Occupy Ourselves - by: Randall Amster

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Occupy Ourselves - by: Randall Amster

Unread postby Paul Kemp » Thu Dec 15, 2011 2:53 am

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Occupy Ourselves
Tuesday 6 December 2011
by: Randall Amster, New Clear Vision | Op-Ed

With Peace in Our Hearts and Power in Our Hands

In just a few short months we have reached a point of near saturation in which the modifier “Occupy” has been applied to almost every sphere of our beleaguered political economy. Not every such application has been equally useful, but for the most part the intended meaning of the word has come through in the sense of prying open the inner sanctum of the dominant order, contesting its authoritarian workings, and agitating for new processes based on the burgeoning tenets of egalitarianism and sustainability. The incisive cultural gaze spawned by #occupy has been cast toward every sacred shibboleth of modern society, and the ripples are palpable.

Yet in the process there has been more external consternation than internal reflection. The machinations of the 1 percent are what have largely brought us to the brink of social and ecological demise, so the primary thinking goes. The ruling class has consolidated their power, skewed the benefits toward themselves, passed the burdens onto the rest of us, and continually demonstrated the illegitimacy and inherent tyranny of their reign every time force has been used on peaceful demonstrators. They have done this and are still doing it, and we must confront their wanton ways with diligence and imagination.

There are key truths and critical insights to be found in this narrative, and its teachings have served to galvanize interest and mobilize people around the world. Still, there is a piece of the puzzle missing, one that is harder to own up to and that blurs the lines of culpability in a manner that is inconvenient for the impetus to organize against entrenched power. When we begin to peel back the layers, however, it becomes apparent that they did not take power so much as we gave it to them — and it has largely been our complicity with the forces of our own oppression that has led us here.

This in no way absolves those who would pervert that power for personal gain, nor does it excuse the outright blackmail-type pressures that have been brought to bear upon many of us to accede. But we cannot and must not pass the buck altogether, since to do so both flies in the face of reality and further delivers our power back over to those who would manipulate and abuse it. In fact, the realization that we are equally to blame possesses the corollary virtue of suggesting that we can also put things right and fix the mess we have made of our social structures and the habitat itself.

So here we are: we have occupied the symbolic spaces, the tangible ones, and the subtle ones. Now it is time to Occupy Ourselves, to decolonize our minds and restore our capacity to act from a place of autonomy and collective willpower. We can refuse to comply with oppressive forces, forswear allegiance to their mandates, forgo reliance on their wares, unplug our lifelines to their conveyances, reject their medicalizations and distractions, discontinue our support for their adventurist campaigns, fail to contribute to their bailouts and schemes, ignore their technocratic designs on mind control, cease making demands on their apparatchiks, and avert our gaze from their spectacles. Yes, we can.

Instead of protesting against abominable wars, let us also stop paying for them. Rather than complaining about corporations, usurious banks, and the indentured servitude of the student loan system, we can desist from paying into their coffers. Beyond pointing the finger at bought-off politicos, there is the option of refraining from participation in their sham elections. If we do not like business as usual, let us skip the charade of fighting city hall and occupy it as shelter instead. This is the essential core of the embedded symbolism in the protest encampments, and it follows in a long line of nonviolent civil disobedience from Jesus Christ and Henry David Thoreau to Dorothy Day and Mohandas Gandhi. It is an active principle, and the locus of its engagement is everywhere.

The key is not to bear this weight of noncompliance alone, but to do so in concert and in numbers sufficient to undermine the system’s capacity to continue in its present form. We recognize that the boundaries of the law do not map directly to the dictates of morality, and that much of the legal architecture in our midst is specifically designed to protect wealth and preserve inequality. Still, we also see that laws and norms in some instances can reflect the societal wisdom of the ages, and thus we do not transgress them out of self-indulgence but rather as our solemn duty as agents of promoting a just, equitable, and sustainable world.

Indeed, as Gandhi urged, noncooperation is merely a first step. The ensuing (and more challenging) phase of sustained resistance is the cultivation of constructive alternatives with which we can wholeheartedly cooperate and lend support. For too long we have had our survival pitted against our values, being coerced to participate in oppression and degradation as a condition of mere existence. We have been carefully cultivated to embrace the consensus reality plied by plutocrats, at best maintaining a schizophrenic false consciousness and at worst being consumed by the beast’s ravages. Lacking genuine meaning in our lives, we opt for artificial replacements on sale literally everywhere. We have looked into the void, recoiled in horror, and drowned our sorrows in commercial palliatives.

Now is the time to commit ourselves to finding other methods of coping, ones that challenge authority and reclaim autonomy. This does not mean that we become absolutists or Luddites, but instead that we get to choose which accoutrements of modernity are compatible with the good society and which are little more than artifacts of control despite their market-tested packaging. We can trade technologies for tools, fast food for slower sustenance, corporatocracy for consensus. The next paradigm is already here, having been incubated for decades within the shell of the old, carefully obscured by the vicissitudes of popular culture and crass commercialism; notice how when people begin to approach its realization, they are often met with sheer force to push them back into blithe torpor.

