Sean McKeown

Occupy Wall Street's Six Month Anniversary, March 17, 2012, Liberty Square
Photo: Allegra Culpepper

I guess you could say I’ve been with Occupy since long before there was an Occupy, just all on my lonesome and my own way.  I’ve been focusing on the divisiveness of partisan politics, the corrosive effect of money in politics, and the causes of the 2008 financial meltdown since about 2006 in some capacity or another, ever since I first heard about “NINJA” loans (“No income, no job or assets”) and the septic mass of the securities market, and figured out that Wall Street was committing suicide on behalf of the country as a whole, and they forgot to ask if we cared.  I started writing a novel a few years ago about the effects of corporate influence on the rule of law, working on a dystopian sci-fi novel set in a stagnant future world where corporate influences have completely purchased and captured the political and economic system, so when I saw Occupy Wall Street, I thought, “Finally! Other people are just as angry about this as I am!”

I heard about Occupy a few days before it happened. I have a former room-mate who had heard about it from AdBusters and was going to go down to help as a street medic, and it sounded like it was going to be an interesting event. I had to miss it because I had scheduled a trip to Cambodia to visit my girlfriend, and I figured it was a shame, but it wasn’t like I was going to reschedule a vacation over it, so I’d just have to miss it. While I was overseas, a lot happened. The day I returned, I found out about the Brooklyn Bridge arrests and told myself that as soon as I was over the jetlag I’d make my way to Zuccotti Park and see what I could do to help. I’ve been part of Occupy ever since.

Occupy is important because, before anything else, the core problem at the heart of our political and economic system is apathy.  Humans are very good at offsetting any complicated problem they don’t think has an immediate impact upon their lives, compartmentalizing it into boxes in our heads where we approximate them and don’t have to think about them and understand them (ask anyone on the streets how an internal combustion engine works!) or just shucking off the mental workload onto someone or something else and trusting everything will be all right. The evidence, however, suggests that everything will not in fact be all right. Occupy is the antidote, in that it calls attention to the problems in the world and gets information out there, waking people up from their complacency and forcing them out of that sleepy compartmentalization to realize that by ceding their minds to the agenda of the status quo will not, in fact, advance their own best interests. The system has become corrupted, and whether you think it needs to be repaired or replaced, Occupy calls attention to the fact that something must be done and that we, the people, must be the ones to do it.

Occupy is amazing not because of its street actions or its opinions but because of the means by which it moves forward and advances its agenda. It creates a space where good ideas can flourish, and the best ideas can be found rather than the stagnant space we live in where a bad idea can perpetuate itself memetically by force of habit or sheer repetition. We have to work hard to get to the bottom of things. The first duty of anyone at Occupy, after all, is to one’s own self-interest, and that means learning more about the system of the world, so we can better understand it; this came from the occupation of the public forum, which drew diverse people from all over to share their specific knowledge and educate others as they themselves came to be educated. By challenging the system of the world as we understand it in our own heads, we get more and more creative minds working constructively on new models, finding new channels to move everything forward and counteract the pernicious influence of bad ideas perpetuated by bald-faced liars backed by piles of cash. We don’t just vote on things and do what 51% of us think is right. We dig deep and move slowly to find the best answer we can, drawing together diverse opinions and minority voices rather than run roughshod over 49% of the people there just because we want to move quickly. Be it by design or by accident, Occupy embraces a system of thought and interaction that will find the best answers it can over time, and it is this striving for the best answers and seeing them put to work in the world around us that is the true function of Occupy.

I’m a weird Occupier, in that I’m a capitalist. Not in the “greedy 1%er” kind of way; I don’t come to Occupy with a fat stock portfolio and trust funds dotted all across the world. I simply come from a moral perspective that understands the intention of capitalism to be a means by which people interact and exchange value for value. I see democracy and capitalism as inextricably intertwined; one is a moral system of self-governance, the other a moral system of exchange for services and the fruits of an individual’s productivity.  I don’t see Occupy Wall Street as being against capitalism, as capitalism is intended to function, as a moral system of human interaction. I’ve been a part of Occupy even as I live these moral precepts as an individual clearly within my daily life, so I can say I know better... we’re against the corruptions of capitalism unbridled that are the expressions of the worst within Man when left unchecked by his own self-interest, and we need to reverse the system we now live in because we all recognize that it is effectively political and economic suicide, and possibly literally so if we don’t reverse our abuse of the environment and reverse climate changes which every day kills entire species on our planet and will cut down ours just as surely if we perpetuate this cycle of irresponsible behavior.

The world I want to see come out of this is a moral world, where people exchange value for value based on their own self-interest, and the system of the world is properly designed so that it is this self-interest that drives the world to greater and greater advancement, so that the best within each of us raises the pinnacles of modern humanity. This world has to control abuses of this moral system, to live within the rule of law in a system properly designed to recognize as immoral that which is immoral and never undermine freedom or justice in the name of expedience. This is the ideal of democracy under which America was founded, and the ideal we as Americans continue to strive towards – because it is an ideal we have never once in our history as Americans achieved. It is still the great work before us, and it is there to be had inside each of us. The revolution is cultural, and to live in this world, you must first be of this world – chasing self-destruction in the name of one’s balance sheet or quarterly profits is opposite to that culture. It is opposite to life itself because it always seeks another victim for its sacrificial altars rather than create wealth by means of production in a sustainable way. The world I envision has no sacrificial altars, but instead holds the promise that by one’s own intellect and labors one can succeed, so long as one holds true to this moral code of interaction with your fellow man.  

Interview by Stacy Lanyon

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