-choice when we consider things such as economics, or a financial reserve that is beyond choice, or a capitalism that has become empire as it exhibits the trait of totality. We feel like we have lost choice.
It is my opinion that at the heart of the occupy movement people are desiring true choice. As a result, we are confronted by an amorphous protest that appears to be incoherent and unable to articulate what it wants. I suggest this is precisely because it is attempting to redefine the parameters of choice in the macro structures and ideology that govern our time.
I am not sure what the end result will look like, but I do know I am in favour of being along for the ride that takes our society to its redefinition.
I agree. I think sitting this one out is more dangerous than getting involved. Let's describe the movement: it has already achieved critical mass, it is peaceful, it is anti-apathy (this is new), it is conversational, it is working on re-imagining a broken world and physically creating colonies of hope and freedom...
ReplyDeleteOh wow! I think I just described what the church should be. If the church now opposes Occupy rather than supports and engages then clearly we have forgotten who we are and are so deep inside Babylon that we have been engulfed and enslaved by principalities and powers...
Also Silas can you elaborate on what you mean by totality...
Yes. And I think the lack of choice is even more pronounced in the USA's politicial system which has always literally been a two party system. In Canada we *tend* towards two parties, but when enough dissatisfaction arises, new parties tend to arise along with it to capture that vote. It doesn't happen often, but often enough to move the system (The Socreds (1952) and the Liberals (1991) in BC, and Reform (1987) and NDP (2011) federally to become major players, as well as the Greens capturing a seat in the last election).
ReplyDeleteI completely agree that people in general tend to get caught in "binary" thinking; the fixation on the two obvious "choices"/alternatives. The reality is that for any problem/system/issue there are always at least a half dozen different ways of approaching it, and usually a dozen or more. That's as true in the micro (dealing with the logistics of multiple competing thanksgiving dinners), the middle (issues at work) as it is in the macro (political and economic systems).
Creative, "out of the box", left field, thinking is a very powerful tool. To be able to identify and rethink or discard underlying assumptions can lead to unexpected solutions.
Unfortunately our civil discourse does not tend to exemplify this. That is, at least in part, I think, because the media tends to capture civil discourse in the form of a competition. The story with a race, and winners and losers is a crisp, punchy, story. An article about the 15 different ways we could approach an issue and find a solution doesn't work as well.
And that, of course, is *our* fault. *Our*, in the larger sense. *Our*, in the sense that the media are profit driven enterprises, and they build what people buy.
The genius of our current system is that if people wanted, and would buy, something different, it would turn up almost overnight.