The law doth punish man or woman
That steals the goose from off the commons,
But lets the greater villain loose
That steals the commons from the goose.
— 16th century English rhyme
Anthropologists have noted three main pathways to power. I say there are four. And out of these pathways come four types of weapons used against us, and four types of weapon industries. One of these has been obvious to all, two became more and more visible as the 20th century progressed, and the last needs far greater exposure than it has received. What are those weapons? What are the main ways to inflict damage on human beings by those who seek to dominate?
The list leads off with physical weapons, of course. From thuggish brawn, through pikes and pitchforks, on to tanks, bombs and computerized stealth killers, they have been relied on by rulers through the ages who hastened to build a military industry and a standing army as soon as they could afford it. But such weapons have two big disadvantages. They are expensive and they are crassly obvious, leaving too many visibly dead and maimed, generating anger and resentment. That is why clever aggrandizers have always resorted to more subtle weapons whenever possible.
Economic weapons, launched primarily nowadays by the financial industry, come next. Look past their endless mutations; you will see that these weapons come in three forms: extortion, enclosure and debt. When the first aggrandizers rose to power in forager and subsistence agriculture societies, extortion was a common tactic. Ambitious, scheming individuals with despotic tendencies inflamed conflicts among neighboring societies, stoking fears and insecurity, then extorted protection payments from their own people. Next, they gradually expropriated chunks of the commons under the guise of “public benefit.” And the strategy of indebtedness was not far behind. As aggrandizers grew more entrepreneurial, they began to twist traditions and customs into tools for self-promotion, and debt became the favorite venue. It is still so today. The poor and dispossessed began to multiply.
The third class of weapons, though visible in aggrandizer-run tribal societies, only received proper recognition when the communists and fascists used it so prominently in their rise to power. Probably invented in Upper Paleolithic via religious societies and embodied in various sneaky manipulations of fear and superstition, ideological weaponry was much later utilized by kings, emperors and high priests via religious dogma, coopting the universal human spiritual impulse for the uses of power. But it was the rise of secular ideologies in the 19th century and most notably the blatant propaganda of the 20th century that drew massive public scrutiny. Ideological weapons include lies, misinformation, misdirection, designer propaganda, astroturfing, political intrigue and panic-mongering, all the way to institutionalizing children so they can be subjected to a relentless, dispiriting and confusing barrage of outdated trivia to short-circuit their learning and competence. The main industry of mystification is the media. Casualties? The dumbed down, the chronically confused, the hoodwinked, the depressed.
But the sneakiest weapon of all is the weapon oozing all around us nowadays like brackish water around gasping fish. We believe we need this weapon for our very own protection. And Mother Culture whispers in the background: there will be mayhem loosed upon the world if you step outside its shadow. If you want to be safe, you need law and order. You need government, she sings softly; without it, brute chaos reins. The fourth class of weapons consists of legal manipulations, laws and regulations, and the weapon industry that builds and applies them is the government itself. The powerless are its casualties.
Political rule making traps its victims in a maze, tilting at windmills. Such choices we have! We can work hard to reform the rules, yes siree. It took the women of New Jersey only 113 years to get back the vote they lost in 1807! Or we can replace the legislators with new ones who promise a whole different windmill design, easier to tilt; once in power, even such changes will be cosmetic. Or we can do as did the mechanicks (tradesmen) of 1770s New England who simply barged into town meetings and began to have things to say and the chutzpah to vote despite being officially disenfranchised. The extra-legal solution worked, of course. The good mechanicks stepped out of the rules box! (Alas, they did not account for the problem of power. The newly-American gentry got so alarmed by these “excesses of democracy” they sent delegates to a secretive constitutional convention in Philadelphia to put a stop to them. And so they did. But that’s another story.)
Rules, laws and legalities are a game those in power play to hide reality. Here is a simple example from life in the United States. Well publicized hospital regulations say that each patient has a right to see their medical record. The patient asks the nurse, he delays. Hours later, she asks again. He claims the doctor had not given permission. (The patient had asked the doctor to give permission, having grown savvy from a previous stay.) She asks for the records again. Some hours later, it is now 11 p.m., she asks again. The irritated nurse turns around and calls the doctor at home, waking him and pissing him off. In the morning, doctor yells at patient. Patient is too ill and worn to explain. She shrugs and lets it go. After release, the former patient applies for a copy of the records to be given her. After some weeks, she receives a letter from an outside copy contractor wanting $52. She shrugs and lets it go.
The reality behind those pretty “patient rights” posters? The hospital was forced by earnest legislation to accept certain rules and to let each patient know. But nothing has changed behavior-wise: most of the doctors, nurses, and administrators do not wish the patients to see their records any more than they did before the law was passed. The rules mask the truth, mislead patients, and pacify the patient advocates who pushed the law through in the first place. Rules in the political arena work the same way. They take people’s attention away from reality and lead would-be reformers by the nose. People in positions of power who wish above all to protect their privileges, if pressed to put some democratic rights on a hallowed parchment, will seek to whittle them away in real life.
But more than this. I am starting to think that government is a house of smoke and mirrors, a front for whoever really pulls the strings. So whenever people try to counter evils by getting into the government, by trying to reform it, or by some other focus on the “governing bodies,” their efforts play out as another bout of battling the windmills. Those who run things in a system of domination and privilege are not fool enough to be subject to popular control or sent packing by means of our votes. And the complex layers of mystification and legal gobbledygook called the government is the keystone in the whole scheme. Shielded Powers-That-Be decree the legal code that steals the commons from the goose and twists the cultural fabric into a curtain concealing their activities and removing them far from any public checks or balances.
March 23, 2011 at 11:34 pm
Love it, as usual.
“And the complex layers of mystification and legal gobbledygook called the government is the keystone in the whole scheme. Shielded Powers-That-Be decree the legal code that steals the commons from the goose and twists the cultural fabric into a curtain concealing their activities and removing them far from any public checks or balances.”
You can see the whole “don’t look behind the curtain” screeching going on about Wikileaks. Glenn Greenwald has a “must-read” piece on Alternet about the general framework of belief in the US media, and how pretty much every mainstream journo (by definition) is calling for Assange’s head – because rather than holding the political elite to account, they are simply another head of the hydra…
http://www.alternet.org/rights/150330/glenn_greenwald%3A_how_the_us_government_strikes_fear_in_its_own_citizens_and_people_around_the_world/?page=entire
Sorry, bad manners to point someone on to another post when you’re putting up “firsties”, but I’ve been having this very influential email conversation with someone about how we need less politeness 🙂
March 24, 2011 at 1:08 pm
A fine post, very well written, and informative in the best way–with balanced insight grounded in real knowledge and hard-won wisdom.
