(Please take note: some of the time references are slightly out of date due to the fact that it was written in March but is being published in May. We apologize for the lapse, but assure you that Seth’s insights are no less timely because of it. – ed.)  

The nature of Occupy Wall Street is difficult to pinpoint. This is one primary reason that many of the accounts of the movement have failed to understand what it actually is, because there is no object at its center, no main character to the story, no pigeonholed political ideology to anchor it, despite the attempts by various ideological or political groups to claim it as fundamentally theirs. Its true actuality is diversity and change.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve spoken with a number of people who have asked me about Occupy Wall Street in the past tense, assuming that since its visibility in the media has diminished, and since the NY city government managed to clear out the OWS encampment in Zuccotti Park back in November, the movement itself had effectively ceased to exist.

So what is Occupy Wall Street? Initially, it was a phrase coined by the Canadian culture-jamming magazine, Adbusters, in a call they sent out in June of last year encouraging their readers to formulate one demand, and then gather together to occupy Wall Street on September 17th to make sure that demand would be heard.

In the months prior to September, a group of people formed what they called the NYC General Assembly, which met, and adopted a set of facilitation guidelines for conducting meetings that would be inclusive and consensus-based. This general assembly model became the basis for collective decision-making that people used when they descended on Wall St. and established the occupation in Zuccotti Park on September 17, almost exactly ten years after the fall of the twin towers.

The encampment and the atmosphere created by activists (using the encampment both as tactic, and as a base of operations) became known as Occupy Wall Street, and pretty soon occupations began to spread to hundreds of cities and towns across the country.

I’ve been trying to understand Occupy Wall Street ever since my first encounter with it in late September. It’s not a thing, or a group of people or an organization. It is an idea, insofar as we can define, both geographically and symbolically, what Wall Street is. It is also a dynamic, open source process, living in time, a work carried forth by the word “occupy,” which can’t be fully understood based on generalizations or anecdotal accounts.

Occupy’s first application was tactical, but it has quickly exceeded our ability to encapsulate, resisting whatever conceptual framework we try to apply to it, much to the frustration of those in the press who want to explain it away, or those in the political establishment who wish to harness its energy, or those within the movement who want to guide its course. This is a good sign, because it means that whatever it is, it’s alive and goes beyond the limited goals, desires, or imaginations of any one of us, even as it depends on all of us to manifest. Which points to the true nature of occupy: whatever it does or doesn’t become will be determined by the participation, or lack thereof, of everyone.

The word occupy has been one of the busiest words in the English language over the past six months, with its meaning shifting and expanding constantly, depending on what is taking place on any given ground, in any given mind, at any given time.

Maybe the simplest way to say it is that Occupy Wall Street is a search for and application of methods for synchronizing ourselves before it’s too late.

Music and dance are human synchronizations, as is conversation. When we sing together, our individual times weave together, and resonate, rather than just colliding or overlapping.

It’s easy to forget that politics is also a form of human synchronization.

OWS’s fundamental accomplishment thus far has been to establish a space and a process through which to synchronize our conversations and actions, direct and in person. The relative success of the action has largely been a result of recognizing that the scale of society has outgrown and thus undermined our traditional means for synchronization, leaving us vulnerable to misguided solutions spun by people whose magnitude of power disconnects them from the effects of their decisions and actions.

Public education has largely become a tool for programming young people rather than fostering their freedom, while mass media is often used to manipulate, rather than inform, the public. While much credit has been given to social media platforms as enabling the kind of spontaneous information-sharing that has been a fundamental feature of uprisings and occupations sweeping the world over the past years, the most important interactions take place, almost invariably in person. And the real rediscovery has been the power of people to gather together the mass and presence of their physical bodies to assert their freedom and upset the occupiers of traditional power.

But physical bodies can be moved, and Government and private security forces have been relatively successful — after the first few months of confused responses to the occupations — at dispersing the high concentrations of people who were actively conspiring to hold the Private-Public power partnership accountable. The question now is, will we be capable of generating a concentration of ideas even more powerful than the concentration of bodies? Will we succeed in cultivating those ideas deeply and effectively enough (despite resistance from mainstream media) for people to sense the necessity, sincerity and integrity of the effort to achieve true political equality, cultural freedom, and economic solidarity? And will enough people find ways to contribute?

