The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
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    #Occupy Organic Resilience-Cold Weather Tents & Group Survival Drills

    By jollyroger on Tue, 11/08/2011 - 2:28pm |

    Showing a nimblenss of adaptation that somehow eludes the more cumbersome apparatus of our multileveled governments OWS is putting up large cold weather tents that will empower the continued and ongoing anchoring of the uprising and also permit them appropriately to extend their hospitality to the otherwise unsheltered.

     

    As a meta message, the new configuration enables the encampment to embrace (as they philosophically must) the participation of all (without barriers, like,  e.g.,  do you other wise have a  home...?).

     

    Parenthetically, the obliteration of  privacy, made redundant in the face of group solidarirty (and comfort with each other) obviates thru simple community adhesion the security issues that have sporadically plagued  OWS.

     

    Quaere: Does the horizontal mandate of the general assembly find an echo in a resulting enhancement of brotherly keepership, such as to suppress antisocial behavior via enhanced citizenship?  Are we all anarchists now?  Can it be this simple?

    Comments

    Actually it is not that simple.  I seriously doubt that OWS has stumbled upon something that has alluded all of the early tribes and societies of humankind.  But you can think bringing in military grade tents can bring about this utopia if you want. 

    The horizontal mandate will not the world of predators and con artists as much as you might wish.  I would agree that there are dynamics of modern society which facilitate and exacerbate mental states aligned with what would be deemed antisocial behavior.  Yet we have been dealing with the issue of Cain and Abel since, well, Cain and Abel.


    by Elusive Trope on Tue, 11/08/2011 - 3:28pm

    I wasn't proposing the end of predation, but the beginning of truly common defence and mutual security.


    by jollyroger on Tue, 11/08/2011 - 3:54pm

    The Amish I think are a good example of this - but they aren't what I would call within the anarchist camp. 

    I suppose one would have to go into the nature of what drives antisocial behavior.  And the horizontal mandate would most likely have a positive influence on some people.  On the other hand, given the nature of antisocial behavior - i.e. it is antisocial - one can easily see the horizontal mandate making it worse in some individuals (in part because it is a mandate).  Ultimately as a group gets larger and larger, the more diversity of opinion will develop.  Eventually there will be those who are seen by others as undermining the mutual security, and the splinter groups will emerge, especially when there isn't a tight set of guidance and rules to begin with. 

    This is not to say that those participating in such events (or whatever one wants to call it) such as OWS won't experience a heightened sense of socialness - which can lead to cooperative, horizontal actions in terms of the greater good rather than the individual good. 

    The question is just how much of what happens within the tight confines of the OWS camp can be translated to the larger society. 

     


    by Elusive Trope on Tue, 11/08/2011 - 5:56pm

    You will not be surprised to learn I am one who has long been impatient with consensus based decision making models . I may have overlooked their strengths.


    by jollyroger on Tue, 11/08/2011 - 7:26pm

    Not that you have, but I have had the little rock 9 thrown at me when discussing the way forward on these issues - but I wonder where the desire for consensus based decision making models fall in this situation.


    by Elusive Trope on Tue, 11/08/2011 - 8:30pm

    That picture is certainly a  "reductio" of the violence implicit in the fifty percent plus one imposing total dominance over the fifty percent minus one, which we intutively think perhaps insufficiently inclusive...Obviously anarchism requires a high level of civic virtue in the populace if it is to work--I just wonder if maybe there is not some systemic/systematic way to evoke that unexpected virtue by expecting it.


    by jollyroger on Tue, 11/08/2011 - 8:56pm

    I just wonder if maybe there is not some systemic/systematic way to evoke that unexpected virtue by expecting it.

    There is something to that I believe.  I just think that organizational structures, whether political or for-profit or otherwise, need to find a way to fluctuate between horizontal and vertical rather than choosing one or the other.  Ideally, over time, the horizontal predominates although the vertical is able to impose itself when needed.

