Dis-organizers of the world unite!
We have to get together on something for a minute.
Okay, you got me, I confess, the use of this picture above veers pretty close to boomer leftist thirst-trapping, but bear with me, I do have a point to make. For those who don’t know, that’s me on the far left in the crimson red mask (I gave away my cool black ones). The banner I am holding says “Glory to Hong Kong.” The one just behind me to the right says “Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Times.” That is the Chinese consulate across from Pier 81 on the west side of Manhattan behind me. We were walking back across the street after holding a teach-in on the sidewalk out front. This was July 1. Picture courtesy of Wilfred Chan of Lausan, the organizers for this protest action.
My down-trodden appearance is multi-focal. First, and probably most importantly, I was physically tired. I had been holding that banner aloft for about an hour. But, I had also just watched someone important walk out of my life by a very Matrix-like set of coincidence that I have written about elsewhere. Thirdly, this was in some ways an act of mourning. The National Security Law had just been applied to Hong Kong, and one of the world’s great experiments in making the transition from colonial to self-determined rule was over. Some of these people standing around me just lost their homeland.
When the police rolled up about half an hour beforehand I felt that hollow feeling of fear in the center of my chest. Suddenly I realized the courage that people protesting in the streets these days have to summon to be out there. We were standing in front of the Chinese consulate. Which global authority legally controls that stretch of sidewalk is not clear. We had no permit. The police kept a respectful distance and while their vans were still parked on the street just behind my head in that picture, they did not follow us as we left peacefully.
One might wonder why I am there. I am not from Hong Kong. I have never been there. The only person I knew personally among all those present left without letting me know during the action. But, these are my people. How does that work?
Promise Li (a good name for this guy because he has a lot of promise), touched on this in this recent piece on Lausan, an online publication about Hong Kong I read, also the organizers of the protest pictured above. This is one of a series of themed essays Mr. Li has been developing that point directly to what I am pointing at in this one.
It is actually time for all people committed to justice and collective self-determination to unite.
In some ways, both SARS-CoV-19, the wadded-up fragile sticky ball of ribose sugars that causes CoVID-19, and also the the 45th President of the US, are gifts to humanity. They focus our awareness. They both represent forces which will destroy us if we do not change how we live together on this blue speck of wet dust in an otherwise inhospitable, cruel, and utterly heartless universe.
We need to cede control of our societies to public health authorities temporarily. It will behoove us to plan ahead of time how to transition it back after we finally grind this troublesome wad of ribose sugar strands into the pavement with the heels of science’s stilettos. That’s going to take some time.
We need to shame the stupidity of racial identity out of existence, permanently relegating it to flat-earth levels of social credibility. Race is a construct, an idea, it has no existence outside of human thought. It can be defeated by simply observing the actual world that exists around us.
I don’t mean we should ignore race, that’s the same thing as identifying with it. We need to see through it. Yes, people are different. That has to do with a lot of different things. Race is a misunderstanding of all that, not an insight. Race exists, but only as a notion we all agree upon. If human thought ceases, so does race.
Reality is right there, available to anyone, all the time. It is actually all that is there. The rest of what we think about the world are beliefs, dots we’ve connected. These connections are there because everything is connected, but because everything connected, nothing is particularly connected.
Authoritarianism offers a refuge from this uncertainty. Human beings get a rush of pleasure and reward hormones for buying into a belief system, like a good smooth hit off a philosophical bong. Ah, it is all going to work out now.
It is much more of a challenge to live with the uncertain, shifting, manifestations and losses of reality. It hurts. It offers no inherent conceptual meaning. Meaning has to be imbued upon reality. This is really tricky.
Governments that account for and respond to reality are messy and they disappoint us often, but no more often than we all disappoint ourselves, and no more messy than our personal lives together. We want to believe that there’s a level of human organization that can work well, so we invest much in the behavior of those in government, and they inevitably, repeatedly, reveal, alas, they’re human too. It has never been any other way.
The refuge from all that persistent disappointment is authoritarianism—Trump, Xi, Bolsonaro, Putin, Duterte, etc., ad nauseam. This is the other virus. The idea that an idea is the answer is the problem. There is no answer. Life is messy. You might as well herd cats.
The answer is organizing around the ideas that are important at the time, but not to confuse the ideas with the leader. Yes, the executive branch of government could do well if the efficiency of a well-run private enterprise were brought to bear, but not Trump’s confidence scam masquerading as such. Yes, the executive branch of government could do well if the needs of the common people were truly put ahead of the needs of the wealthy few, but not Xi’s insider-trading cronyism.
Let’s leave aside that discussion as a diversion. This kind of categorization feeds the virus of authoritarianism. What is possible if we drop the search for a way, as in capitalism vs. socialism, to do this and just start solving problems? What happens when we take our authority back?
That’s why I marched holding a banner I couldn’t read. I want the same thing these people want. I want to live in justice and peace. We all have the same problems, we all face the same obstacles to progress. Their problems are my problems. Our solutions are the same.
This is what Mr. Li points to in his essay, this is what I point to here. Those of those who generally don’t respond well to being organized around authority need to organize ourselves around moral and ethical authority. In previous eras of humanity this wasn’t possible. we didn’t know about each other, we couldn’t organize globally.
Air travel half a century ago brought some of this about. Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X flew to Africa and left connected organizations behind. The Black Panthers did the same, some are still in exile. Now we have connected information networks. We can do this now from our cell phones.
But, it’s going to be herding cats. It won’t be Live-Aid. There will be grand unifying moments, but mostly it is going to be fraught with the kind of messy confusion and disorganization that we all face now.
But, it has to be deliberate. We have to do it. We have to reach out. We must persist.