I’d only add my “own agenda”, a focus on the great underpinning of it all, as the key to our getting anywhere new from here. I see the detailed analyses, plans and actions as sort of like the teeth in the key.
The underpinning I refer to is the largely hidden-from-all meta-weapon, so well hidden that even its main deployers are unaware of its full features. Its the perpetual, perceptually-based bombardment of the world by an illusion-crippled way of experiencing and shaping reality itself. Contagious and certifiably crazy, it’s that core consensus reality of the tired old dominant patriarchal paradigm, relentlessly at war with the world. Wielding weaponized modes of awareness that are hideously, hopelessly out of balance with the way the cosmos actually works, these meta-war-mongers (ourselves included to the extent we are blind to how we are infected) constantly create and maintain both tried-and-true, and evermore powerful versions of the four sub-weapons sketched here by Leavergirl.
Or so it sure seems to me. I see this as important because in my experience and observation, without a continually cultivated shift in our inner orientations and outer relationships to the world, we cannot truly change the game enough to generate much movement in the direction of restoring balance and reducing suffering.
March 25, 2011 at 3:14 am
“weaponized modes of awareness that are hideously, hopelessly out of balance with the way the cosmos actually works”
ROFLMAO. That’s genius. So, yes, we need to
a) be aware when we are simply perpetuating our own infection and spreading it to others (intellectual self-defence/memetic decontamination)
b) re-frame (via movements, in my opinion, but I respect that others think movements can’t do this) the debate. Not to enforce the substitution of the weaponised modes of awareness (god I love that phrase!!!) with our own dogma, but to make people realise that yes, these are weapons, blinkers, greed goggles… etc.
c) take action to prepare ourselves and others for the various shit storms that are coming down the line.
Respect!!!
March 25, 2011 at 11:19 pm
Thanks for the compliment, Dwight. Good to know how stuff strikes people you’d like to like it! And nice to feel understood. It figures i’d like your use of “greed goggles” and “shit storm”. Words can be such elegant and crudely fun tools, especially if we don’t get stuck there. … A clarifying question for you: Why don’t others think social movements can re-frame the debate? Examples?
Hey, i’ve been in a bit of a guilty mood today in mentally reviewing some stuff i’ve written in various places lately… So i want to clarify that back when we were talking about the current Middle East freedom movements, i didn’t mean to demean the struggle toward emergence of civil society. Must be a step in the right direction!, but i didn’t trust how the dominoes would likely tend to fall. And now i’m pissed at the way the U.S. gov’t charged right into Libya with bombers blazing, as if trying to piss off the world on the very anniversary of the Iraq invasion. A big part of why i’m leaving Babylon.
I’ve got more, but this one is getting long enough already.
March 26, 2011 at 2:04 am
Hi Jay D,
the best person to answer this question, I suspect, is Tony from “Horizons of Significance”.
My understanding of the anti-movement argument (and I am trying to do it justice but am probably inadvertantly going to caricature it is)
a) movements fall prey to aggrandizing leaders
b) movements end up with lowest common denominator thought, bringing too much unexamined baggage from the everyday world, in a bid for “unity” or “consensus” (there’s a great post over at rhizome about what consensus is and isn’t – http://rhizomenetwork.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/consensus-decision-making-what-it-is-and-what-it-is-not/
c) movements are easily corrupted/co-opted/repressed or just act as a ‘safety valve’ for pressures in the system.
d) movements can turn nasty and demand obedience/conformity, an ideological monoculture that will get wiped out quickly
e) other things I haven’t remembered/been exposed to
I think all of those things CAN be true,and often are but they don’t NEED to be (theoretically at least!)
Does that help? Tony, this is your cue to pitch in…
March 26, 2011 at 7:35 am
Thanks for the lead-in Dwight!
My position is more basic. Movements organize around ideas: ideologies. Ideologies are elaborate preconceptions. Consensus and coercion are used to align people with the controlling ideology a movement is to express. This compromises any movement fatally, as I see it. They turn people, and others, into means to reach some preconceived END. This is using the same old thinking in an attempt to get a different result….
“Reforming” movements is a futile task because it maintains focus on the same mechanisms that created the “problems.” No reform will change these two underlying defining characteristics of a movement: its function as a disseminator of preconceived ideologies, and its reliance on turning beings into means to some end.
Insisting that a “perfect” or “enlightened” movement can be established is equally flawed. No preconception, no matter how it is twiddled, will ever contact actual conditions in the same way as an engagement with existence, and tapping into mind through practice can. No thwarting of one’s own, or another’s, agency; making someone into the means to meet any preconceived end will ever be right. No matter what the justification used to uphold it we cannot escape the the fundamental fallacy that we can know enough and control enough of our situation to make judgements that require the sacrifice of anyone’s being to fulfill our “plan.”
A “naive” movement, if there ever was one safely tucked away in a romanticized past, would have had the excuse of an excess of enthusiasm. To insist on making movements out of what we now suspect to be true is to just give up. It says, “Well, our situation is just too hard to accept! Let’s just pretend we can keep doing the old stuff, but call it something else!”
What is specific about our situation is that we have the opportunity to see through this and all the evidence we should ever need concerning the fundamental corruption and bankruptcy of the old way is on constant parade in front of us every day. This is a wonderfully clarifying moment! It’s also OUR moment.
This ties in with striving, with the will-to-become as opposed to being. It connects with the dynamics behind conflict; that opposition breeds conflict, that we can never overcome our “enemy” which will just spring up in some other form even if “vanquished.”
Movements are part of the “Show,” the Spectacle. Focusing on it and its agendas gives the old ways their continued strength and power, while it saps us of ours.
A great lesson in the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East is that they are emergent, not movements. The movements there, from Al Quaeda to the PLO, to Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, etc, and ad infinitum, were not “behind” these uprisings. They have stalemated with their “opposition” over their entire life-spans – as they would since that is what movements do! Here we have an emergence growing out of a recognition within each individual’s own “heart” that they will not abide the old ways and that they have lost their fear of the old ways. This is their victory, not whether or not they get hijacked by the “right” movement to give them promises that draw them back into the land of the wishing. Their cry is “LEAVE!” They are voicing the obvious. Their oppressors are “over.” They just don’t know it yet. They haven’t established movements with agendas. They are voicing the emergent reality, not opposing an enemy.
Look at the way Libya’s situation has gone. The “Big Players” horning in to bring the dynamic back under control. Turning it into a war….
I do think this is important. I don’t want to hijack anyone’s forum. Feel free to bring this back over to Horizons of Significance if you’d prefer. If not I’m happy to talk about it here.
One last thing. I hope this doesn’t come across as a polemic! I’m assuming that at least two of you know the background to these assumptions I’m making. I also find that you all are probably the best chance I have for engaging in the kind of conversation that might lead us all where we haven’t been able to go on our own.
