Since early October, I've been closely following Occupy Wall Street, and the other protests it spawned. At first I was interested in it as a sort of social experiment, I've never heard of long-term camping as a means of protest, and I was curious to see how it would work out. As it's grown though, I've been thinking that there might be a couple of things happening in the movements that might be of interest to rationalist communities. I've not seen much discussion of Occupy and its tactics on LessWrong, and I think that if nothing else, they're at least interesting, so I thought I'd open it up here.
Each Occupy movement is a hotbed of community experimentation. Things like General Assemblies (horizontally democratic voting discussions to make policy decisions) and ad-hoc sanitation, fire, and security committees of all shapes and sizes are popping up all over. What's more, as the events grow in size, and as police pressure on the events rises, these constructs are going to be tested more and more. We have a wildly varied gene pool, strong environmental constraints, and a fast mutation rate. It's a big evolutionary experiment in community formation. And I think if we look closely, we can find a whole lot of useful hacks to make stronger communities.
The whole thing's a great big ethical, emotional, and legal mess. There are issues with how private/public property laws intersect with freedom of speech, there are matters of what level of force is justifiable for police to keep peace in certain situations, there're issues of whether health and safety trump rights of protest, on and on and on. If nothing else, there's an interesting discussion there, about what a truly rational set of laws would look like, and whether or not the protesters or the police are justified in their actions.
And at the risk of sounding like a James Bond villain, there are some serious options for us to take over the world here. In the sense at least that the Occupy movements' goal is lasting societal change, and they have a good deal of momentum already. If members of the rationalist community moved to help them, they might have a fair deal more. And if we introduce them to rational ways of thinking, if we inject those memes into the discussion, there's some serious opportunity here to help stop the world being so insane.
At least that's my take on the whole thing. And I'm not exactly strong in the ways of rationality yet, still reading and re-reading the Sequences (I keep getting lost somewhere halfway into the QM sequence, I think I need to practice mathematics more to understand it on a more instinctive level) and I'd certainly appreciate the view of those Stronger than me.
Ah, I see what you're getting on about now (And yes, I did accidentally think you meant the post-modernist art style rather than the philosophy, sorry about that,)
I've been trying to figure out why philosophies like that tend to profuse in the left more than the right, actually. I've not come up with much yet, and I think that it may just be a Rattlers-v-Eagles type thing, where one party takes on a philosophy just to differentiate themselves from the other party.
So I think that this may just be a very good opportunity to help educate people out of those post-modernist leanings. Most every protester out there is angry at what they view as a rigged political and economic system, they'd probably be pliable to believing other systems aren't true as well. And if we come up to them with very convincing arguments, they may just listen.
Not saying it'd work universally, or even all that widely, but teaching even a few people is a long way from being a bad thing.
I don't know what to say about "left" and "right" here -- I don't find those terms descriptive enough to be useful for analysis; they are more useful for branding -- but it seems almost definitionally true that the sorts of people who find a mode of thought that emphasizes deconstructing conventional beliefs appealing are more likely to identify as political or social progressives than as conservatives.