It doesn’t matter if this takes place under the rubric of Occupy. New language will well up when necessary to do justice to the collective imagining so critical for real social transformation. The word occupy, five months in, is already somewhat tired and weighed down with overuse, nostalgia and orthodoxies. But we do seem to be at a turning point, when time itself requires that we, the living generations, act in accordance with our deepest visions of what life on earth can be, that we do our damndest for each other and the generations to come, in honor of those whose bodies have returned to the ground that it’s our basic responsibility to care for. It’s not that much to ask. In fact, it’s pretty standard fare as far as human history goes, punctuated as it is by generations of people who put life before lifestyle, by choice, force or necessity, expanding human consciousness in the face of overly concentrated systems of oppressive power.

Many of us have had the privilege to decide whether we want to dedicate our lives to maintaining the status quo (“Latin for ‘the mess we’re in,’” according to Ronald Reagan), or to tapping into our imaginations, common sense, accumulated knowledge to create new social forms that can do justice to the unprecedented necessities and realizations of our time. Increasingly, the burden of proof is falling on defenders of status quos to justify their positions, as the ground on which they are based shifts, and the dream of maintenance becomes more fanciful than that of a real, slow, life revolution.

Rosa Parks once put it this way, “I believe we are here on this earth to live, grow and do what we can to make this world a better place for all people…” It’s a statement any child can understand, and one that we, as we try to grow up, might do well to remember.

What we are, thereby, also seeing throughout these times is nothing short of a death of our existing understanding of the human being itself. Our paradigms have run dry, and they have run dry because they are out of step with reality. And yet, what has been our response to this?

More than a year after initial events in Tunisia and Egypt, we are seeing old patterns re-emerge in different garments. Dictatorships are being dressed up as something else, in many instances using imported clothing.

The fact that Egypt, for example, is currently working towards the kind of formal democracy which has created the kinds of problems that people in America are themselves rebelling against must surely raise some serious questions.

No doubt there are steps on the road to any destination, and progress can be painfully slow. But what of the road that we as humanity tread together?

The lessons being learned in America must also be learned by those calling for social change in other parts of the world. In looking to America, it is clear that representative democracy coupled with a so-called ‘free market’ has devastated not only that country, but, as a global power, the rest of the world with it.

The paradigm that stands behind neo-liberal globalisation and the ‘Washington Consensus’ is nothing other than a dragon which has been devouring the world (and the human being), and is now also devouring the lair out of which it has crawled. The question must be, however, Is another world possible? Is there another world waiting to be made?

True creativity involves a process of death. In nature we can observe the withering and decay of plants even while their seeds germinate and bring new life. Animals, as a part of a particular species, such as the lion, will often compete with other lions. Here, the strongest may survive (on this lower level Darwinism proves itself true), but only in order that the species as a whole may find renewed life. In this sense, each human being is a species unto him or herself; and contains within it all animal species.

In zooming out our microscopes we can also observe the way in which natural ecosystems contain organisms that do not compete with, but rather support, one another. Bees pollinate flowers which, in opening to the warmth and air and light, offer their pollen for the honey of the bees; bees which are involved in an elaborate co-working for the hive as a whole. Everywhere we can observe organisms which have not merely ‘adapted’ to their surroundings, but whose survival itself actually depends upon this mutual co-dependence and co-operation.

Social life is nothing other that the coming together of human beings. At present, we are working with paradigms that picture the human being only as a higher form of animal that must also compete to survive. The social revolutions we are seeing take place around the world are nothing other than a feeling within the human being that there is more to it than this – that no longer do we wish to live in a world that forces us through its structures to pit ourselves against our brothers and sisters in an eternal struggle for survival as if we were merely animals.

What we are really seeing unfold across the world in our time is the external manifestation of a kind of inner revolution taking place within the human being. At the same time, this outward revolution is causing us to ask more and more questions about the true nature of who we really are.

We feel ourselves to be more than a creature in constant war with our fellow human beings. We feel ourselves with something better to contribute to the world than the way it currently is. For we can feel that the way it currently is is a world which is inherently hostile to the true nature of the human being.

And where we see people currently attempting to reshape society, we see something of that which lives behind this feeling uniting with that which is the same within others. And yet, in order to avoid continued violence, we must also have the courage to get behind these feelings and make such impulses conscious. If this does not happen, the world will continue to be rocked with violent social explosions, sparked by the match of our own misunderstood feelings.

What we must truly come to understand is the connection between ourselves and the kind of social life that is seeking to emerge through us. And if we really observe the current social situation around the world we can see that the existing system is a system and a paradigm that is withering, that seeks death.

In particular the global economic and political systems are severely in decline. Because we have allowed economy and polity to set the global agendas for society as a whole, so society is also in decay. As an organism we could say that it has already passed the point of its own death. We keep it alive, as it were, on structural and societal breathing apparatuses. We huddle around it as we might huddle around a person kept alive in a hospital, though we know they are in truth not really there. Through this society-paradigm we have created machines that allow us to freeze human beings – before or after life (or, indeed, during) – and now we use these same ‘machines’ upon society itself.

