Having read Douglas Rushkoff’s excellent appraisal of the Occupy Wall Street movement, I felt I would like to add some thoughts.
There is a new consciousness crystallising, and Rushkoff said something which (as usual) was very insightful, in that the mainstream media are having trouble getting to grips with the (r)evolution because they can’t see it, it just looks like a jumble of different causes all mixed together, and the people at the heart of it refuse to discuss it on the mainstream media’s terms, and reduce everything to black and white and soundbites.
Check out the Fox News interview he links to on there and you can see the new and the old paradigm meeting.
Old: binary (right or wrong)
New: inclusive (everyone has a facet of the truth, including the so-called ‘enemy’)
Old: soundbite
New: conversation
Old: Simplified
New: In depth
Old: Judgemental
New: Non-judgemental
Old: sensationalist
New: realistic
Old: dreaming (our actions have no consequences)
New: awake (our actions do have consequences)
Old: newspapers, tv
New: social networks
Old: top-down politics
New: bottom-up organising
Old: secrets, cover-ups
New: open source, transparency
Old: protest (asking for a favour from those ‘above’)
New: occupy (taking what is rightfully ours in a peaceful way)
Old: News of the World
New: Wikileaks
Old: separation, fear
New: inclusion, love
This new paradigm has gradually, almost gently, emerged and it is still in its fragile early stages. But I imagine that reading back this blog post in a year or two’s time, what I am saying here will seem so obvious as to make people wonder why I even bothered to mention it at all; the consciousness will have fully established itself and will have totally changed the ‘conversation’ we are having about any important issue you care to mention in Western industrialised society.
Photo by Amine M'Siouri from Pexels