Following the Occupy Wall Street movement has been interesting. Following the media coverage doubly so. It is revealing to see how quickly the media loses interest, and how shallow most reports are. But the main issue I feel the need to write about is this “what is your demand?” thing.
And hats off to Occupy Wall Street for not falling into that trap. Because a trap it is. Here are protesters who oppose a system that consists of dozens if not hundreds of interlocking parts, some of them so arcane that it takes a couple sentences to just broadly sum up what they are (or did you know about credit default swaps before the crisis?) and then another couple sentences to explain what their part in all the mess is – and then you want those who oppose this system and its results to sum it all up in a soundbite? The media exhibits the same flawed attitude here as CDS incorporate: Maximized simplification with a disregard for the underlying complexity.
And attitude is one of the things that is the problem. I still remember times when todays NASDAQ wasn’t mentioned on the evening news as if it mattered. Because honestly, to 99% of the population it doesn’t 99% of the time.
Protesters might be occupying Wall Street to free it from the financial arsonists that are holding it in thrall. But they are also trying to occupy our minds which have become enslaved to the mentality behind the conceptual Wall Street – that everything is and depends upon economics. As usual, this thought struck me while reading a book, this time it’s the interesting german Der Glückscode: Die kosmischen Quellen für Selbsterkenntnis, Liebe und Partnerschaft, which sounds way too esoteric for my taste, but so far really isn’t, aside from a few subordinate clauses I can easily filter out. Broers writes about how we are treating our wishes in life and our relationships in an investment model. And how this changes our wishes and relationships. Young children, he says, usually wish for non-material things, like that their parents make up with each other. Parents trapped in the investment model disregard those childish wishes and press the child to wish for something “realistic”, which means an object or something else that can be bought.
And that’s how politics and the media are treating Occupy Wall Street. Most of the voiced demands are non-material at this point – fairness, justice and freedom are typical topics. Part of the job of a politician is to find answers to the questions that society is asking. Sadly, the current generation of politicians have all failed their jobs, and it seldom becomes as obvious as when they’re shown to be unable to do their job – finding solutions. They rely entirely on being told the solutions, either by lobbyists or now (or so they wish) by the protesters.
But there are no easy answers, because the frame of references is where the problem is. When your language of thought is economics, you can’t find answers to questions that are non-economical. You just don’t have the vocabulary, or grammar. Major problems of our times, like Global Warming, can not be solved economical. Because economics is a process of optimizing profits, and Global Warming isn’t a problem of profits. And neither is the financial crisis, or the inequalities of the current system.