Why would Egypt, or any country for that matter, seek to take on a system-paradigm that has proven itself incompatible with the human being? Why wouldn’t America – the country that has been the flag bearer for democracy and new economy – itself realise that the way it has been operating at home and around the world is no longer appropriate for the world or the human being today?[1] Why do we continue to prop up structures that have, essentially died?

We have so permeated the world with systems arising out of these paradigms (essentially Social Darwinism), and out of the corresponding picture of the human being, that we fear what may happen if we were to let them die. For in letting them die, we feel it may well be that we will die along with them. We fear our own death, for we have no clear idea of what lives on the other side of it. And this fear is paralysing.

On the global level, as the recent ‘bailouts’ in Greece reveal, it appears we are afraid to act, other than to re-enforce that which we already know. But what is being asked for today is that we come to an experience of that which we do not yet know. In order to do this we cannot re-insert more habits or old ways of thinking into the world nor our own selves. In order for this  to happen, we must be prepared to make a space in ourselves for this same ‘not yet’ – for the future. This future – the future world that longs to be – will only come into being in and through us.

But this can only happen if we are prepared to let something in ourselves die. What is this something? Nothing other than that part of ourselves that we associate with who we are, but that in truth is not us; everything we have built up as a kind of identity of who we think we are, but that is in reality only of this same decaying social structure, and that will pass away with this structure as it too passes away.

Everything that is connected to our own lower selves – to that part of us which proves Darwinism and Social Darwinism to be true – is, in fact, needing to die into our higher selves, as a plant often needs to die in order that its true reality may live on in the seeds of the new plant. This new plant has, in a way, lived within the old for some time as potential from the future.

We cannot overlay tired, worn-out structures onto countries nor the world as a whole. It will ultimately be rejected, though with the tragedy of more unnecessary violence. The only social structures appropriate for our time are the ones that are born, seed-like within human beings, when human beings allow enough death to take place within themselves in order for new life and the true future to emerge.

In the initiation traditions of old, the human being would undergo a kind of ceremony of death in order that they could be reborn into the spiritual realities of the world. The whole initiation community carried this process. It was treated as if the previous person had died and a new person had been born out of the old.

Now, everything has become an initiation waiting to happen. In order to have any true knowledge about anything, we must be prepared to let what we think we already know about it (and that part of ourselves connected to that knowledge) die. This extends now all the way to the social structures of the world as a whole, and how they impact upon our individual tasks.

Our individual tasks have become connected to the global paradigm. It cannot be avoided. Global economic and political structures affect the way I live. The dragon is everywhere. So too must my creative deed carry something of a world-response within it.

The initiation communities of old are, generally speaking, no more. Today we must form these communities ourselves, though they will look far different than they once did. The true initiation ceremony of today takes place in any encounter between human beings. In any moment, in order for something new and creative to be born, we must have the courage to let something of ourselves die. And that something is that which we think we know of one other.

The other person is not only comprised of their past and present, but also their future – their ‘not yet.’ In making a real space within ourselves for the future of the other, we enable them to be creative out of their own highest potential. Not only that, but in such moments – in the other – we are able to locate our own highest possibilities.

Such moments are initiation, or perhaps resurrection moments, in which it is possible to experience something of our future selves – the true selves of one another as human beings. Such moments are moments in which we are able to experience not the part of ourselves tied to the past – not that part of ourselves that links us to the animals and to concepts of Darwinism and Social Darwinism – but to a part of ourselves that will not pass away when we die. Such experiences link us to that part of ourselves that contains the life of a new seed waiting to slowly grow in the soil we make for it – as we tend it again and again. Such experiences allow us to get beyond the fear that lives in and arises out of the gap we sense between death and new life. Such experiences create a bridge across this gap; such experiences are this bridge.

To the extent that we are able to foster such activity through our own free will, we put ourselves voluntarily in service of all that constitutes the spiritual part of who we are and of the world as a whole. We ourselves are able to create the conditions of what was once handed down by others in initiation wisdom. We can become free beings in service of the world becoming.

If we are able to create, with and for one another, such social spaces of free and true spiritual insight into the realities of the world, then do we stand a chance of being able to overcome the inherent fear that lives within the possibility of death. In ‘dying before we die,’ we are able already to put ourselves in service of new life. We will find there a space for new thoughts, new insights, new possibility, new creativity and, ultimately, true social thinking. For we will have come then not to an alternate social paradigm to place alongside (or as an appendix to) the old, but to the place from which all paradigms spring. In so doing we can come into a social space where it is possible for us to perceive the forms that the social organism itself is asking for in order that it may be possible to find a place within it for the true nature of the human being – in so doing, we will have actually already co-created a seed of this new form; this new life.