Being “against” movements is not to be against relationship. It’s precisely the commodification of what would otherwise be relationships into the “efficiencies” of movements that brings them into question….
March 28, 2011 at 3:12 am
Thanks for taking that concise crack at it, guys. So a synthesist might say that it sounds in sum like part of the point is that movements can maybe re-FRAME a debate, but not reFORM much of anything. Is that right? Dwight not as sure about that as our other commenter, but knows of the issue.
Antonio wrote,
“Insisting that a “perfect” or “enlightened” movement can be established is equally flawed. No preconception, no matter how it is twiddled, will ever contact actual conditions in the same way as an engagement with existence, and tapping into mind through practice can.”
Well, yours all told was one potent comment. I am definitely intrigued as to how you may go on to prove this above statement logically. Perhaps you already have, and so i might be into some more exploring or discovery of that either here or there or elsewhere, if we can go to great enough whatever to be clear. Given that we can’t say all that much that is both expansive and clear in one measly post comment (though we may all prefer the bite-sized chunks aspect?). So i seek clarity rather than ignoring important points made.
Now let me check again that i’m not taking you out of context… OK, E.g., i’d like to be able to follow you from your first sentence quoted above, on to the second one, since as written the second does not naturally or necessarily flow from the first, right? Though it might be true, of course we sort of need to “prove” it… And you are probably better prepared to do that in your own forum. Or maybe here is best to clarify what gets said? Maybe a moderator’s guidance is best, depending on tie-in to her post, etc.,. But i would like to ask you to at least clarify whether you meant the following: For an emergent movement to insist that they can do better, wisdom-wise, on the dreaded practical movement level, by implementing relatively enlightened principles in place of the outmoded ones, does that pre-conception necessarily doom them to failure? If so why? If, say, they were functionally savvy to this pitfall of over-reliance on detached preconceptions and the like which you smartly shred?
You steer right up my alley with,
“What is specific about our situation is that we have the opportunity to see through this and all the evidence we should ever need concerning the fundamental corruption and bankruptcy of the old way is on constant parade in front of us every day. This is a wonderfully clarifying moment! It’s also OUR moment.”
That to me is and has been for some not-so-long bit of time now one of the biggest pieces of news for the human species to more fully consider how huge it is. And more to be unpacked about connections between these two quotes, of course. Like the question of whether, in this clarifying moment of ours, we would be foolish to seriously support anything construable as any sort of social movement founded on a sane response to this moment, no matter if hard-won wisdom were brought to bear? I agree that the pre-conceptions that come with that either co-founding or joining something are fraught with what you warn of. So i’ll end with another (non-rhetorical) question: If we know all that about this moment, yet can’t go down a collective road (since doing so requires intentional social movement, not just being refugees), what does that leave as viable alternatives, once we’ve truly sworn off these weapons of which this post speaks?
March 28, 2011 at 6:54 am
Jay D,
I’ll try to be brief. The point I condensed, perhaps beyond recognition, is that considering that a movement is a gathering around a preconception – an ideology – no matter how well done, it will always have the failings of preconception. It cannot be emergent since, as we are discovering, an emergent condition is not pre-ordered, it coalesces. Also, since a movement proceeds by marshaling and attempting to control its members – as well as its “opponents,” it commodifies beings: it is using people as a means to an end. It is saying that its ideology knows better and its leadership – however that is organized – should be given control to achieve an outcome.
So, in a spiral of failures the urge to have movements ties us to preconceived plans, an edifice of bureaucracy that attempts to book-keep its way through our confrontation with reality. It commodifies everyone involved by making them cogs in a machine. By setting up and maintaining divisions – our team versus the bad guys – it keeps us in thrall of divisive, destructive, seeking-after-solutions. None of this is emergent, or in any way takes us beyond the old world-view and its mindset.
Your final question is the BIG one! That’s what we have to figure out. I’m suggesting that as a starting point, we need to see through as many of the assumptions implicit in the current world-view and withhold our urgency as a dangerous distraction. As I wrote in “Mastery, Not Control,” every past “reform” or “revolution” has brought us right back where we started if you broaden your perspective to take in how it has failed to respond to what is destroying the world.
This is why I want to follow the hints of futility: that if something is frustrating, and fraught, and problematic it’s not going to be helpful to muck about trying to reform it or even react against it. The hardest part involves whatever “good” intentions we bring to life. To acknowledge that our striving leads us to seek ends that we’re all too ready to justify when all those justifications are fraudulent since they seek to put us in control instead of some other. If control is a delusion, then competing for it is unhelpful. That means we need to question whether any of our “desires” are untainted. It also leads us to recognize that if we do have any clean desire, say for the world we inherited not to be destroyed, we need to look elsewhere for ways to bring such a thing about.
Sure it’s messy and hard! Why didn’t anyone before now ever get it right? Why should we think it would be an easy adjustment for us now?
One last point to emphasize. Being nonplussed to movements is not to be in favor of atomized “individuality.” This only works, and inexorably leads to, the need we have for each other in relationship. The difference is between working at relationship versus finding some “nice” way to commodify ourselves and others.
March 28, 2011 at 11:54 am
Antonio, thank you for trying to clarify. I think Leavergirl wants us to go ahead and keep discussing this here. But is “Mastery, not Control” a post at your blog? I don’t see it here. I’ll look you up.
I know our host too is less than enamored of “movements” in general, as am i…seems like we need a new word for an alternative? Does Dark Mountain have such a term? Does Dave? Does anyone? I do see what you mean about past revolutionary failures and have long shared your concerns. I like to say a lot of the same thing to, e.g., counter folks like Mr. Jensen’s too-shallow condemnations of pacifism, but i don’t know enough of the history to say patriarchal movements and revolutions, or whatever you want to call them, NEVER have worked for good reason. That’s pretty absolute, and then there’s Gandhi’s example with satyagraha, basically spiritual activism, the radical self-reliance and such used to kick the British overlords out of India. Call it what we will, it met the key criteria for a social movement, and the fact that it didn’t continue to transform India and beyond wasn’t the movement’s fault. An opposing faction killed its leader and there weren’t enough Mahatmas to carry on. But what if there were this time? Isn’t that sort of what you’re talking about? Hmmm, maybe not, if you consider a sense of urgency a dangerous distraction to be avoided. How about a middle way on that one?!
March 28, 2011 at 12:51 pm
Jay,
If you’re interested take a look at “Horizons of Significance.” Link off my Hovercard….
The key phrase is “if you broaden your perspective to take in how it has failed to respond to what is destroying the world.” Gandhi is a tremendous example to us, but “The Modern” India has brought us no closer to slowing down the Juggernaut.
