In the ‘Supporting Occupy Toronto‘ segment tonight, Steve Paikin grilled – as nicely as pie – the young, well-meaning pinstriped lawyer dude who spoke in support of the Occupy Toronto movement. Other than the latter’s point about demonstrating solidarity with other Occupy movements (that I get), I quickly tired of uttered generics like “the larger issues“, “dialogue“, “change“, blah blah blah. No amount of prodding would bring about any further elucidation.
And y’know, it’s this inability to consistently and categorically state its mission that is one of the perplexing things about the Occupy movement. For you see, it had a mission, but the mass media was sufficiently underwhelmed by it that it spun an entirely new mythology for the whole thing. One that even the protesters themselves might have bought into. After all, the media (and the rest of us left-leaning 99%-ers) had a vision where the Occupiers themselves did not – and a vision is how you instantiate a reality, folks… Continue reading
Those with a capitalist cheerleading bent might want to put down the pom-poms and statistics and fancy charts for just a moment – lay people are speaking.
[updated : 2009-12-19]
I was challenged, in a classroom setting, to respond to this book called ‘unlimited wealth: the theory and practice of economic alchemy‘ by Paul Zane Pilzer. In very broad terms, his idea of alchemy is that societies thrive when their economies become more knowledge-based, and when technical innovation is maximised. He argues (I think), that even while technology appears to sweep away traditional modes of commerce and work, it repays society with unprecedented wealth, and better opportunities to live in harmony with the environment. Thus a strange magic, or ‘alchemy’, is at work in the economy even when the existing infrastructure is destroyed, because in the final analysis things are better, and for more people, in the long run.