Such activity is not re-activity – it is, rather, true creativity. It is the antidote to both austerity (social ‘freezing’) and revolutionary violence (social re-actionary ‘burning-up’). It stands in the balance. It is itself this balance. It is the powerful creative gesture in defiance of the ‘bailout’ – it is the diving in, the diving through.

To be active out of true insight into reality in the shared spaces we make for one another as human beings is to be truly social, truly creative and, at the same time, truly individual. Unlike the bee, the human being of today can only be truly social if he or she is truly individual. And yet, paradoxically, we can only truly find this individuality in mutual co-working with other individuals in community. For true health, each community must bring out the best in all individuals, and in each individual the community as a whole must be alive. Only in this way will we create healthy, human, social hives appropriate for our time.

This is a spiritual-cultural deed. Long since sidelined from the world situation through economic and political activity, but also, tragically, its own irrelevance, culture must once again be fuelled with the reality of new life. It must not let itself be carried away to some other place in order to make its home. It must make a home of this place. Cultural life must find the freedom it needs in order to let such new life flow into the world through the human being. Everything depends on this.[2]

A great courage is needed to again and again cross the abyss that lies on the other side of death – be it our own or the world’s. Courage can keep such fear at bay, but also lay down its sword so that we may cross upon it into the new life that waits for us in order to be truly creative in collaboration with the world that seeks to be. We have responsibilities for each other in this direction.

If civilisation is not to explode in too much revolutionary heat, nor freeze in the cold-room of the cryogenic life-preserving structures that it itself has created for its own continuity, it must be prepared to burn as the candle does – as a self-sacrificial activity that sheds light and warmth for all others on this path. We ourselves are such candles.

Revolution is currently taking place against the mostly-unconscious story-mythology of Darwinism and its social consequences. The old stories are half-truths and no longer appropriate. This must become conscious. The human being must now take centre stage.New story-mythologies must now take place out of current resurrection possibilities. Resurrection story-mythology must itself be reborn and recreated anew between human beings.[3] If we are able to truly find one another as human beings (and not as mere Darwinian animals), then will we find new life; then, in such moments, we will co-author an always-new resurrection story in the space that lives between each of us, and in all that flows out of such creative, spiritual fields for the resurrection not only of ourselves and one another, but of the earth as a whole.

***

The current global economic and social paradigm is one of competition only because at one point we agreed (consciously or otherwise) that it should be so. Therefore, our capacity to agree prefigures anything we may actually agree upon, including the notion that we are competitive beings. That is, the social paradigm that states we are competitive beings is itself only made possible because we are able to agree – to collaborate – to work together. This fact alone undercuts the paradigm of Social Darwinism. At any moment we can choose to make new and conscious agreements out of our deeply collaborative nature.

John Stubley

John Stubley, Ph.D., is a co-founder of Occupy the Future (occupythefuture.org) and founder of the Centre for Social Poetry (socialpoetry.net). He is a social scientist, social artist, consultant and facilitator. He has published his poetry, prose, drama, journalism and essays in numerous journals, newspapers, literary websites, blogs and e-newsletters around the world.

Article originally published on the Centre for Social Poetry website (socialpoetry.net).

Flowforms. Photo: Ani Hanelius

1. You have been attending “Occupy Wall Street” activities since the end of September. What, would you say, is the aim of the protest; what is it all about? Is there a common goal?

Any scan over the many signs present at Liberty Plaza, any attendance at one of many General Assemblies (GA’s) taking place across the city, or any reading of the many publications now emerging from the Occupation (including the GA endorsed ‘Declaration of the Occupation of New York City’) will begin to reveal certain themes. One of the central concerns is that business, wielding its vast economic power, has completely overtaken political life. Government is seen as nothing other than a kind of puppet for the interests of an elite few – the so-called 1% – who are able to exercise their economic might for their own personal gain. Political life in the USA (and elsewhere, of course) is saturated with the interests of economic power – from campaign financing to lobbying, from endorsements to the appointment of certain individuals into powerful and favourable positions.

