The Occupy movement is at the cusp of something truly contemporary, in the sense that I do not think a phenomenon like this has been seen before. Has there ever been a movement in history that actually went against the financial and corporate powers on a GLOBAL unified scale? As far as I know, there hasn't been. As Paul Mason of the BBC succinctly puts it, "Their mere existence shows that people are determined to "think globally" about routes out of this crisis at a time when economics is driving politicians down the route of national solutions... in 1931, as the remnants of Globalisation 1.0 collapsed, there were no mass international protests against austerity. There were only plenty of national, and indeed nationalist ones." This is certainly telling of the world's current aggregate social mind-state and temperament. A quick survey of world news articles demonstrates the global village effect and the holistic ramifications of this crisis. For instance, although Canada has a more firm economic footing than our southern neighbour, the income gap between the rich and the poor is widening at a speed faster than the U.S., and the entirety of the middle class is deteriorating. Every nation, from the superpowers, to the powers, to the subpowers, to the vassal states, are suffering "economically" in an increasingly global marketplace. It seems there's nowhere to hide and the fact that no country can stand as an island in a fundamentally, pragmatically interrelated planet is making itself known. Now, in the global economic paradigm where 1% of the world's population controls 40% of its wealth, it is to be expected that eventually, people would get pissed the fuck off.
It was troubling however, that although unified in their acrimony (and rightfully so), how scattered and directionless the masses were at St. James Park Toronto in terms of who to blame for, and how to rectify, these social inequities. There were chants denouncing the evil bankers and government lobbyists. Some demanded more government interference, while others demanded less of it. Still, some simply declared the solution as the ambiguously defined ideal of going back to, as if we ever really had one, "a real democracy" (which, as an aside, without some benchmark of "constitutional rights" that sets agreed upon limits, is in its purest form, forty white men hanging a black man). Scattered ubiquitously throughout the park were also tarps and signs painted with comforting yet inconsequential slogans like "all we need is love" and "sharing is caring," which, although are all very admirable in a gestural sense, are devoid of any real methodical solutions related to any sort of tangible plans or suggestions. These cornucopia of differing viewpoints were all of course unified under one singular consolidating blaming imperative: "We are the 99%." In that inherently divisive statement, an invisible line has been drawn and a target has thoroughly been pointed out. The antagonist, the ones to blame, the de facto "villains" in this stage of history, are apparently the 1%. There were calls to impeach C.E.O. this or President That. There were flyers handed out providing histories of the polluting and environmentally negligent behaviour of corporations. Quite almost instantaneously, several mental images are impulsively evoked: the Wall Street trader, the hedgefund manager, the government lobbyist, the amoral corporation, etc. And the unsaid assumption is that if all of these bad, extremely greedy and malevolent people were taken care of, then the problems would simply go away. However, this begs the question: if these abhorrent personalities are indeed the determinants of the problem, what were the determinants of the determinants?
It is somewhat ironic as I walked amongst them, as indeed one of them, to see the crowd's oblivious support for the same corporations and financial powers that they apparently so vilify and abhor. People were toting Nikon cameras, Ipads, Sony headphones, and the like. They were wearing brand named clothing, unobservant of the fact that even as they waved signposts against "corporate fat cats," they were effectively signposts themselves for Nike and Adidas. These "evil corporations" are actually (perhaps uncomfortably to some of these protesters) the circumstantial backbone of modern Western society. They are the providers of the products we are now seemingly irreversibly tied to. They are the providers of services and amenities. And ironically, they are the ones themselves that have enabled the worldwide Occupy movement via the provision of social networking services, computers and cellphone technology.
It is in that same breath however, that for as much as they have provided, they have consequentially taken away. Individuality has been relegated to the variety of different brands you can buy. Freedom of choice is reduced to the essential question: "Coke or Pepsi?" But of course, this isn't avoidable (in our economic paradigm). Not because of some fixed human nature, but because the free-market capitalist system needs, and therefore, systematically propagates, the behaviour. Paul Mazur, a Wall Street banker was quoted in the Harvard Business Review of 1927 stating precisely this: "We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire. To want new things even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America." Our economy's success is based on growth, turn-over and profit, and thus necessitates a need for constant consumption (buying of goods). People need to want-to-buy-things in order for G.N.P. to increase, and thus, "grow" the economy. This is no secret. As a student of psychology, it is obvious to me that these needed artificial 'wants' can be manufactured by employing conditioning techniques. Operant conditioning (through reinforcement) for example, via advertisements, create a social reinforcing agent of perceived inequity depending on such arbitrary variables such as the type of bag you use or the type of hat you wear, creating neuroses and longing that would not have existed otherwise. Consequently, we all want stuff. So why is it such an outrage and surprise that those who can GET said stuff, hoard as much of it as possible? It seems to me that "greed" is simply this shared (manufactured) desire acted upon. It is the reinforced mentality.
And of course, when talking about greed, the topic of profit is not far behind. It's no secret that the modus operandi of the free-market capitalism paradigm is the profit motive. For all the relative progress that it has created, the sole imperative of this economic system (as denoted freely in any economic textbook) is completely devoid of any forethought of DIRECT equity and equality consideration, instead built on the goal of self maximization, assuming that this will somehow bring equality and fairness ("The Invisible Hand" concept). There is very little to nothing else considered. After all, by and large, the standardized indicator of a nation's progress and well being is not any statistic on mortality rate, psychological measure of contentment or public health. Instead, it is the measure of a country's G.N.P./G.D.P. or "economic growth." Everything else is an assumed correlation.
Keeping this in mind, are the "1%" really at fault? If one thinks about it, the Wall Street investor who deals in derivatives doesn't do it to intentionally collapse the economy in a bubble of fraud. That wasn't his goal, it was simply a side effect brought about by the initial imperative to increase income. Continuing with this thought exercise, the car manufacturing plant that lays off thousands of factory workers to replace them with automated manufacturing systems doesn't do this to maliciously lower the standard of living for thousands of people. By automating, it is simply lowering building costs, thus offering a more affordable product to consumers, and by extension increasing their gains in profit and reducing costs. Similarly, when a corporation lobbies for certain legislation that would benefit them and not the public, they're not doing so with an intent to torment the middle and lower class while twirling their mustaches menacingly and rubbing their hands together. They're simply doing what they can do, and what the economic system absolutely allows for, to maximize profits and minimize costs in some way. If you think about it, the 1% are simply the best players in the game. Similarly, if the protesters at St. James Park were in similar positions of fiscal prominence as the "villainous" 1%, one wonders if they could say with certainty that they would not do the exact same things.