“Enough Mahatmas” might be a way to think of it. He was acting the part of a truly reluctant leader. He would rather have helped people learn of their own efficacy than lead anyone.
The main thing is that our power comes from how we can learn to handle not-knowing. Seeking assurances and looking for specific outcomes traps us in what we already know. If what we already know, if cleverness, was the “answer,” we’d have figured it out by now. Emergence doesn’t happen unless we can couple disillusion with a lack of fear – that’s not the same as some Berserker “Fearlessness.”
That’s where suspending urgency comes in. Urgency aligns our thinking towards what we want to happen instead of what is. Shifts of view don’t happen because we push our selves or others into them, they happen when we are open and calm enough to receive them. This goes counter to everything we know as culture, especially today.
It’s amazing to me that as a relatively well-read American, I’d never heard of David Bohm or Krishnamurti before a few months ago. Dark Mountain is a handful of “crack-pots” strewn around the world. Robinson Jeffers, Alistair McIntosh, are generally unknown. I think there’s something to this. Every stripe of lunatic fringe is generally known and even celebrated in popular culture. These voices? Not so much….
One last thought on urgency. I’ve had the mental picture of a soldier in Vietnam with a jammed M-16 lodged in my head since 1968. What does he do? He has to take it apart and undo the jam. Doesn’t matter if he’s in the middle of a fire-fight. Doesn’t matter if there are ten VC running at him. He has to clear the jam or die trying. Urgency doesn’t help him.
March 29, 2011 at 7:20 am
Hi Jay D, Antonio, Leavergirl and others…
conscious that while not totally OFF topic, we are not exactly ON topic either – LG, will, I trust, tell us to take it elsewhere as and when she feels appropriate.
I wonder if we are having a “definitional debate.”
I am not sure I agree with Tony’s definition of a movement –
“I’ll try to be brief. The point I condensed, perhaps beyond recognition, is that considering that a movement is a gathering around a preconception – an ideology – no matter how well done, it will always have the failings of preconception.”
Movements tend to be more heterogenous than that, and have overlapping rather than unitary visions. This, classically, is how they get “bought off” – enough of some members visions get met, and they withdraw their support.
The movement that I want to be part of is a movement that recognises our crimes against other species, and our own, that recognises the existence of dominators, and their four weapons. A movement that recognises the need for humility, for constructive doubt. A movement that uses tools to keep itself ‘honest’ and searching, while also struggling for justice and resilience.
I am inspired when I read of Ella Baker and the SNCC, and of Bob Moses and the courage of those Civil Rights workers. Their example led to some great things, what I would consider work unfinished.
Antonio – I REALLY like what you say of sense of urgency (like the Vietnam image – from a TV news clip or something else?) I have “let go” of my sense of urgency now. Humans have committed themselves to a high-emissions pathway. All hope of mitigation is lost. That means we have to learn resilience. The beauty there is that resilience is largely LOCAL. You can’t create it at the end of a gun…
Best wishes to you all…
March 29, 2011 at 8:04 am
Perhaps the key is where vision comes in. Movements, as I see them, are established based upon a previously articulated vision. That’s ideology. If a group of people gather to help each other restrain from fossilizing into following stale visions, and you wanted to call that a movement, hmm, I’m not sure I would use that label, but I wouldn’t be against such a gathering together.
This is where a clean slate seems a better way to go. It’s confusing to do something different and try to maintain that it is a reforming of an old thing. Especially when every assumption just about everyone will bring to it needs to be overthrown or at least seriously amended.
I hope it’s clear enough that I’m not against what motivates you to look for ways for people to gather and work together, only that I’m suspicious of the usefulness of calling such a thing a movement.
What you are suggesting here has great potential, but it would be more to the point to get on with figuring out – better yet, doing – whatever that is rather than trying to take the entire overburdened contraption of movements with their connections to government and economic affairs, etc.
To bring this back to Leaving Babylon, What Leavergirl is usually writing about, including this post, has to do with discovering how far back and how deep the disorder goes. Most of these things go back to the founding of civilization. That is cutting pretty far back to find viable flesh!
This takes us way beyond reform and revolution, the two arenas for movements historically. What is presenting itself – in emergent fashion, in glimpses of insight and instinct barely heard and hard to follow – points towards a reworking that requires a willingness to let go of so much we’re tied to. It also warns us off so many of the perversions – atop the business-as-usual sort! – of revolution the 19th & 20th centuries were filled with.
This means going outside our “comfort zones” while staying out of the creepy zones of millennialism. I’m not sure how this can be done without pruning our terminology rather severely. My instinct is that what leads to Pol Pots is a fierce desire to make reality meet our terminology and its “rigors” while building a radical respect for non-commodified life requires us to be willing to be ruthless towards our terminologies and their structures and patterns instead.
March 29, 2011 at 11:39 am
We’ve had some great discussions… this one is surely among them!
Jay D: absolutely, domination is the über-weapon relentlessly at war with the world. Beautifully said.
Dwight, earlier you said that movements can reframe the debate. I wonder what you meant by it, what sort of hope?
Jay D: the thing about Libya gives me the creeps. Just before they barged in, a little news item flashed by, that Gadhafi was offering cease fire. Why wasn’t that dealt with? Could have been an opening to something different. Now we have more of the same.
DT, you say, “I think all of those things CAN be true [about movements],and often are but they don’t NEED to be (theoretically at least!)” — Can you explain? I pretty much see it all as built in.
Antonio said: “No reform will change these two underlying defining characteristics of a movement: its function as a disseminator of preconceived ideologies, and its reliance on turning beings into means to some end.” Precisely. Back to Kant. As you say, movements are part of the Spectacle.
“This ties in with striving, with the will-to-become as opposed to being. It connects with the dynamics behind conflict; that opposition breeds conflict, that we can never overcome our “enemy” which will just spring up in some other form even if “vanquished.””
That’s the whole thing that bothers me about consensus: it sees opposition as conflict, and as an obstacle to wise decisions, and I see it as essential to eventual wise decisions emerging. (Just made a comment on Rhizome to that effect.)
Jay D: that is the key, isn’t it? You’ve hit the nail on the head when you said “If we know all that about this moment, yet can’t go down a collective road (since doing so requires intentional social movement, not just being refugees), what does that leave as viable alternatives, once we’ve truly sworn off these weapons of which this post speaks?”
We need to step out of the movement box and look around, nah? What do you all see, through the misty haze?
“I hope it’s clear enough that I’m not against what motivates you to look for ways for people to gather and work together, only that I’m suspicious of the usefulness of calling such a thing a movement.”
Huzzah, and count me in, Tony.