At the same time, there is also concern that these same economic forces are either directly (through business) or indirectly (through government) influencing not only political life but all that is connected with what we might call spiritual-cultural activity. People connected to Occupy movement are aware of the way in which business interests control such things as media, healthcare, social security, agriculture and, perhaps most importantly, education. The total debt of student loans in the USA now totals over $1 trillion. Many involved in the Student GA’s here are calling for the relief of student debt. They see that education has itself become a business. Economic forces are setting the curriculum for the spiritual and cultural development of human beings. One is either economically enslaved prior to education (through not being able to afford the schools one wishes to attend), during education (through a curriculum dictated consciously or otherwise by economic forces) or after education (through massive student debts).

Reading these symptoms on a deeper level it becomes clear that the Occupy movement is seeking for the disentangling of economic power from political and cultural life. Economic life has become like a giant oil slick spreading over all realms of society, suffocating the activities of both the political and cultural realms; suffocating, essentially, the human being.

2. Are there any suggestions for a solution of the current crisis we are undergoing? What kind of perspectives do people have, what kind of concepts for the future?

The solutions that the Occupy movement is suggesting can be found within the activities of the movement itself. At the centre of the Occupation is the General Assembly with its modified consensus decision-making process. It is the heart organ of the movement. For so long, people in America have experienced extreme inequality. Their voices have not been heard. The GA process, on the other hand, allows for everybody’s voice to find amplification. People feel included in decision making processes – in the life of rights – in, essentially, political activity.

This process of equality has become a kind of heart-foundation for the movement, and is constantly evolving. A new (for Occupy Wall Street) process has now begun called the Spokes Council. No doubt such equality-forming processes will continue to develop. It is, in a way, only natural that such processes evolve as a kind of platform for the rest of the movement, and that they overcompensate, initially, for the inequalities experienced in wider society.

Such processes, however, are not appropriate for the recognition and formulation of aims, goals, visions, values, imagination, and so on. Equality in the life of rights is essential, and this is what the movement is currently announcing. What belongs to the next phase of the movement, however – the further and conscious articulation of what the social organism is itself asking for – can only be rooted in processed which ensure individual human freedom. Such free cultural activity, and the need for it, is already present in seed form within the movement. In continuing to develop such free and conscious spiritual-cultural processes in addition to equal political processes, the future development of the movement and society as a whole will grow ever clearer and stronger. Out of a conscious spiritual-cultural fabric, values, aims, goals and new ideas will continue to flow into the reshaping of both political and economic life, as well as the formation of society as a whole.

3. What role does the question of money play in the movement? Are there any thoughts and concepts with regard to it?

There are numerous working groups focusing specifically on economic questions, including questions of alternative currencies. In looking at the movement itself in relation to money, however, we can again come to a degree of clarity not only in regards to what is being spoken about, but what is actually speaking.

The New York City General Assembly has received, to date, more than $500,000 in donations. This itself is an interesting financial observation. This money was not gained through the sale of goods and services. Nor has it been loaned to the movement. Rather, it has been gifted. As gift money it is not tied to that which has been produced in the past, nor is it loaned for something which has to take place now, but instead allows for future activities. Gift money has the quality of making a space for the future to emerge. Those who support the movement financially are those who invite something of the future, archetypal social organism to come into being.

As a movement which is not political nor economic in power, but cultural, the true way in which its activities must be funded is through money which allows its future-based visions and goals to be realised – money which is freely gifted, with no strings attached. Here we have activity which greater society should pay attention to if all cultural and spiritual activities (such as education, the media, healthcare, social security etc), as well as the human being, are to have a free space in which to develop their unique capacities and gifts.

How this money is allocated is proposed through the working groups, as well as the General Assembly, in such a way that modified consensus must be reached before the money is made available. All processes are open and transparent. Here money comes directly into the field in which it belongs; namely, the field of agreements that people make with one another as human beings – as a document of the rights life. In addition, only the best ideas are given financial support – ideas and initiatives which, flowing from spiritual-cultural activity, are able to serve the community as a whole in the best possible way.

4. How do you judge this movement in face of the present condition of humanity? What kind of thoughts do you have from a greater perspective?

It is clear that this movement is a large wave emerging from a greater ‘swell’ taking place in the social oceans of the world. The Occupy movement is not economic in essence, nor political. Its power is cultural. Even though the content of its conversations are primarily political and economic, the place from out of which it speaks is cultural. It is a civil society movement wielding cultural power, which has the potential to reshape society as a whole. The Occupy movement itself is, however consciously, currently its own demands. Namely, a spiritual-cultural life based on the freedom of each human being; a political-rights life based on the equality of all human beings; and an economic life which does not meet the needs of only a powerful few, but an economic life based on co-operation in order to meet the needs of all human beings.

The question is whether or not this cultural power can be recognised and worked with consciously. Each human being is responsible in this sense. Each human being is a microcosm of society. How do I need to be in order that I may allow new ideas to flow from cultural realms – from spiritual life – into the agreements I make with others, as well as how I contribute towards meeting the needs of my brothers and sisters?

