Playing in Pluralistic Time-Scales
A recent documentary on the bank bail out of 2008 was appropriately titled, Too Big To Fail. As the financial crisis hit, leaders who felt a sense of responsibility for the United States, and its population of 300 million+ people were suspended in a state of confusion and panic so paralyzing that for many their time-scale shrunk down to immediate survival: tomorrow, this week, this month. From that perspective ‘Too Big To Fail’ is the fear-based conclusion that makes the most social sense. The financial system, Wall Street, the banks are all too big to fail because they form the organizing system that deals with and makes legitimate our money. And money is the way that those 300 million+ people get what they need for their survival. Years later, in 2011, the reverberations of the instability of the financial system continued to intensify- homes were being foreclosed, unemployment was high, people couldn’t pay their mortgages. Conservatives were trying to exert moral pressure to maintain a time-scale perspective of: your family, this year. Framing the financial melt down as individual failure to pay off debts and evoking moral pressure was necessary to reinforce the validity of the governing economic system.
In 2008, that conservative strategy had been relatively successful in maintaining business as usual. In 2011 people took to the streets. They saw a larger pattern of economic injustice generated by the internal logic of the system that was purportedly the mechanism and means of their survival. As the dominant story corresponds less and less to lived experience, fissures of doubt can get between conditioning and observation. As more information produced through lived experience lifts from its context and circulates, the more the dominant story becomes populated by Pluralist accounts.
Any model that seeks to describe a progressive process of turning the tide of this magnitude must account for the basic, pragmatic needs of the people involved. The model must be sustainable- as in able to sustain a global population of humans and other life forms on this earth, at least as imperfectly as we’ve experienced so far. To truly be sustainable, this model must also fulfill our emotional needs,meaning, connection, stimulation, purpose, joy. We do, after all, want a revolution where people are dancing.
We find ourselves emeshed in present structures and systems, the heterogeneous capitalism by which means we provide for ourselves and our families. We can acknowledge the pluralist state of the economic system which encompasses the more pernicious forces of late capitalism- advertising, Monsanto, the prison-industrial complex- alongside the genuine efforts of individuals and social formations to bring forward alternatives everywhere along the spectrum from modest to radical. We can see these people, we can see ourselves, not as hypocritical parasites leaching off the very system we seek to smash but as good bacteria working to shift the overall composition of our host organism.
Whatever an individual, social formation or network brings forward, if enough people feel that it is fulfilling their emotional or pragmatic needs, they will support it with their financial contributions, participation, or whatever else it needs to continue on. The nature of enterprise and innovation is that those at its core will try long and hard to maintain the project, from their own passion, sense of self and feelings of responsibility. If after all their striving, the venture cannot find a way to continue, then either the powers it is up against are too great or it is simply not fulfilling the emotional and pragmatic needs of the people involved or the context which it is attempting to serve. It is a necessary failure. More accurately, it is a step in the succession of evolution.
Far from lamenting the evanescence of human organizing, we can see this as accelerated adaptation to a fractaled dialectic. What is not an effective means of bringing people together, confronting hegemonic powers or an attractive enough vision to magnetize people towards it dissolves back into all that is. Lessons learned are carried forward in the people- informing, growing, evolving within them as they move forward to new projects and relationships. They leave behind informational representations of their model, story, process, making it available for others to learn from. They leave behind an imprint of whatever they did accomplish, internally and externally , even if it was not the grand, lasting or definitive impact that was hoped for.
Some writers in the wake of the 1960’s wrote despairingly about what a failure that social movement was. That is a very short time-scale view. Now we can see how everything since has been built on the watershed of that cultural shift. It marks an irreversible change that all proceeding generations now grow from. Perhaps certain people’s visions weren’t realized and the dialectical backlash of conservative, imperialist capitalist conditioning struck hard, but the impact of the change that movement generated is undeniable.
Maybe the people who most feel like the 1960’s or other social movements are a failure, are those who are hoping for a totalizing system instead of a pluralistic one. We are all distinct, coming from and embedded within diverse and specific contexts. The means by which we will seek to have our emotional and pragmatic needs met are similarly distinct, diverse and multiple. It follows that our vision of Global Justice must be pluralistic enough to hold multiple visions of Global Justice. And we must believe in ourselves enough and trust each other enough to get it- to get that we are the ones bringing it forward. Examples may be more mundane than what first comes to mind. It might be camping with your girlfriend and working at Zipcar. It might be teaching science to kids, which is how Mario makes the money to keep on working on his electric car technology projects and pay rent.
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