March 30, 2011 at 6:37 am
Well, movements can make what was obvious and unproblematic to the “mainstream” suddenly an issue. Things go form being natural and common sense (owning slaves, denying women the vote, denying blacks in the South the vote, denying blacks in the North access to the same government support that whites get) into issues that have to be defended. Over years (well, decades!) those movements gain ground and eventually a new ‘common sense’ is created.
As a white male who grew up in a racist society, the ONLY reason I am not far far more of a racist sexist dick is because of the social movements around sex and race. Where does my ecological awareness come from? Not just Rachel Carson, but Greenpeace stunts, and (in my early days) FoE newsletters etc. I can’t prove it, but I suspect I’d be a racist, sexist greedhead if it weren’t for people willing to say “there’s more to life than consumerism”. Although my family upbringing wasn’t in that vein, the pull of asinine consumer culture is pretty strong. Many go through life not questioning the common sense they absorb through schools, television. The whole point of common sense – it’s like water to a goldfish, you just don’t see it.
So movements create “cognitive liberation” (not my phrase, but I like it). I don’t know how else we expect people to slowly/quickly ‘wake up’ and understand that the dominate lies are, well, dominant lies, without people (in movements( standing up and saying “No, there’s another way.”
I too am massively disappointed in the vacuity and power struggles and routines and intellectual cowardice that I’ve found in movements over the last ten years. But I’ve managed to ascribe that more to despair and incompetence among the individuals in movements (and the co-optation of previously important groupings in NGOs etc). I may be wrong. I probably am. But, like Monbiot at Dark Mountain, I don’t see any alternative to movements for changing the assumptions of “the masses.”
I now believe that climate mitigation is a lost cause, and that the task ahead is to create local resilience, local understanding, and to be ready to divert/resist the Eco-fascist impulses inherent in States that find themselves under ecological stress (that is to say, all of them.)
All best…
March 30, 2011 at 10:52 am
Well, I gotta, just gotta, do a different take. In Czechoslovakia, we did not have the luxury of movements. Yet, over time, the culture shifted. First, over some years, clandestinely, quietly. Then, in the spring of 68, it blossomed all over the place. And even though the Russians came to force the cat back into the bag, things were never the same, the culture shift persisted, and it was only a matter of time…
If people had tried to do a movement, they woulda provoked the authorities into a huge and ongoing counter-offensive, and the new culture would never have had a chance to flourish discreetly.
Was the protestant revolution a movement, or was it a massive culture change that percolated for many years before erupting into the open? It still erupted too soon, IMO, and brutal wars resulted, along with brutal heretic hunts. And in some places, forced counter-reformation.
Or think of the Copernican revolution. Galileo tried to make it a movement, and provoked a crackdown while becoming too much of a “science is truth” fanatic. It was a culture shift that eventually won the day.
It would be instructive to do a comparison between the British and American abolitionism. The former accomplished a culture shift that resulted in a political shift. The latter resulted in a fratricidal war, the devastation of the South and apartheid. Hm… wish I knew more to do an analysis, anyone?
March 30, 2011 at 11:30 am
Antonio, i did go to “Horizons of Significance” a couple times lately and looked for that piece you alluded to, and rooted around in general for awhile. Good stuff there. E.g., Krishnamurti’s perspective had a significant influence on my 20s and since; saw him speak under the oaks at Ojai once…gotta love the way he cast off the illusion that was projected onto him as The Next Big Thing by the Theosophists. And erasing dichotomies like between meditating and not-meditating. Critiquing the pitfalls of a “path”, etc.
Dwight, i don’t think you’re wrong about the theoretical potential of a movement, and neither are our other commenters on this post and topic so far who appear to have less use for them. (Though leavergirl admits to a soft spot for some of the Tea Party in the States, and some of the organized freedom-seizing work in the Mid-East, burdened as they are with “movement” baggage.) Can we all be right? As I’ve harped on here too via past post comments, and as do you as well, i agree that so much is about definitions of our words. I think we’re really just talking about the spectrum of organized collective action that acts for change beyond its own group. (An I.C. with tons of organized action may or may not be involved in much beyond itself. The one i was in when i was young and naive was part of a larger vision, though a partially misguided one due to its denial.
So the upshot for me is that i think i’m gonna stick with avoiding calling anything i’m henceforth involved with a “social movement” or anything old-school-sounding like that. But that doesn’t mean that the essence of what a movement asprires to is necessarily misguided, nor even that all of its work is. It’s about process, process…If a process turns its participants into means to an end by overlooking the dark side of that, that process is fatally flawed. Let’s learn and do better…and call it something else…
So to stick with this point about the importance of definitions, and on to more of Antonio’s points. For example, “urgency”! We could each easily do posts and weeks of commentary on this concept, or whatever you call it, this big factor concerning one’s assessment of what’s going on, their degree of concern about that, implications for timeframes, scenarios, how to act accordingly…
I’m trying to grok this case against urgency which others here seem clearer on than i. In fact i see the example of the jammed gun as essentially the same as my definition of the urgency that should be helping drive a process (fill in blank with preferred term or concept) to get some things going more groundedly in a different direction. A jammed gun when under fire, or about to be, is clearly to me an urgent condition, meaning it probably cannot be put off without greater peril. Priority One, or what? Unless it be bayonet time? Or time to run? Or surrender? It’s a good metaphor, except for the violent imagery, of course, for my focus on becoming less fixated on our comfort zones and more on getting ready “now”, not when we “get around to it”. For me and others, the urgency factor forces agendas with plenty of opportunity to minimize suffering and find some balance with a strategy that gets in gear sooner rather than later, and there’s a great power in that alignment with what is actually happening on our planet. Plus ever-more-immense danger the longer we dilly and dally over definitions and such. (Not that we’re doing that yet; i see this stage as an important “get clear” phase of necessity, since we are such verbal creatures.)
So my view seems similar to me to what Antonio wrote, i.e., my take on this as an important “moment” we need not waste, we’d be unwise to not take maximum advantage of. I mean, what else would we be waiting for? Things aren’t likely to get less challenging before they get more so.
Maybe the point i’m hearing on urgency is that we don’t want to go around in “emergency mode”, as in we gotta haul ass to the nearest ER all the time. Talk about an unsustainable state! I hold it the way i hold my image of “the long emergency”. A balance between ‘fairly-high-alert-seriousness’ and ‘we must take time to laugh and have some fun, not take ourselves TOO seriously, or the party’s over’.
So…can we call what we’d like to see something more like an intentional evolutionary “emergence” then, instead of a “movement”? With a battle cry of
“I-E-E-…!” Just kidding…or am i? 😉
March 30, 2011 at 11:51 am
Well, i didn’t see the above comment before i posted mine. So i read this as more clarity around a definition of a movement as necessarily more preconceived, over-structured, overwrought, like a living loudmouth wall demanding (in the eyes of its opponents) to be torn down… Whereas, say, what’s happening in Egypt and thereabouts as more spontaneous shifting of culture, less something solid and attackable. {More like a network? ;-)} OK.
