In a time where new hybrid movements seem to flash up every single day; where special interest causes abound due to the many different, yet connected problems we face; consolidating ourselves and maintaining cohesion in the activist community is critical.
Given that society is a deep, complex synergy of social, biological, economic, environmental, and technical factors; engaging platforms that are holistically thinking facilitates more complete and relevant understandings. The problems out there share a common systemic source, and have common systemic solutions. Ideas and concepts are realized in their full implications within the context of others. There’s a natural synergy of understanding when things are brought together, conceptually.
While ideas must continue to evolve with fresh new approaches, too much reinventing the wheel and launching new initiatives of off-shoots and groups can spread us too thin, and fragment otherwise unified efforts.
The even greater damage is the erosion of holistic thinking and focus, as many off shoot movements/initiatives tend to focus their approaches to more specific and singular areas, limiting the “big picture” scope of awareness so desperately needed in the world today to confront system-change.
There’s also an (insidious) relativism of ideas and priority that sets in with too much fragmentation. An endless array of movements exhausts people’s bandwidth and coherence of priority on where and how to direct their efforts. Just think of the perpetual splitting off and meiosis of ideologies into new variant “isms”, and “ists”, the countless non-profits seeking your email and donation; the constant duplicity of groups on social media, promising as the new, one true revolutionary platform for change; all the simplistic, sensationalized activism that is quick to go viral, but lacks tangible robust solutions, fragmenting, exhausting, and confusing things.
Perhaps it’s an outcome of people lacking a sense of completion and reward in a long term system-change movement, and to reinvigorate their emotional drive for activism they launch some new initiative. It’s that immediate short term-reward/gratification pathology vs. the deep, structural, long term change needed.
Not to discourage new movements that are genuinely evolving ideas, but redundancy of the same general direction should be avoided. We should consolidate ourselves where we can.
A platform for unified activism is what is needed- one grounded in fundamental principles for improving the world, ie: the reduction of suffering and inequality, sustainability/stabilizing our relationship to nature, applying our science and technology wisely, structural change to society, making corruption punishable, working towards systems of universal access and autonomy, automating labor to end oppression and liberate human potential, reallocating our resources from war and the 1% to advancing society, presenting new models and systems to replace Capitalism with, addressing identity-tribalism, bias, and cults of ignorance, etc.; shared goals and principles, from a shared reality, which bridge across all issues of concern as a complete, holistic approach to society and progress.
It’s time we move beyond “special interest” causes, and come together around a truly structural approach to the whole of society.
The Zeitgeist Movement has attempted to facilitate just this kind of platform for ideological unification from the very beginning. Our true power for change is in the realization of our shared social goals, and the common ground we all really do share.
