Charles Eisenstein: At The Heart Of An Occupation
Stacy Lanyon Interviews Charles Eisenstein
27 May, 2013
Attheheartofanoccupation.blogspot.com
Life or Debt: A Day of Health Care and Education, March 23, 2013, Washington Square Park Photo: Stacy Lanyon
I just get excited anytime there is a crack in the façade. Like a lot of people, I’m not satisfied with the way the world is right now, heading over a cliff and destroying everything that is good and beautiful for no good reason, so anytime there is a hint that change is in the air, I get excited about that. It’s quite simple. I only visited the park once. It was in October of 2011. The first Occupy I was at was in Philadelphia, and then I came to New York as well. There was a lot of different stuff mixed in. It wasn’t all a positive vibe. Some people I talked to were experiencing something new in their lives. It had opened their horizons. When I came to Zuccotti, I felt like I was seeing a small and partial glimpse of something that’s in the future. You know how an alcoholic has moments of clarity on the way down? Our society is like that. This was like a little moment of clarity. There was definitely a glimpse of what is possible for human beings.
There were those moments where things were just happening organically, the right person showing up at the right time to do the right thing, everybody contributing without being forced to, without being paid to, simply acting from their desire to give and to contribute. When I was here, I definitely saw some of that and felt some of that. Even in October when I came, there was already a feeling that that was getting submerged in these other dramas. People carry a lot of wounds growing up in this civilization, and usually we have all of these social mechanisms to suppress those wounds, from psychiatric medication to peer pressure to financial pressure. They get acted out inside of households, and here was a bunch of people really living together and living in a community, so all of these buried wounds had a chance to be expressed and to be dealt with. My feeling was that the movement was becoming more about those things than anything external.
Some people might say that that’s the reason why the movement petered out, or it just kind of got wrapped up in itself and that it was therefore a failure, and I think that maybe that was the most important thing about it because it showed us what kind of work that we have to do. It’s not just external political work. Right now, if by some miracle, the Occupy Movement won the revolution and took over, what guarantee would there be that we wouldn’t re-enact all of the dysfunctions that we saw in Zuccotti Park, along with the beauty? It really is a wake-up call. There is work on every level that needs to be done, and that’s why I think that there’s really a spiritual dimension to the political movement, and I use the word spiritual warily because I’m not saying that there is some separate realm of spirit that’s separate from matter. I’m not saying that there isn’t either. Spirituality for many has been separate from the realm of matter. What I’m seeing is the necessity for fusion of these two realms, which I believe are not really separate.
I’m a bit ambivalent about the tactic and concept of Occupy. One thing that I like about it is that Wall Street, Zuccotti Park, and this whole earth belonged to everybody. We have a right to stand there, to occupy space. I tend to be less well-disposed toward the military connotations of occupation because we’re not going to win a war against the powers that be. They have more force at their disposal than we do. The only way that we’re going to win is through a change of heart, and then the question becomes, “How does that happen?” When people are attacked and threatened, they might become more defensive rather than less. That means that this kind of militant interpretation of what occupation is, I’m not sure if that’s the right tactic right now. I think it is important to use our bodies and not just our mouths and not just our computer keyboards. With the decline in public space, it’s not really clear how to do that anymore. There was a time when and maybe there still will be a time when the physical disruption of the routines of society will change things.
Right now, we talk about words versus actions, but actually the occupation was really a type of symbolic communication. The border between words and actions is very blurry, so being at Wall Street or near Wall Street carries a symbolic communication. It’s not that physical presence prevented people from getting into their offices. Why is it powerful to be there? It’s because Wall Street symbolizes something. The presence there symbolizes something, so there is a communication happening. I think that we have to continue to be innovative in our use of symbols to disrupt the story that we call normal. The story of normal, I call it. I think it was a brilliant idea, actually, Occupy Wall Street. It brought issues into public awareness that had not really been there so much before, issues of inequality and debt. Once it achieved that, then Occupy Wall Street came to be more about Occupy Wall Street. “Are we going to get evicted or not?” “How outraged are we that we are getting evicted?” And all that kind of stuff. In the mind of the public, it became less and less about the 99% and the 1%.