The Occupy movement is itself a wave that is emerging out of a spiritual groundswell sweeping across the earth. The true spirit of our time – the true ­spirit of progress of our time – is announcing itself in the activities of human beings prepared to put themselves in free service of world becoming. In these deeds – in the deeds of individual human beings putting themselves in service of the spirit – we can see the efforts towards a creation of the right kind of vessel – the right kind of chariot in order that the spiritual champion of our time may ride truly into the world. This chariot is a social organism that is consciously threefolded – with civil society representing a free cultural spiritual life, government representing an equal rights life, and business representing co-operative economic life – and where all three realms come together in the right way: autonomously yet interdependently. This exists in seed form in Liberty Plaza, albeit mostly unconsciously, and belongs to the future task not only of the Occupy movement, but of all such waves upon this vast sea-swell of spiritual-cultural life.

Only if these pictures are further developed in a conscious way will we be truly able to clean the currently stifling and, indeed, evil oil slick that exists not only in social life but within our own souls. Only in this way will we create the conditions necessary for the right kind of ‘rising sea levels’ to flow over the world – a rising sea of spiritual activity which will itself ‘break up’ and clean the world of the evil and polluted oil slick we currently experience, and create the further necessary conditions for the true sprit of progress to take up its rightful place at the front wave – at the high water mark – of human and world evolution through the free deeds of spiritually striving human beings.

John Stubley, Ph.D., is a co-founder of Occupy the Future (occupythefuture.org) and founder of the Centre for Social Poetry (socialpoetry.net). He is a social scientist, social artist, consultant and facilitator. He has published his poetry, prose, drama, journalism and essays in numerous journals, newspapers, literary websites, and e-newsletters around the world.

“A wound awoke me,
Opened the lids that lie closed
Over the eyes of the longing
That lives in the sleeping soul
To be whole;
And a word woke me
To reach
Into the wounds of the world –
And the wounds
Became speech.”
Christy MacKaye Barnes

As human beings striving for a future worth occupying, we hear our wounds speaking. My wound speaks about the education of our children, the kindling of future strengths and of human purpose. How are we supporting these beings in their becoming? What is necessary now?

“Here my idea is to declare that art is the only possibility for evolution, the only possibility to change the situation in the world. But then you have to enlarge the idea or art to include the whole creativity. And if you do that, it follows that every living being is an artist – an artist in the sense that he can develop his own capacity. And therefore it’s necessary at first that society cares about the educational system, that equality of opportunity for self-realisation is guaranteed.” Joseph Beuys

The attention shown towards standardised testing, education’s growing dependence on technology and institutionalised academia at increasingly younger and younger ages begs the question: who profits from these measures? The impulse of many reform initiatives is put in place largely by forces that deal with the economic and political spheres of society[i] – while education itself is a cultural endeavour.  There is an enormous pressure on schools, teachers and parents to step into line with these economic and political concerns, and spend less time on the cultural concerns unless they ‘add value’ to the former two spheres.

Reiterated again and again in media and publications, in research and dialogue, is that success in treating education as an artistic vocation is measured with proof of better test scores or higher percentages of graduates entering university. In the same way we measure a country’s worth by GDP, we measure schools through their currency of standardised test results – and in some countries these school results get publicly published in such a way that suggests this is the singular worth a school has[ii] – as if young human minds, just as the labour force or food today, are a commodity, and you had better invest in the best stock.

We have been trained in the western world to think in terms of commodity, rather than community and this is one of the factors that has led to the crises we experience in education today.

“I think we have to change metaphors. We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people, we have to move to a model that is based more on agriculture. We have to recognise that human flourishing is not a mechanical process; it’s an organic process. You cannot predict the outcome of human development, all you can do is, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish.”  Ken Robinson

To create such a shift in education is to reimagine the role of the teacher and of pedagogy itself. We must respond to our human need of connecting with our individual, authentic purpose and bringing our agency to the communities we are part of. When such agency works in a necessary and timely manner, true positive organisational change can occur.

The farmer lives in such a way, enacting certain rhythms and rituals in order to prepare the soil – these acts are performed at the correct phase of the year so as to ensure the strength and success of the plants. Children, a class, also have seasons and stages and the ability to deeply listen and to respond to these as a teacher ensures their healthy social unfolding.