But the veil is now lifting — and consciousness once raised has a way of finding daylight. Occupy camps can be destroyed from coast to coast, but the essential illumination of protest and its eternal promise remains. This is the time to come back twice as strong, working harder and smarter, demonstrating our resiliency as a crucial factor of social and ecological survival. We will hang together, so that we do not have to hang alone. In the end, we come to realize that there is only us as we confront the true oppressor that lies within ourselves and our own complicity. In this, we find that all oppressions are interlinked, internalized, interposed, and interdependent. The struggle to surmount them lies just as much within us as it does with the robber barons in their lairs.

We can do this, and we must. I do not believe that the power has ever actually left us, but more so that we have had our attention pulled toward false idols and their machinations as the source of influence and authority. Today, we see the seeds of the better society growing up through the cracks in the hegemonic facade everywhere, sprouting forth with renewed vigor after an imposed dormancy. We will not be the consumers of this world, but its co-creators; we will not be witnesses to its destruction, but participants in its resurrection. Now, with peace in our hearts and power in our hands, the time to reclaim both ourselves and our world is upon us. This is our generational task, our shared responsibility, and our best hope for salvation. Let us meet it willingly, together.

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Randall Amster
Randall Amster, J.D., Ph.D., teaches Peace Studies and chairs the Master’s program in Humanities at Prescott College. He is the Executive Director of the Peace & Justice Studies Association, and serves as Contributing Editor forNew Clear Vision. Among his recent books are Lost in Space: The Criminalization, Globalization, and Urban Ecology of Homelessness (LFB Scholarly, 2008), and the co-edited volume Building Cultures of Peace: Transdisciplinary Voices of Hope and Action (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009).

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Re: Occupy Ourselves - by: Randall Amster

Unread postby Paul Kemp » Thu Dec 15, 2011 3:25 am

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157:4.2 It was late forenoon on this Wednesday when the apostles assembled in Celsus' garden for their noontime meal. During most of the night and since they had arisen that morning, Simon Peter and Simon Zelotes had been earnestly laboring with their brethren to bring them all to the point of the wholehearted acceptance of the Master, not merely as the Messiah, but also as the divine Son of the living God. The two Simons were well-nigh agreed in their estimate of Jesus, and they labored diligently to bring their brethren around to the full acceptance of their views. While Andrew continued as the director-general of the apostolic corps, his brother, Simon Peter, was becoming, increasingly and by common consent, the spokesman for the twelve.

157:4.3 They were all seated in the garden at just about noon when the Master appeared. They wore expressions of dignified solemnity, and all arose to their feet as he approached them. Jesus relieved the tension by that friendly and fraternal smile which was so characteristic of him when his followers took themselves, or some happening related to themselves, too seriously. With a commanding gesture he indicated that they should be seated. Never again did the twelve greet their Master by arising when he came into their presence. They saw that he did not approve of such an outward show of respect.

157:4.4 After they had partaken of their meal and were engaged in discussing plans for the forthcoming tour of the Decapolis, Jesus suddenly looked up into their faces and said: "Now that a full day has passed since you assented to Simon Peter's declaration regarding the identity of the Son of Man, I would ask if you still hold to your decision?" On hearing this, the twelve stood upon their feet, and Simon Peter, stepping a few paces forward toward Jesus, said: "Yes, Master, we do. We believe that you are the Son of the living God." And Peter sat down with his brethren.

157:4.5 Jesus, still standing, then said to the twelve: "You are my chosen ambassadors, but I know that, in the circumstances, you could not entertain this belief as a result of mere human knowledge. This is a revelation of the spirit of my Father to your inmost souls. And when, therefore, you make this confession by the insight of the spirit of my Father which dwells within you, I am led to declare that upon this foundation will I build the brotherhood of the kingdom of heaven. Upon this rock of spiritual reality will I build the living temple of spiritual fellowship in the eternal realities of my Father's kingdom. All the forces of evil and the hosts of sin shall not prevail against this human fraternity of the divine spirit. And while my Father's spirit shall ever be the divine guide and mentor of all who enter the bonds of this spirit fellowship, to you and your successors I now deliver the keys of the outward kingdom -- the authority over things temporal -- the social and economic features of this association of men and women as fellows of the kingdom." And again he charged them, for the time being, that they should tell no man that he was the Son of God.

157:4.6 Jesus was beginning to have faith in the loyalty and integrity of his apostles. The Master conceived that a faith which could stand what his chosen representatives had recently passed through would undoubtedly endure the fiery trials which were just ahead and emerge from the apparent wreckage of all their hopes into the new light of a new dispensation and thereby be able to go forth to enlighten a world sitting in darkness. On this day the Master began to believe in the faith of his apostles, save one.

157:4.7 And ever since that day this same Jesus has been building that living temple upon that same eternal foundation of his divine sonship, and those who thereby become self-conscious sons of God are the human stones which constitute this living temple of sonship erecting to the glory and honor of the wisdom and love of the eternal Father of spirits.

157:4.8 And when Jesus had thus spoken, he directed the twelve to go apart by themselves in the hills to seek wisdom, strength, and spiritual guidance until the time of the evening meal. And they did as the Master admonished them.
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