Ran Prieur On #occupywallstreet

[nebris]

"October 2. People are asking my thoughts on Occupy Wall Street. Here's an article about five ways OccupyWallStreet has succeeded. But notice the level on which it has succeeded: public opinion. In the middle ages, there was universal agreement that the church was corrupt for hundreds of years before the church began to reform. Even then it did not reform because of public opinion, but because it was losing to competing churches. Wall Street has no incentive to change, because it has a monopoly on our lives. We can't buy houses or go to college without bank loans; we can't drive without oil companies; we can't eat without agribusiness. Predictable assholes are saying we have no right to protest if we use products made by the systems we're protesting against. They're so wrong, they're almost right: the whole reason we're protesting is that we can't get what we need without going through corrupt systems; but until we have other ways of getting what we need, we have no leverage to do anything but shout into the wind.

I'm not hopeful about sudden positive change. At the global scale, fast changes tend to be destructive and traumatic, while good changes take decades. Maybe this is like one wave of the tide coming in. The next twenty waves will be smaller, but then one will go a little higher than this one, and eventually the giant blocks of money will be washed away, except for a few islands."

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