“The aesthetic – as opposite of numbness, of the anaesthetic – is closely linked to our ability to respond. In this space – beyond the linear, the liberal, the discursive – where the creative imagination weaves and moves, we are moved inwardly to become internally active.” Shelley Sacks

An aesthetic treatment of education does not leave out the politics, economics or science of teaching, but places them in context to the human being[iii]. With human development and social balance at the centre, this approach fosters meaning and learning within students, teachers and the community surrounding a school. Schools have the possibility of being key birthplaces of new social order.

Schools as organisations can be places of discovery and play. It is all too easy to fall into the traditional structural hierarchy of a school, yet many teachers yearn for more autonomy and more delegated responsibility. They yearn for the right kinds of relationships with their peers – relationships that stimulate their innate passion and curiosity for education and social process.

“…Human organisations are not like mechanisms… Human organisations are much more like organisms; that’s to say they depend upon feelings and relationships and motivation and value, self-value, and a sense of identity and of community. You know, the way you work in an organisation is deeply affected by your feeling for it.”  Ken Robinson

It is interesting to see school autonomy being taken up by the debate of ‘value-adding’, entitling policy such as paying teachers who produce better test results, more. But this is simply the occupation of culture, once again, by economic-political forces. To be truly responsible in their vocation, teachers must first and foremost be accountable to themselves, which requires their autonomy in the cultural pursuit of their work, rather than the statistical measurement of their ‘effect’ on their pupils. Given the right form, teachers are responsible for their class, their school and are consciously, visibly learning as practitioners.

Working in this autonomous way can be a great leap of faith and requires much more from the individuals who take part than a traditional hierarchy, or a pay-for-performance model. Furthermore, taking such intentions into a classroom can be very challenging for teachers used to asserting their authority, rather than owning it.

What strikes me more and more as a teacher is the child’s sense of entitlement. The children I am teaching today feel entitled to many things, and are not in the least afraid of authority. This brings new challenges, but also new possibilities to a classroom.

“To be in a room with others where keeping a question alive is more important than thinking one has the answer.” G.I. Gurdjieff

I must make clear that I am not an advocate of children running schools (as is done in some democratic models). I believe that the organisation is the playground of the adult, that it is our social-artistic material. We work with our peers to create a cultural environment in which children can flourish. With careful observation of the children, the teachers know in which direction things should move, that is our art. This is also why it is so important that teachers are teaching children, rather than only teaching content.

For a healthy future in education, we must also go beyond the existing pedagogical models. It has never been as simple as taking existing models and enacting them. An education bound to existing models is an education bound to routine and convention; it is a job a teacher fulfils. In the end it does not matter the ‘branding’ by which a school operates, but that the work is done with meaning and purpose, that teachers are working in a way that is both science and art.

What matters is that teachers themselves are learning, observing, researching, taking risks, making intuitive choices and being held responsible for the outcome. When in education we move towards treating the social substance of a class or school as plastic, as malleable, as we would clay when modelling or air when dancing, our serious play thrills and feeds us to give more of the conscious, passionate agency we have.

“ To be a teacher is my greatest work of art. The rest is the waste product, a demonstration. If you want to explain yourself you must present something tangible. But after a while this has only the function of a historic document.” Joseph Beuys

–

Gosia Winter lives in Berlin, where she teaches at an international school, plays with her band and works on her self-directed study in organisational management and aesthetic education. She was born in Poland and raised in Australia where she worked for 5 years as a Waldorf teacher after her studies.

www.gosiawinter.com

http://study.gosiawinter.com

Video of the National Day of Action in NYC on December 6:

“In a bold new phase for the 99% movement, a vacant home in the center of New York City’s foreclosure crisis is presently being reclaimed today for a local homeless family…..Hundreds of neighborhood residents and citywide supporters are gathering after a real estate tour of vacant bank-owned homes available for occupation in the neighborhood — signaling that community activists will remain vigilant about the theft and abandonment of these homes by big banks. Black and Latino communities like those in East New York were targeted by predatory subprime lenders and have suffered disproportionately during the foreclosure crisis.”

Read more at

www.occupywallst.org

Occupy Homes

Article in The Nation

Democracy Now! Report

Waiting to get on the Subway at Atantic Ave

Rude Mechanical Orchestra brings some funky tunes to the block party

The empty home foreclosed on by Bank of America (Sign reads Banks Steal Homes).

The Carrasquillo family come out of the house to be welcomed by their new community.

Everyone enjoying the Housewarming Block Party

More photos of the day:

Click to view slideshow.

Image of the Word Exercise: The Future

TOPLAB in collaboration with OWS Education and Empowerment Committee and OWS Performance Guild are hosting a number of workshops, their current series of workshops explore Self-Organisation,  you can write to toplab(at)toplab.org for more details.

