Militant dissidence can affect positive change

I love democracy, capitalism, Jesus and America. I also love anarchy, socialism, Buddha and Canada.

I love these ideas because they are all concepts that contribute to cultural evolution. In this instance, the term evolution is intended to parallel genetic evolution.

While genetic evolution operates under the principles of natural selection within gene pools, cultural evolution functions under similar yet distinct principles within a knowledge pool.

This knowledge pool is constituted primarily by our creations: language, institutions, objects, art and anything that facilitates communication.

Our interactions with these creations determine our cultural evolution, particularly when our interactions or participations are channeled or grouped.

For example, a single individual’s ideas are worthless in a democracy if others will not hear and propagate them, regardless of whether they agree.

So long as there is common participation in that idea, or creation, it might have the opportunity to affect change on some level — even if it’s simply a slight change of opinion. Capitalism works similarly: Markets respond to trends, not individual choices.

For this reason, ideas are a form of currency that do not belong under your mattress. Spend, share, give and take — otherwise this currency is worthless.

Through their dissent, occupiers are using their currency better than anyone else today. They recognize the need for the currency of ideas to be exchanged and for particular ideas, such as anarchy, to be defended despite existing environmental pressures that write it off simply as chaos.

It must be understood that anarchists do not endorse lawlessness for the sake of destruction or disorder. Democratic socialists do not want power to be controlled by an unjust oppressive government but instead want power to be equally distributed through an effective government.

Occupations are intended in large part to create a marketplace for ideas within which marginalized ideas might regain value lost due to lack of engagement with those ideas.

“Lack of engagement,” I recognize, is the soft way of putting it, yet it is my choice of rhetoric.

The rhetoric of more militant activists will say that terms such as socialism, anarchism and communism have been smothered and entirely sterilized of connotations of plausibility within mainstream public discourse by the existing power structure.

Such militant activists are calling for the destruction of this power structure so that misrepresented terms can reclaim their value and be given the opportunity to gather support as all ideas should.

Across the world, activists are becoming more militant. From Greece to Oakland, Calif., these activists are done waiting for their call to be heard. They are mobilizing and beginning to tear down systems of oppression — social oppression, economic oppression and ideological oppression.

I ask you not to forgive my militant friends. They deserve praise.

They fight not only for their own ideas but for all ideas. As occupations continue, which they likely will, remember that they are not only for those bold enough to defy authority and take what they see a need for. They take space for everyone’s benefit.

­— poren@indiana.edu