And, oh, yeah, about “consensus”…I’ll have to look at this “rhizome”…i did like his or her recentish comment here a lot. I have experienced consensus process as yet another continuum of functionality. When it’s working right, no, opposition is not viewed as obstacle that does not strengthen the result, but rather like you prefer, Leavergirl. Its intention is certainly stated thus, unless it’s dysfunctional consensus…after all, anything active can be defined by either end of its competency continuum, so the question here is whether, like “movements”, consensus processes themselves contain fatal flaws we’re better off steering clear of. Another thing needing sorting out, yes.
Geez, this is fairly fun…especially if we end up sort of “settling” some things here, eh?
March 31, 2011 at 6:27 am
Leavergirl,
Yes, “the culture shifted.” Just as it is doing in North Africa. Even if they are tamped down again they will have changed inside. They will have lost that particular kind of fear that holds people in its thrall. Without that, tyranny doesn’t “own” anyone. The fear of death or injury is manageable compared to that other fear.
It’s interesting that what they are calling out isn’t a slogan, it’s simply, “LEAVE!”
Just as with Fukishima, the spectacle tries to heal over this rent, this fundamental shift in our conditions by trying to narrow the context. It’s not about some particular despot, it’s about, well, it’s about Babylon. They are saying to Babylon, “LEAVE!”
This is an emergent condition. There is the weight of reality behind it. So long as we’re caught-up in the aftermath of movements – now that it’s been fifty years or more since one has been possible without the stink of futility all over it – we willfully enter a zone of formalized, imposed, and quite rightly resisted and seen-as-lame activity where all we can do is either get caught up in a false drama – like the Obama election night and inaugural fantasy-fest where for a moment we “believe” in a “redeemer” who will carry us away – or pick it apart for its lack of the “right” elements. In either case we are choosing to enter into a false ritual – the only kind we know, now that all the real ones have been denatured.
This is why it’s more than just a quibble over terms. Language matters and that’s because of its power to set the conditions under which we operate. That’s why it’s in the spectacle’s interest to erode language into an empty shell that is “good enough” for commerce and warfare.
Whenever we “line-up,” hell, even when we jump up and shout, “The line forms here!” we are accepting the desire to have whatever basic human yearning that has motivated us to be suppressed beneath an anesthetic cocoon turning off our living, breathing engagement with the reality behind what we respond to so that we can be “delivered.” Or be the “deliverer.” In either case we’ve short-circuited and left true engagement behind.
We instinctively react to this by sensing the futility of such actions. Our responses to futility vary from avoidance and displacement to doubling-down and going manic at trying ever harder. Either way we cannot get away from the problematic nature of the situation we find ourselves in as we confront a futile act. Genuine engagement is different. It grips us and we are in a different realm. We are so estranged from this organic emergent way of being. We won’t find it in a movement. If we continue to focus on movements, or governments, or business – remaining in a problematic relationship with failed ways of attempting to interact with our reality – we cannot find the peace and the calm and the energy we require to accept a more sane approach.
This is a way in which our sense of justice, or righteousness, leads us astray. The desire to divide is so powerful. If only we can “cull the herd!” we think. If we can find the “right” way to divide behavior, or isolate the culprits, we will succeed! Only this has no end. It leads us into an infinite morass. The ultimate “Turd Sandwich!”
April 2, 2011 at 2:31 pm
So to bring it back around to the post, I like the link to who pulls the strings, and following that link to the site, Domhoff’s citing of Mann’s IEMP model for the four networks of power (ideological, economic, militaristic and political); with Leavergirl’s added twist of them being wielded as weapons. Domhoff says all these are based in “organizations”…which reminds me of how I prefer to view this definitional debate about “movements”. I find it most useful to see dysfunctional movements and organizations at the end of a spectrum which Antonio is essentially talking about in defining movements as pretty much worse than useless. But at the other end we have groups and movements that more and more closely resemble living “organisms” and for all intents and purposes are using biomimicry and as such are more capable of fairness and based on balance. Which can avoid the meta-weapon I brought up on my first comment.
April 3, 2011 at 10:26 am
I’d like to finish my contribution here to this dialogue with an extended passage from David Bohm’s “On Creativity:”
“…Now one of the ways in which thought has developed is in a direction which I call LITERAL.”
“By this I mean that it aims to give a literal representation of reality as it is. It is maybe admitted that it is incomplete, or not entirely correct, but that is nevertheless what we aim at. I think that this is a very limited sort of thought. What is left out is that thought is participatory, that thought has produced everything that we see here in our society. Wherever you look is the product of thought: buildings, farms, everything, including pollution.”
“But not only that – thought also produces and shapes our perception of reality. We see reality according to our thought. Therefore thought is constantly participating both in giving shape and form and figuration to ourselves, and to the whole of reality. Now, thought doesn’t know this. Thought is thinking that it isn’t doing anything. I think this is really where the difficulty is. We have got to see that thought is part of reality and that we are not merely THINKING ABOUT IT, but we are THINKING IT….”
“…thought is broken up into bits… It is extremely hard to break into that. But that comes about primarily because thought has developed traditionally in such a way that it claims not to be affecting anything, just telling you the way things are. Therefore people cannot see that they are creating a problem and are then apparently trying to solve it.”
“…a problem… Ecology… works perfectly by itself. It becomes a problem because we are thinking in a certain way, by breaking everything up, and with each person doing his own thing.…. …Thought thinks pollution is a problem ‘out there’ and it must solve it. (while) simultaneously thought is creating all of the activities which make the problem in the first place and then creates another set of activities to try to overcome it.”
“Thought doesn’t stop doing the things which are making the ecological problem,…. This is why it is so hard to put a new consciousness into practice, because we are unconsciously in our practice doing the opposite of what we claim to do. …the important point is to be aware of what we are actually doing.”
“Q How would you suggest to spread this awareness…?”
“It would be a mistake to try to put it into practice. That is already a contradiction. …we have begun by doing one thing, we keep doing it, and we try by means of a practice to overcome what we are doing in the opposite direction. That is like someone who is hitting himself with his right hand trying to stop it with his left…. The basic difficulty is that our practice is unaware of the fact that it is producing all these problems.”
“…There is no practice which will establish communication, except communicating itself, and encountering the problems of communicating. If people want to communicate, and if we say we have got a practical problem, this is going to limit us. …suppose we say ‘We want to communicate,’ BUT WE ARE NOT GOING TO SET UP A PROBLEM.…”
“…If you ask what practice can we get by which we can start to do this (communicate) it is not going to make sense, because we’re saying unconsciously that we are committed to doing just the opposite. Then we will try to overcome it; that is as if we are forever unconsciously resisting the very thing we are trying to do.”
