Mixing Up The Real With The Imaginary

I have had many recent discussions about the 'Occupy' movement. "What is the purpose of the camps?" is a continual theme. The movement and the ideology seem to resonate emotionally with many people and in some sense I think that is what binds the movement. But is the ideology real or imagined by the people with whom it resonates? The ideology is real and it is imagined by many different people and the camps are physical manifestations of the group ideology. I liken the camps to a set of disparate parliaments that combine to form a neo-parliament if you will – places where you can go, be heard and have your voice incorporated into the group ideology and, perhaps more importantly, contribute to a new way of addressing what many of us feel is a deaf ‘ruling class’ of people. Apathy is at the heart of our current malaise and your silent obedience to the ‘ruling class’ is what needs to change. I encourage everyone to visit an Occupy camp near to them.  　

Ayn Rand seems to be back in the mainstream philosophical discussions again and I wonder if there is a relationship between this kind of thinking and what I perceive to be the general feeling in the world about the current economic state of affairs. Rand promoted Objectivisim and Individualism, which I have in interpreted in many aspects as analogous to the free market approach to economics. That is to say that both the free market and Rand prefer to boil things down to the "reality" - look at the facts and figures and take reasoned action based on the reality of the facts and figures that are before us. The action to be taken is, in both Objectivism and the free market, trade. I feel like this approach strips us of our humanity. Emotions are not rational. It is difficult to boil down an emotion to something that is a tradable commodity, though many advertisers are masters of this sort of trade. I believe that our emotions have a legitimate role in contributing to our lives as well as others and that while they are not rational, they deserve conscience recognition. I believe that much of the Occupy movement is driven by this kind of consciously recognized emotion.

Rand believed that there was an external reality common to the universe. I do not believe this. I don’t think that they way I see the world is the same as the way you see the world. No one perspective is right and no one perspective is wrong, merely the manner in which the universe ‘chooses’ to reflect itself in the particular manifestation that is observing it. We shape the universe according to how we see it and are shaped accordingly. In this regard I agree with Rand that it is important to recognize and rationalize with clear reason your own personal needs and requirements. However, I don’t think that should be to the exclusion of other people and life in the universe, and this is where I part from Rand; if it were not for the other life in the universe, I’m not sure life would be worth living. Hence, it is important to nurture life, your own and others’. I’m not saying Rand didn’t value other life, but I do believe that she encouraged an underdeveloped sense of community to say the least (indeed she rejected collectivism).

With the information available today, I think the time as come to recognize that we need to help all people in the world attain a good standard of living. I know, good is relative and difficult to define, and I’m not going to get into that here (I’m ducking the issue for today). Typically, people work together to achieve things. It is rare that a single person is responsible for all of the work required in a particular project. The notion that the "mindless" or "menial" labourer is not as valuable as the salesman who sells 50,000 widgets is crazy – all are needed to achieve the goal. Are CEO’s really worth tens, or hundreds, or thousands of times more than the average employee in their company? Should we even be measuring such worth in money terms? Even if one CEO is worth that much more, I find it difficult to believe that all of them are. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link and hence the strong link (and not just the strongest link) has a good reason to help out the weakest one. Why not help the weakest in our society – it will make us all better as a whole.

Right now we are being bathed in fear through the media, we are being held in control by debt and unemployment (and the statistics the government give us help to undermine our confidence in them as I think we all know that the stats for unemployment are wickedly ‘massaged’). We bailed out the banks (I don’t know why – perhaps for public confidence, or maybe it was just greed), and we also bailed out the auto industry. At the time, I wondered why we bailed out the auto industry of all the industries to choose from on main street and I wondered if war was on the minds of politicians – auto factories were retooled in the previous world wars to make weapons and ammunition and vice verse after the wars). Obama seems scared and has done an about face on so many issues, such as Israel, relatively recently. I wonder why. Why is Obama forsaking his seemingly heartfelt promise to bring change to America – perhaps because war is to be avoided and if it can’t be, then you need to be prepared for it.

Real or imaginary, people make emotional decisions. Occupy wants to embrace these sorts of decisions and try to reason them in some strange hybridization of Objectivism and Relativism in which relative ideas are brought to the table and then objectified at camps. Rand would go to war, if physically threatened first, and indeed in her time that is exactly what happened. I want to try the Occupy approach and see if we can avoid war this time…Occupy is a globalized local phenomenon lets reach across the borders of countries.