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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