Occupy Movements as a Symptom

When there is a problem in an organism, it may respond with various symptoms - fever, inflammation, chills, shaking, .... One can look at the occupy movements as symptoms indicating that there is something wrong at both the national as well as the global level. The organism's response to the malaise is not a direct cure for the issue. It may help it tolerate the malaise in some measure while the organism's other systems attempt to actually cure the malaise.



My sense of the occupy movements is that they are such a symptomatic inflammation indicating that there is a problem in the system. And that the problem is severe enough to warrant an inflammation. However, my sense is that as a nation and as a planet, we have no idea how to cure what ails our "organism" (human society).

Is there a solution ? A cure ?  My sense is that there is. However, I don't think there is a person alive on earth who knows what that cure is. I do think that even though we don't know what that cure could be, we do have processes for finding that cure. What would such a process look like:

• Pull together a team of people with multiple perspectives: gender based (male, female, gay, .... ), age based (young, middle, old, ....), economic status based (poor, lower, middle, upper, top 1%), ethnic, ..., others?
• Learning phase for these team members: systems thinking, what we know about human cognitive errors in decision making, compassion meditation, love meditation, team effectiveness, dialogue, ...
• Create a meta team from some team members to gauge the effectiveness and operation of the team. And allow them to make changes to the team as necessary for team effectiveness.
• Charge the teams with coming up with a plan to resolve the malaise, i.e., find a cure.
• Give the teams the resources and authority to implement their plans, follow through on the plans, learning from what works with their plans and what doesn't,  change their plans as needed, have feedback loops for learning and changing the plans as needed, ....

This is simply a barebones outline of what such a process to find a solution would look like. It clearly needs to be fleshed out a bit more.

This is a bit pie in the sky. We have two rather strong dynamics to contend with:

• Machiavelli on change: "It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favour; and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it. Thus it arises that on every opportunity for attacking the reformer, his opponents do so with the zeal of partisans, the others only defend him half-heartedly, so that between them he runs great danger."
• Kuhn in the Structure of Scientific Revolutions:  The established order rests on a generation that may in large be unwilling to accept a paradigmatic change for the structure of human society.

I am not sure we know how to address these dynamics. Perhaps that magic process mentioned above can also figure out how to address these dynamics?