“…PRACTICE MUST FOLLOW OUT OF SOMETHING DEEPER.…”
“…What we need is to be able to talk, to communicate. At present there are great differences and many of these are not negotiable. What is needed is a dialogue in the real sense of the word ‘dialogue,’ which means ‘flowing through,’ amongst people, rather than an exchange like a game of ping-pong. The word ‘discussion’ really means ‘to break up everything,’ to analyze and have an exchange, like a game. Therefore, we need this dialogue; the spirit of the dialogue is not competition, but it means that if we find something new, then everybody wins.”
“The basic idea of this dialogue is to be able to talk while suspending your opinions, holding them in front of you, while neither suppressing them nor insisting upon them. Not trying to convince, but simply to understand. The first thing is that we must perceive all the meanings of everybody together, without having to make any decisions or saying who’s right and who’s wrong. It is more important that we all see the same thing. That will create a new frame of mind in which there is a common consciousness. It is a kind of implicate order, where each one enfolds the whole consciousness. With the common consciousness we then have something new – a new kind of intelligence.”
I’m sure this will awaken all sorts of connections to buzzwords and fashions I’ve been lucky enough to have avoided since only now finding Bohm’s work. I’d like to suggest we read this as it was written and not get short-circuited. This would just be the right hand of thought having another go at us, while we strive to fight it off with our left. In this way, it’s not that some movements might have merits, it’s that thinking about movements distracts us from the overall problematic stance.
Please forgive the length and the extended quotation. Please read On Creativity. I’m on to On Dialogue – as soon as I can find a copy!
April 3, 2011 at 11:26 am
Jay D, I am interested in the Tea Party as a (possible) culture shift toward doing decentralized linkages among people who want something else happening in the States. There is an aspect of them that is a movement to reform the GOP, and that does not interest me (and I think they will fail anyways).
It would be nice to do a whole essay on the differences between a movement and culture shaping. Maybe someone somewhere has it in them. In brief, I see a movement as an organized body of people that sets goals and marches toward them (hopefully), while getting in the face of PTB and making a nuisance of themselves in the process, trying to prod and push the PTB to change. They employ the media in spreading their message and their successes and hope for greater and greater participation at their events, and more money coming in via fundraisers. (Yeah, a loudmouth! You got it!) And so on. A culture shift, on the other hand, relies on the subtle and discreet (though not necessarily unnoticed) actions of various groups and individuals who are loosely unified by shared vision or shared heartache, but not by goals. They do not seek publicity, though individual culture-shift artists may, or an event may grow so big that publicity cannot be avoided. The idea is to undertake interesting and inspiring events etc. that are meaningful in their own right, and then watching with interest what that might do to the cultural fabric. It does not have goals, it has surprises.
Let me give a quick example. In early-high medieval days, the merchants, who were growing wealthier and more active, wanted the king and his armed men to protect trade routes and make economic expansion possible into new territories. They could have organized a movement, lobbied the king, got into his face to tell him he wasn’t doing his job, picketed the palace, written rousing pamphlets, got marches under way in London, and so on. But what they did instead was… they discreetly slipped him more money to finance his operation. The king used it to do more of what he already was doing: train more men, and go to war. This sparked the modern arms race as each kingdom was financing yet fancier weapons which of course needed yet fancier counter-weapons. The merchants got what they wanted, and more, as wars became very profitable as well. (I am sure that this process was also accompanied by various discreet ideological manipulation aiding such expansion, as well as the elaboration of early banking and debt). This is how culture shifties do it.
Antonio, thanks for the reminder. A movement plans. A culture emerges.
Jay D, I did not get the four networks from Mann, who seems like an interesting fellow to read. I worked three of them out in my head, picturing the early domination civs like Sumer. Then I came across Earle (How chiefs come to power) who confirmed my hunch. He also counts kinship as one of the pathways to power, but feels it is less key, and weakens over time, as chiefdoms grow. Then I began to sense that my model was yet incomplete, because legal rule making is used as a weapon, and I am frustrated by activists getting coopted into the system by the promise of legal work to change the legal work. — I think there is the obverse to all 4 weapons: the instruments that can be used to counter domination through their use. Physical force can be used to promote accord rather than conflict. An economy can promote fair exchange and gifting, rather than debt, extortion and enclosure. We can have ideas that delight and aid rather than bamboozle. And we can have open-source agreements and conflict resolution that is responsive to community needs rather than a monopoly on rulemaking that creates legal manacles.
I disagree that institutions are the locus of power. Each individual is the original locus of power. This power is often wheedled or stolen from them, and hoarded by institutions (as well as by individuals). I find it interesting that the Amish do not believe in, and avoid, institutions of any kind. What they have is a body of unwritten agreements, and they respond to life as it comes: for example, they do not have an institution of mutual aid, they simply collect money from everybody in the community (and organize work parties) when a particular need arises.
Antonio quoted: “Thought is thinking that it isn’t doing anything. I think this is really where the difficulty is. We have got to see that thought is part of reality and that we are not merely THINKING ABOUT IT, but we are THINKING IT….”
To that, I would add, “that we are not merely thinking about it, but are thinking it and in some way, doing it, testing it out in the embodied world.”
Thank you for the extended quote. I will be interested in seeing how you will come to embody these various teachings that have so captivated you.
Wow. Thank you all for this awesome dialogue. 🙂
April 3, 2011 at 11:51 am
A P.S.: I don’t mean to sound like a know-it all when it comes to the four power industries. I am mentioning my own path to that understanding because I just kinda did thought experiments over time, and arrived at a place that several thoughtful scholars have as well… which gives me the sense that this stuff must be a pretty good map of the territory.
April 3, 2011 at 7:00 pm
Interestingly, I came back to see if there were any more comments, but i re-read what i wrote to remind myself of the context before reading responses to it, and as a result i thought to add something. That i didn’t mean that i thought that the idea for “the four” came from those two other guys, but no matter its history, our host and poster added an important (to me) twist by essentially pointing out how they’d been weaponized. And i also wanted to echo that it’s a classic condition that more and more people are re-cognizing, which yes is good news, that people are seeing how those four aspects tend to go together. With the ‘underpinning of consciousness’ i inserted in the course of the thread. Somewhat sadly to me, fewer seem to see that and its implications.
And thanks, L, for giving good examples throughout…though the first one in your last longer comment above went over my head, i think, or under my radar, or something, so far…Will try again later, as well as get to the long Bohm passage, which i look forward to.
Anyway, seems like a good bit is getting sorted out here.
