“Revolutions Are Infinite”: The Activist Threshold Revisited and Occupy Wall Street

The world is kept alive only by heretics

– Yvegeny Zamyatin

The Occupy Wall Street protests began on September 17 and are picking up steam.

A month before they began I wrote what now looks like a timely post called Where Is The Activist Threshold in which I discussed the long sleep of activism in the US and what ingredients might be required to further ignite the movement. I wrote:

I wonder what ingredients will be necessary to reawaken the activist spirit in America.  We could sure use it.

It seems like we’ve had a secular bull market in apathy since the end of the civil rights movement and Vietnam.

Meanwhile, our government has been broken for a long time and has proven itself incapable of making difficult decisions much less steering us back onto the industrious course we’ve tradionally held as a nation.

So its going to have to be the citizens who catalyze change in the U.S. via activism and protest.  We can’t count on our leaders even as we share responsibility for having elected them.

The following are critical factors relating to the emergence of a significant activist movement in the U.S. Please add to the list in the comments below.

1. Further deterioration in the standard of living – We’ve had plenty of bread and plenty of circus and we are fat and tv addled. Disruption in the food abundance we’ve grown accustomed to would spur activism. Persistent high unemployment is moving us in this direction but nowhere near threshold yet.

2. An Event – An event must occur which outrages and/or empowers and which captures the imagination of the people.  This will come out of left field and will carry symbolic meaning for the activist movement to rally around.

3. Communication Tools – Social media already exist which can be used to organize a movement and spread information incredibly quickly. We saw it this Spring with the role Twitter and Facebook played in the Middle East uprisings.

4. The Inspiring Leader – A leader must emerge who inspires the people and I’m not talking about a Ron Paul type.

I would like to focus in a bit more on #4 – The Inspiring Leader – because I think it is critical at this moment for OWS.

It seems that this is the key ingredient missing from the protests presently. If there was a single voice to better define the movement and inspire, OWS would accelerate focus and force. A couple of thoughts on this:

1. Anyone who is a part of the establishment who makes his/her ideas public already is tainted, even the lefties and radicals. This goes for anyone who is involved in politics or the media. No matter how outspoken they may be, their motivations are questionable and the organizations they are a part of are not trustworthy.

It is no coincidence that in the great dystopic novels of the 20th century, the potential leaders of the revolutionary movement (and the protagonists of the stories) are unsuspecting and plucked from the unknown.

Zamyatin’s We (embedded below) provides perhaps my favorite example…

2. Social media tools provide the soil from which a seeming nobody who is not tainted by the compromising loyalties of politics or traditional media might gain prominence. One tweet could do it so keep your glove up and your eyes open.