In the latest issue of the New Yorker we find a cartoon, showing two women with huge brand-name shopping bags, blurting out “I am going to start my own Occupy movement on 57th St”.
Scott Peck, on Organization, observes that organisations go through phases: honeymoon , chaos then, compromise before reaching full functioning.
Movements however are little bit different (spontaneous and horizontal spread) e.g. Ms movement.
Wonder Woman, shopping for Wonder Bread and raising wonderful children, although a few grew up to be “flower-children”.
If you want to understand the human potential movement, you need to see that “naked gestalt circle” in TIME. We were into breathing, feeling and (organic) gardening.
The thing about movements is that they morph and move on.
In their wake, Ms movement for instance, we have a whole generation of children grow up without close supervision from either parent (pre-Mr Mom era).
I was both fortunate and unfortunate to grow up with two sets of parents: one biological, and the other, already-grown-up siblings (who to this day can’t grow out of their surrogate role). With two women of the house being out of the house, I learned to grow up quick on my own.
While sorting through various upheavals, from the British Invasion (Beatles) to “the Invasion of the Body Snatchers“, I was mindful of movements, but always missed out on them by a few years (sexual revolution, de-apartheid movement, organic movement and computer revolution).
There is nothing inherently evil or good about movements. It’s an exploitable situation when people are seeking and open to change e.g. Jim Jones and San Diego suicide pact. One can easily be swept away in clashes and chants, in mobs and marches.
The very leaderless nature of a movement gives it both authenticity and vulnerability. By the time it fizzles out, we have no central figure to blame (or send city-sanitation bills to).
In Egypt, they had arrested a Google executive, but a few days later, he was surprised that the Arab Spring had taken hold during his detention.
Right now, the movement to go online (shop until you drop) has surely advanced way pass its honeymoon phase (dot.com) and chaotic phase (dot.com burst).
Web 2.0 is here to stay (Groupon was so confident that it had refused Google’s best offer) and to push to the Cloud (Facebook has just picked Sweden to anchor its large server farm). A digital joke: can your parent tell a server from a waiter? Or as in our New Yorker’s cartoon, Occupy Wall Street vs Occupy Fifty-Seventh St?
When it comes to movements, you need to zoom out and take a balcony view. While having less fun, detachment helps you see the DNA strand that runs through all : dis-contentment. History is made up of movements, large and small. In my short time, it just happens to be full of both. Now, where should we Occupy next?
Thang Nguyen 555 