I can lay out all kinds of horrifying things about climate change, about imperialism, about the debt-based financial system that is turning nature into product and relationships into services, destroying community, plunging us into a world of scarcity amid abundance. Why do one in seven children go hungry in this country? Is it because there’s not enough food? No. We waste 50% of our food, and the biggest crop in America is lawn grass in terms of acres. I could lay out all kinds of glorifying things, but that information has been out there for decades, and if somebody is not alarmed by it already, then my off the cuff, unsubstantiated description isn’t going to make a difference. Even if I substantiated it, what are they going to do? Look up my references? I think it’s an important question, “What is it that causes people to change their beliefs and to change the way they live?” It’s not necessarily being confronted with evidence that doesn’t fit into their beliefs because they’ll just go running off to Rush Limbaugh who will explain away that evidence, or they will immediately create a story in their head about why Charles Eisenstein is saying this. “It’s because he’s discontented.” “It’s because he’s a wannabe hippie.” They’ll have a story to dismiss it.
I think what allows people to change their beliefs is when their totality, their total story of the world, begins to fall apart. So someone gets fired from their job, and everything that had seemed so reliable and pure and all of the beliefs around it – hard working people get ahead in life, and those that don’t get ahead are lazy. All of the sudden, that story crumbles, or their son tells them that he’s gay, and their whole story about homosexuals and sin and that God hates gays, that story disintegrates. It takes some kind of shock. Now, the shock could be negative, but it could also be positive. That’s why I like Strike Debt and the Rolling Jubilee because one thing that could disrupt somebody’s story of the world is to receive generosity or on a personal level to receive forgiveness, or to be really listened to for the first time. That would disrupt the story of, “Nobody is listening to me.” To be valued when you’ve never been valued in your life, to be respected when no one has ever respected you, these things can change somebody’s world.
I think that this is another meeting place of activism and spirituality where it just comes down to personal relationships, even if it’s just your neighbors across the street who are talking about how God hates Muslims and gays. What experience can you give them? Where does that hatred come from? What experience of life is causing that fear and hatred and how can you disrupt that? Maybe there’s some generous thing you can do for them, and even if it doesn’t directly attack their opinions about Muslims and gays, it does challenge or disrupt whatever world you are living in where basically people suck, and it’s us against them, and everyone is in it for themselves. If Occupy or whatever Occupy morphs into really wants to have a lasting influence, maybe Occupy should (and this is already happening a bit with Occupy Sandy) become like a service movement, maybe not only a service movement. The Muslim Brotherhood did this for decades and decades. They were basically a charity and social service organization. That’s why they had so much trust. Now, once they’re in political power, they’re discovering all kinds of hidden wounds.
This is why the movement was powerful at the beginning because of the slogans about the 99%. People have to know that we’re really in it for them. We’re really in it for society. We want to serve. We want to make life better for everybody, and that’s hard for people to see when it gets militant and political, so I think we have to actually broaden our understanding of what is political and to see what is the second foundation of the political system that we live in, the consumerist society and all that. I’m not saying that other levels aren’t important too, but if we only act upon the structure levels and system levels, and we don’t address the ground level, which is the foundation, I don’t think the movement will last.
I think that the crisis of this planet is challenging us to go all the way to the bottom of the crisis, and that goes all the way to the answers to the deep questions that we ask, “Who am I?” “Who is humanity?” “Where do we come from?” “Where are we going?” “What’s valuable?” “What’s important?” “What happens after you die?” “What’s the nature of life?” “How does change happen in the Universe?” This could get into a very long discourse, but the way that we have answered those questions as a society for centuries, “You are a separate self in a universal other.” “Things change when a force is exerted on them.” “The purpose of life is to survive and reproduce.” “Humanity has risen above animal origins to become the lords and masters of nature.” “Goodness comes through control because it’s this indifferent, impersonal, universal force out there.” All of this stuff, it’s becoming obsolete now, but our institutions are still built on that, and I think we have to work on that level as well as the institutional level.
