Occupying Consciousness

December 01, 2011

Every human being, in times of social stress (whether cultural, political, or economic), wakes up to a certain extent to current events. What’s going on? Who’s behind it? Why? What do they want?

A number of years ago I read in one of Rudolf Steiner’s lecture cycles (and I’m looking for it now!) that there had been two attacks—presumably the Bolshevik in Russia, and the then-still-forming attack on Middle Europe—and that a third would come, in the West. The West for Steiner included Britain and the USA. And he had also observed that it was the karmic destiny of Anglo-America to form a materialistic world empire, to build a “global economic machine.” Karmic? Because of the people we are, and who we were in previous lives; because of the territories we occupy; because of the consciousness our English language promotes in us; because of our capacities for detachment and abstraction, and our closeness to the spiritual force Steiner called “Ahriman.” (See his cycles The Karma of Untruthfulness, The Challenge of the Times, and Ideas for a New Europe.)

Global Economic Empire

Now it is something every American ought to understand, and few of us do, that “America” or the dear old “USA” has a split consciousness. It’s rather like some individuals. Inwardly, and in their intimate relations, they are thoughtful, generous, trying to become better people, even. Outwardly, and in their professional lives, they are intensely self-interested, calculating, two-faced. It is from this perspective on our indeed very great nation that we can see how we can both talk endlessly about democracy, and even expand human rights within our national boundaries, and outside the USA operate a global empire with over 700 military bases, “defense” expenditures equal to all other countries combined, and a record of service a “national interest” which is almost exclusively the interest of our transnational business corporations.

And over the last sixty years, national (now “homeland”) security has usurped the leading role in our national consciousness—the role long held by the words of the Declaration of Independence. It has meshed, as Steiner envisioned, with our commercial interests, and it is now turning its controlling attentions to the internal affairs of the USA. This isn’t just because of economic calamities such as our current Great Recession. No, building the global economic empire is a larger and longer-viewed concept. The “battle of Seattle” was a startling marker in that struggle. Seemingly out of nowhere, a very diverse group of Americans—labor groups, environmentalists, direct democracy advocates, religious people, young anarchists, cultural creatives—showed up in late 1999 in Seattle to stop a meeting of the World Trade Organization which was intended to place the capstone on the world economic government.

You didn’t hear about that plan? The WTO is supra-national. Nations join it by treaty, and the treaties state that wherever national laws and even constitutions contradict WTO agreements and rulings, the national governments will conform to the WTO. And that is how you make a global economic empire. You don’t replace governments, you place another structure of power over them. And once fully in place, no government can afford to withdraw from the WTO—because the economic damages are likely to be too extreme.

The Sovereign American People

Now what nation, if any, or rather what national group of human beings, might be strong enough to overthrow or just resist this system? Well, there are more populous countries than the USA, but there are none that are richer or prouder or more concerned, at least historically, with their freedom. The final enforcements required for a global economic empire to assume unquestioned authority would have to be against the people of the United States.

Indeed, it appear that we are at the point of a major and perhaps decisive contest between the American people, who are the real sovereign entity (“We the People...”), and the social mechanism we call the business corporation and those who benefit greatly from it. And it seems to many, “Occupiers” and “Tea Partiers” and libertarians and small “d” democrats, that all three branches of our national government are already substantially under the control of for-profit corporate interests.

The Corporate Challenge

What does the combination of the profit motive and the corporate form imply? A brand new book (Customer Centricity by Peter Fader) opens with this bit of catechism:

“What is the primary objective of every company in every sector and every marketplace in the world? Well, the answer is obvious, isn’t it? The only reason anyone goes into business—the only reason any commercial enterprise exists—is to make a profit and to maximize those profits over as long a period as possible. We are in business to make money. Preferably, a lot of it.”

So a business corporation, in a view which can be said to be “obvious,” is a means for extracting as much wealth as possible from others and concentrating it in the hands of a relative few. Much more could be said, but that is the force that is facing us.

Occupy Consciousness

And so, when a small magazine called Adbusters, published for many years in Canada as a biting critique of corporate control of contemporary culture, called for an “occupation of Wall Street,” something happened. Modest but quite serious and non-violent groups of people “occupied” Wall Street and many other locations. And they began to take back the national and international dialog about the needs of humanity today.

Now, as winter and overwhelming police force are driving the “Occupiers” out of the public squares, we are publishing several articles to wake ourselves up. And perhaps we can take the larger questions, the present challenges to our humanity and society, into our deepest wakefulness through that special period of destiny-consciousness we call “the holy nights” so that Spring of 2012 will find us clear and awake and at work.

Links

So please follow these links. First, Leslie Loy appeals for us to get out and meet the people who have been moved to protest. (And Gary Lamb has added wisely that we should look to Tea Partiers as well as Occupiers.) The original, Michaelmas declaration of Occupy Wall Street is posted.

The Social Science Section conference this past summer provides a great backdrop to the fall events. Two articles out of that conference are in the new being human. John Miller describes how new thinking about complexity can help us approach social questions, and we are posting a short follow-up article. Chris Schaefer has tested Steiner’s Fundamental Social Law against income disparities with fascinating results (see being human).

Youth section members have created OccupyTheFuture.org and are pulling together many good reports there, including one from Jordan Walker calling for really deep social artistry and creativity. Think OutWord has announced its annual meeting in February to consider education and social questions.

Torin Finser’s new book, Initiative: A Rosicrucian Path of Leadership, is also highly appropriate to today’s circumstances. The consciousness out of which change comes is invisible and yet decisive. We publish the introduction, courtesy of SteinerBooks.

Here at anthroposophy.org we are already posting some of these, and will be adding more, including on what may be seen as the essential history of the Occupy movement in America, back through Dr. King’s Poor People’s Crusade and its Resurrection City, the Berkeley Free Speech movement, the dialectic between poverty and power in the Franklin Roosevelt administration, the full emergence of women into national political life a century ago, and the deep identification of democracy with economic justice which is a hallmark of the life and work of Abraham Lincoln. A first bit of that history of American social consciousness is the 1911 poem Bread and Roses. "Yes, it is Bread we fight for -- but we fight for Roses, too!"

Slavery, in a certain sense, is the real issue. Human beings in their struggle for personal identity find it hard not to "use" each other. Will the human being’s inescapable physical, economic needs be used—now in much more sophisticated ways—to control and exploit us, to cloud our ideals, to harden our relationships, to dim our consciousness?

Jefferson apparently changed the phrase “life, liberty, and property” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Will we be able to sustain that noble shift of consciousness?

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