Esteemed Reader: November 2011

by Jason Stern, October 26, 2011

You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
—Buckminster Fuller

Esteemed Reader of Our Magazine:

Walking along Main Street in my hometown of New Paltz, I found the event I was looking for—the Occupy Wall Street gathering between Chase Bank and Starbucks. There was a crowd of about 80 people gathered, some carrying signs. A man sat on top of a USPS mailbox with a guitar, and someone in the center of the group was leading a chant through the microphone, “We are the 99 percent!”

I was holding my two sons’ hands and we stayed on the periphery. “What are all these people doing here?”, the five-year-old asked. “They’re upset because they got robbed by the banks,” I told him. The boy thought for a minute. “Did the banks rob us?” he asked. “Yes,” I responded, “they robbed the whole earth.”

One placard simply said “10% of us own 90% of the wealth. How can this be correct?” This proportion seemed familiar. Where had I heard it before? And then I realized—it is about the proportion of the brain’s capacity we are said to make use of in our daily lives. Wow, I thought, this is a truly a microcosm. The as above, so below formula is playing out yet again.

Just as one-tenth of the population controls nine-tenths of the world’s resources, so too does a tiny proportion of our intelligence decide the fate of our whole being. The Occupation has (at the time of this writing) spread to over 100 cities in the US and over 1,500 cities globally—there’s even an Occupy Poughkeepsie!—and it also seems on track to take root closest to home.

Here’s the latest: Occupy Yourself!

The notion that the world is a mirror of our inner lives is not new. The old language was religious: “Man is made in the image of God” (I think it is safe to translate the word God as “the whole world”). In Arthur Koestler’s more modern holoarchic model, there are holons, each of which is the part which in itself is also a whole, a complete world within larger worlds. A human being is such a world unto herself.

In this direction, the Occupy Wall Street movement is on a firm footing as a unique holon, made up of its constituent holons. They are a leaderless organization guided by a method of consensus-based guidance called “people’s assembly” that facilitates collective decision making. In other words, they are creating a small society that exemplifies a truly representative model of human interaction. It is a model that addresses the needs and insights 100 percent of its participants; a world based on principles that address the whole, not just a tiny part.