Any label I put on what kind of world we can bring about is too small. I think that a lot of people have had glimpses at various times of what the world could be if everybody just got it, if everybody understood how precious life is, if everybody understood how precious other people are, if everybody could look at each other and understand that this person is a part of me, this person is a mirror of myself, that we’re all one, all connected, that there are no enemies. If we understood that nature has an innate intelligence and a tendency toward organization, a tendency toward beauty and unfolding purpose, that instead of conquering and imposing our will against a senseless substrate of generic building blocks, that we could participate in this unfolding. A world built on that would be a world of abundance – abundance of food, abundance of time, abundance of love, abundance of joy, of intimacy.
One way I describe it, it’s a world of gift consciousness. So say you’re a young person contemplating what career path to take. The question will no longer be, “How can I make a living?” “How can I leverage my abilities to take enough for me?” The question would instead be, “What is it that I want to give?” “What are my gifts from which I want to give to the world?” In theory, money is supposed to encourage that. If you do things that society values, society will give you money as a token of value. If you do things that have no value to anybody, then no one will give you money, in theory, but in practice so many of the necessary and beautiful things that need to happen today, there’s no money in those. Where is the money? It’s in things that are pushing us over the edge or things that we just don’t care about. Why should it be that way? Money is just a system of agreements, and those can be changed and brought into alignment with the things that we really care about.
That’s one of the things that I write about, “What would a money system look like if it were the ally and not the enemy of our desire to give to the world and to serve other beings?” Agriculture, it’s the same thing. Instead of essentially being a way to mine the soil and convert it into food, agriculture can be practiced in a way that gives and receives from the earth. I see a world of permaculture. What’s separating us from that right now? Just perceptions, habits and an economic system that encourages commodity production, which is related to a debt system. Even if you don’t want to convert some part of earth into product, if you’re under debt pressure, you have to. In Germany now, I can’t remember what the percentage it, but some really large percentage of buildings now are energy exporters. It doesn’t even cost that much money to retrofit a building or to build a new building. It doesn’t cost that much more to build is so that it’s hyper-efficient to the point where it actually produces more energy than it requires. These things are not far away.
I think that to focus on the economics and the technology of what the world could be kind of misses the part that really inspires me. I envision a world where most of the times a lot of the sounds you can hear are children playing and birds singing. I envision a world where we’re not afraid of the dark, so you can see the stars every night. I envision a world where it’s totally normal to meet someone outdoors and to just gaze into their eyes for five minutes. If you’ve ever done that and felt the intensity of connection and richness, in the midst of that experience, are you going to want to shop? Are you going to want to consume? Are you going to want to gamble? Look at pornography? It’s so nourishing. That’s the kind of nourishment that we don’t have today. We’re so disconnected from each other, disconnected from nature too, and the resulting void is an engine of endless consumption.
It’s not greed. Greed is a response. It’s a symptom of disconnection, so when we go to war against greed, we’re in delusion. That applies on a political level too. When we make greed into the enemy, greedy people into the enemy, we are not operating in reality. We’re not seeing why they’re greedy. It’s not because they’re bad. When you see them as bad and you see victory as conquering them, then you’ll end up in the same place you started, even if you do win, even if you mobilize millions of people to overthrow the bad guys. Then, the bad guys go home, and everyone goes home. Problem solved, but it’s not solved. The bad guys were just a symptom. Pretty soon, there are going to be new bad guys because you haven’t addressed the root of where greed comes from, where fear comes from, where hatred comes from.
It ultimately comes down to a lack of connection. In Occupy, in the encampments, people experienced connection. They experienced community, knowing each other, looking at a face and knowing the stories around that face, and needing each other. To look at someone and say, “I need you,” which is different from a money economy because if you have money, you can look at anyone and say, “I don’t need you. Whatever service you offer, I can pay somebody else." Maybe that’s one of the most valuable things that came out of Occupy. In fact, I have talked to Occupy people who have said that. What they will always remember, what they really learned, what they treasure is that experience of inner connection, of interdependency, of community. That’s what we’re hungry for. Anything we do to create that is simultaneously a spiritual act and a political act. The more people who are feeling connected, feeling part of something larger than themselves, then the fewer consumers we’ll have. What would the world be like if everybody trusted like that?
Charles Eisenstein is an author and public speaker and self-described "degrowth activist". He is the author of the 2011 book Sacred Economics.
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