Reply to Foster Gamble’s video blog on his experience at the recent Occupy Solidarity Social Forum. His theme is “Liberty, Democracy and Occupy,” and he links to a document titled “Unanimous Declaration of Independence,” available HERE. I put the link below to my post on this blog of Core Values and Mission Statements for Occupy Santa Cruz from last October:
http://berealtruth.wordpress.com/2011/11/20/proposed-core-values-and-mission-statements-for-occupy-santa-cruz/
I think the word “Liberty” is also problematic. It’s not equal to “Freedom.” Freedom is at the core of our unalienable rights, the radical term arising from political philosophers of the early 1700’s, that truly made the rest of the world respond to the American Revolution as something new.
Unalienable rights don’t appear in the Unanimous Declaration of Independence, nor does Jefferson’s (I suspect) masterful “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” So, governments theoretically are a creation of human society, whose legitimate purpose is to secure rights, not “govern.”
Liberty is something that’s granted (like rights supposedly guaranteed by the Bill of Rights), begging the question “by whom.” It presupposes a hierarchy, which would seem to be anathema to the concept of the kind of radical equality hinted at in the “Unanimous Declaration.” One of the great questions facing us at this time is whether we can really create governing systems that don’t include assumptions of hierarchy or rank (which devolve from the concept of personal identity, a psychological sense of being a separate self truly distinct from the All-That-Is). There is a contradiction between this sense of what Adyashanti calls the Imaginary Self, and the growing realization of our interconnectedness within the web of life.
The defensive responses by world hierarchical systems at this time, which seem to be leading inexorably toward a prison-planet, scientific (technocratic) dictatorship of a hidden oligarchy, are, I would argue, being triggered and accelerated by the awakening of the so-called 99% to this ineffable interconnectedness (which Brzezinski chronically characterizes as an “inconvenient” Global Political Awakening). If we want to realize a new social contract based on this interconnectedness, it’s incumbent on each of us to see our own defensive responses, which constantly work against the radical (not sovietized) cooperation and openings that will make the arising of the much-touted New Paradigm possible.
And I will point out a crucial distinction about “The State.” “It” doesn’t ever do anything. It is clearly a conceptual artifact, with existence only in human minds. The evils ascribed to it are from the actions of those who use the conceptual structure to promote what they see as their own strategic advantages. “It” is, literally, an instrument of mind control.
–Bruce