Marie-Claire Picher is a co-founder (1989) of the Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory (TOPLAB) and has worked and collaborated closely with Augusto Boal until his death in 2009. One of the most experienced TO practitioners in North America, she has presented thousands of hours of TO facilitation training in New York and throughout the United States, as well as in Chiapas, Tabasco, Mexico City, Guatemala and Cuba.

Elia Gurna is an artist who uses Theater of the Oppressed in her work as a teaching artist and youth worker.

Theater of the Oppressed is a tool for building groups and communities, challenging power and practicing self- and social transformation. This workshop is designed for people who are actively working with others to create collective, people-controlled alternatives to the capitalist system, and who seek to remake the world into a compassionate and humane place, free of privilege, exploitation, violence and domination of the many by the few.

taken from www.toplab.org

Useful Links:

Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory

International Theater of the Oppressed Organization

Pedagogy & Theater of the Oppressed (they host the largest TO conference)

Wikipedia

The Forum Project

On a certain level it is relatively easy to see the connection between earlier ‘civil rights’ struggles and what is currently unfolding through the Occupy movement.

But we must have the courage to dig a little deeper and see what, in reality, is the living connection between such movements in human history, and that which we are witnessing in our own time.

In the concept of ‘civil’ we can find much to help us. To be civil means to express something of the front wave of human and social striving – to be ‘civilised’ is to represent something of where civilisation itself wishes to move towards. Civil society today is that realm of social life where a new and moral civilisation-building force is able to flow into society as a whole. Civil rights has to do with the way in which this civil – and ultimately cultural – force is able to affect the life of rights, of polity.

This can be seen in the great leaders of earlier civil rights movements both in America and around the world. Martin Luther King Jr in the USA, Mahatma Ghandi in India, Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Jose Rizal in the Philippines, and so on.

The concept of ‘civil disobedience’ must also be mentioned here because it became something of a moral technique employed by many of these movements. Henry David Thoreau’s work on civil disobedience and its further articulation by Ghandi, King, Mandela, Tolstoy and many others is central to all civil rights activities, including the Occupy movement. Civil disobedience has become a kind of moral weapon.

Indeed, any other kind of weapon, or activity, ultimately falls short of the transformation of society as a whole. There must be a kind of moral or spiritual force at work if any true or lasting change is to take place in social life.

In this sense, Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman and other transcendentalists of America were also civil rights leaders – they stood up for the moral and spiritual nature of the human being.

Anywhere a new way of being with one another as human beings announces itself through the true spiritual striving of individuals shall we, in truth, find an articulation of civil rights activity. True spiritual striving can no longer be divorced from the realities of daily life.

King’s final words in public, the day before he was assassinated, were: “I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” Tolstoy’s main work on civil disobedience was titled The Kingdom of God is Within You. Emerson’s greatest concept is perhaps that of ‘Self-Reliance’ – the capacity to rest upon the spiritual nature of one’s own self. Ghandi’s ‘Be the change you want to see in the world,’ speaks for itself, as did Mandela’s ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission’ following the end of apartheid in South Africa.

The success of these earlier movements rests upon the capacity of leaders to speak to the highest nature of others, so that others may freely and willingly act out of their own self-reliance. In the Occupy movement, it is not that there are no leaders – it is that there is a potential leader in everybody. Central to the Occupy movement is the desire to make a space for the leader – for the self-reliant spiritual activity – of the other human being.

This must continue to develop and flow into the movement as a whole if it is to bear true fruit. Only by acting out of our highest, spiritual potential will we be able to create a world worthy of the highest nature of the human being. The civilisation being asked for today can only be built out of bricks fired in the kiln of the living spirit. We can help one another to achieve this.

In addition to a heart organ of equality, we must also have a head organ able to develop its unique capacities in freedom, and hands that are able to work co-operatively with others. In such a way shall we build a society where it is once again possible to find the human being – a spiritual cultural life working in complete freedom, a political-rights life based on equality, and an economic life based upon the cooperation of mankind. The archetypal human organism seeks to find itself in the archetypal social organism.

Only by seeking to create, out of love, the social organism as it itself is seeking to be, will we create the right kind of vessel for the true spirit of progress of our time to find right footing on the earth today. Nothing less is being asked of us than this – to create not only new civil rights activity, but new civilisation – one worthy of the true nature of the human being.

John Stubley

Useful Links:

Occupy Idaho

Occupy Idaho on Facebook

Occupy Idaho Falls on Facebook

Occupy Boise

A photo taken in Stanley, Idaho – population 100. It is an Occupy Wall St. The photo was taken on Wall St. in Stanley, Idaho.