April 3, 2011 at 7:07 pm
P.S. I was referring to the example of the merchants as culture shifters vs social movementers not being clear to me.
And a Q: Who are you disagreeing with that said that institutions are the locus of power; was that in Antonio’s Bohm material?
April 3, 2011 at 7:49 pm
And a possible “A”, as in answer to my own Q: I realize now you were reacting, probably, to my paraphrasing that link’s saying that the four were based in “organizations”. If so, “institutions” threw me off. “The locus”…hmmm. Maybe they meant more just the co-organized instruments for the expressions of the power, not that the power simply isn’t centered in people? Though no doubt they are affected by the fallacy as well, which not many escape…yet another crucial continuum of sorts, ‘How much weight one assigns to what as being most important’. Varies all over the map. Yup, good to not get bogged down in them easy distractions. Consciousness is core, and thus key. But not enough to focus on by itself either.
April 3, 2011 at 9:28 pm
Sorry, I think the “institutions” referred to Mann’s theory of power. I disagree with him… but I haven’t read him, just the essay in the link.
Another example? Well… Earthaven had, when I was there, a no cat policy. I had two cat friends at the time, and this policy, more than anything, turned me off to living there. It was suggested to me that I work to change it through the meeting system, but I was warned that nobody wanted to revisit that painful consensus process that stirred up a lot of feelings among people a couple years back who were upset that the one then-resident cat hunted chipmunks. Well, so the movementnik would challenge this policy, lobby key people, make speeches in the meetings, get it on agendas, reopen the old wounds, agitate for change (and believe me, that place was so overrun by mice, change was sorely needed!). But the culture-shift artist would… well, some unknown person could leave an exquisite place setting in the mouse-ridden common kitchen, napkins and silverware and all… with a dead mouse and a pile of droppings. How would people react? 🙂 Or someone would do a skit at the next fun night on what happens when humans settle, how they disturb the land, and then the rodents move in… which is where cats come in so handily. Or someone could paint cats… another person could build an enclosed cat sanctuary, populate it with a few homeless kittens, and become a big hit with the kids. Or … if I were still there, I would walk my cats, as I always do, and showcase another way to relate to felines (yup, I go for hikes with my cats, for miles sometimes… you gotta go slow). All these happenings would get people talking, thinking, maybe changing their views. Basically, it’s a difference between changing Earthaven’s cat-hostile culture through often subtle means, versus changing policies for people to obey while pitting people against other people. The more I think about it, cultural messing around seems so much more interesting than strident head-on stuff. (?)
April 3, 2011 at 11:12 pm
Yeah, it was Mann, i went back and looked in the interim, and though he calls ’em organizations, Domhoff states in a few different ways how orgs are the bases from which the four (weapons)are wielded. Of course what they are is “structures” of power, well-suited shelters for the development and deployment of coercive crapola.
You and Antonio are onto a lot here in looking away from movements, though i think Dwight and i are too in maybe seeing more value in some. So i repeat my call for a middle way ‘twixt too much structure and not enough, ‘tween lackadaisical approaches to the urgency of what we face at this closing window, and overly anxious emergency modes which will win relatively few hearts or minds.
I must say, the more we think about it, the more it’s clear there’s an awful lot packed into L’s last sentence above, i.e., “…cultural messing around seems so much more interesting than strident head-on stuff.”
April 7, 2011 at 8:23 am
[…] is from Leavergirl, over at Leaving Babylon. I think she’s onto something. In brief, I see a movement as an organized body of people […]
April 27, 2011 at 8:17 am
[…] Their premise seems to be that with the right people in power and the right re-balancing of power (political/legal, economic, police/military, and ideological/media, all could be right with the […]
April 27, 2011 at 8:47 am
I am delighted that Dave Pollard has linked to my post, and grateful. I am astonished by what he says about it. Am I really that bad at getting my point across?
Stay tuned for a rebuttal.
April 27, 2011 at 9:39 am
Two of the basic premises of this blog are:
Love community and you will kill it
Toiling for da goal Man
Emergent vs imposed design
Group intelligence emergent
April 27, 2011 at 2:43 pm
Sorry V. I didn’t mean to imply that you were quibbling with my theses – I linked to your post because it offered a succinct summary of the 4 means of exercising power. My point is that we need to get past debate about who has power and what should be done about it (a debate most political bloggers and thinkers can’t let go) and realize that most of what needs to be done has nothing to do with power shift, but rather with learning, capacity building and local grassroots actions.
April 27, 2011 at 4:07 pm
Great clarifications by our bloggorista, and i like Dave’s clarification too…I agree all the main points, so is the main problem mostly about seeing how we are actually more in synch that we knew, and in whatever persists in lurking unexamined behind that?
April 27, 2011 at 5:20 pm
Thank you for dropping by, Dave. I am relieved. My point being that it can be handy knowing the weapons used against us. 🙂
May 1, 2011 at 12:01 am
Hi Antonio, Dwight, Jay, leavergirl, Dave thanks for discussion my view from experience on Twitter and from observation of Middle Eastern youth emergent consciousness is that organised hierarchical movements of charismatic/dominant leaders are old world consciousness.
I see spontaneous group actions that can coalesce and regroup via the Internet with no central doctrine nor leadership and no long term goals/investment to maintain group identity…even business models are going that way…the Internet in my mind is a model for consciousness for what I believe to be a new human consciousness (perhaps we’ve been here before historically tho?) and because of our natural space and time constraints we are using quantum technology (Internet) to channel what is a collective consciousness already formed within individuals-except that it is now a unity consciousness that seeks unity and dare I say transparency. I also think the transparency that the Internet can afford means there can be no cover ups. It looks like we are craving transparency with our financial markets too…no group leaders in that revolution yet look no bank is untouched! People now question and feel empowered to re-evolve currency. Something we previously took for granted. Unlike the past there is now no statistical bias in the current stockmarket, chaos rules, there is no hidden string pulling leader now except the power of unified human consciousness- an emergent phenomena to seed all emergent phenomena…
May 1, 2011 at 11:59 am
[…] Their premise seems to be that with the right people in power and the right re-balancing of power (political/legal, economic, police/military, and ideological/media, all could be right with the […]
May 6, 2011 at 10:28 am
Ruth, welcome. I think you are right about the direction it all needs to go in. The recent flurry of posts about Bitcoin, peer-to-peer internet money that has no central governor, may be a harbinger of these changes. You say there is no bias in the current stockmarket; is that really so? Can you tell more?
November 27, 2011 at 11:45 pm
For the four weapons, I have the four shields, one for each. In order:
Blue
Black
White
Red
[Leavergirl edit: See more of Raymond’s thoughts on this topic in the comments of
http://rhizomandala.blogspot.com/2011/11/taste-of-history-of-idea.html