    So maybe the way to look at the Occupy movement is not how it can show the way to switch the current system to a horizontal one, but how do we better incorporate the horizontal into the current system.


    by Elusive Trope on Tue, 11/08/2011 - 9:43pm

     how do we better incorporate the horizontal into the current system.

    I don't think that exactly captures the anarchist's spirit, but to offer an opinion unencumbered by any reading, let alone thought, on the matter, my hipshot is to highlight the experience of one's own consequentiality, which is so (tediously) provided to (as in anothr context) the "least" of us, by  the consensus model.  I'm willing to propose as a working hypothesis that a sense of one's own consequentiality is a necessary, if perhaps not sufficient, precondition of achieving the level of socialization such as to be reliably noninjurious to your neighbors.

    One could do worse than ask how to extract that empowering energy without having to sit through the whole fuckin' general assembly, but still having each feel that their autonomy had been honored.  (prolly ya gotta sit through the assembly or they'll know you are blowing smoke and not honoring their autonomy...)


    by jollyroger on Wed, 11/09/2011 - 9:38pm

    Great question!

    It seems to me that people who live in community respect each other more, trust each other more and expect more from one another than people whose social lives are atomized and individualistic.  The expectations of others can have a powerful effect when you are in an active relationship with those others.   When there is no community relationship, or where the relationship is only that of a hierarchical command system, expectations are experienced as alienating and oppressive - and are only effective to the extent they are backed up by further sanctions.

    The most crime-free societies in the world are not those with the most powerful and hyperactive systems of law enforcement, but those in which there are high degrees of social solidarity, so that not much enforcement is needed.  American society seems by contrast to have high degrees of individualism, loneliness, anti-social feeling, narcissism, criminality, and oppressive and brutal systems for dealing with that criminality.   Hopefully this is something the occupiers are intuitively striving to reject in their new horizontal communities.

    I hope the occupiers continue to grow in their appreciation of community.  A lot of them are alienated from their broader society, and have been brought together by their common rejection of that society.   The alienation is sometimes manifested as an impulse toward individualism and personal liberty, and rebellion against community standards.   But we really need is for these people to continue to move beyond rebellion toward solidarity and integration.

    Perhaps something will come of this movement that will help us find a way to re-integrate into our society all of the lost bodies and souls that we have disposed of in our insanely swelling prisons.


    by Dan Kervick on Tue, 11/08/2011 - 3:32pm

    Well, the (in retrospect) intuitive solution to the looming question of the weather is impressive in its simplicity as well as the breadth of iimagination that understands the possibilities that open once (forgive me for the indulgence) bourgeois shibboleths are repudiated.

    Moreover, through inclusion, the "problem" of the unhoused  ( people who are on the streets tend to be on the same street-they have homes, they don't have houses) is solved far more organically then a shelter (eg, isolate) system.

    update: I've been very uncomfortable with the ostensible "issue" of the "rarticipation" of street people which has been flogged by the guardians of the old order, every time they could trot out a concern troll to reference the rape of so and so (actually, the one case I heard of alleged a perp who lived,( ie had a home) in Bay Ridge.  This because the communal energy harnessed by OWS has produced sufficient resources (shelter, food, security) that the safest place to exist has become Zucotti.  As if that were something to regret abot Zucotti rather then deplore about society at large...


    by jollyroger on Tue, 11/08/2011 - 3:58pm

    I didn't understand a word of it. But, good to see your script.


    by Oxy Mora on Tue, 11/08/2011 - 6:40pm

    I thought that the way resources to meet the challenge of the weather were marshalled, given the difficulties of the consensus based decision making process, was instructive--especially by comparison with the way things work in congress. My attempted deconstruction of the "horizontal mandate" was a tentative move in the direction of proposing that if people are able to experience agency (need4consensus adds value to the individual input) their game rises.


    by jollyroger on Tue, 11/08/2011 - 7:21pm