Building on what has come before.

In the previous few posts, at the end of the list of chunks of new knowledge, I wrote:

Some ideas, some chunks of knowledge, can spread very fast throughout a whole population, especially if the population has been prepared by being supplied with the intermediate knowledge required so that the new or radical idea makes sense. The foundation is already there and when the new idea is heard even once the reaction in the vast majority of people is “Yes!, Yes! That’s exactly right. That is what we must do.”

Can we analyze this? It sounds great. If we could organize the stages of our revolution so that each stage ended with an epiphany, a kind of revelation in a large number of new people, a revelation of some significant revolutionary truths, that would cause them to accept, support, or actively work for the revolution, then it would seem that the revolution would be very well underway. In the previous posts I was trying to analyze chunks of knowledge, information useful for making a revolution. I was asking what would be a good order to spread these chunks of knowledge, these facts, these truths, these opinions to a big chunk of the population.

The revolution might be more or less continuous. That is progress might be more or less steady. Or it could be like Steven Jay Gould’s punctuated equilibrium in biological evolution — periods where nothing much seems to be happening, separated — punctuated — by, very short periods of great change. And we must anticipate periods of reversal, where there are system changes that take us farther away from our goals.

Since the revolution occurs in people’s minds, the revolution can be progressing during periods of apparent stasis and even reversal. And of course the revolution does not have to proceed through punctuated euphoric revelations either. There may be none. But there will probably be some.

If there are any euphoric revelations — where some significant revolutionary idea/s spread almost instantaneously to a large portion of the population — this will generate a lot of enthusiasm for the revolution. We must keep this new enthusiasm focused toward our revolutionary goals and methods. Mass enthusiasm can be dangerous. Charlatans and those not working towards our revolutionary goals might lead people in wrong directions. But this will be less likely if many or most people have previously inoculated themselves against propaganda and self serving authoritarians/leaders through the methods of improving their thinking we discussed in the previous posts.

So, given that the revolution must occur in people’s minds, how do we see any progress, any changes in our systems? The changes in people’s minds precede changes in their behavior. The changes in behavior will affect the operation of the system directly and indirectly. The changes in people’s minds must be translated into changes in the structures of our economic/political systems. This might happen through changes in laws. It might happen through changes in customs if a large enough number of people change their behavior in consistent ways. For example, if enough bankers, traders etc., change their minds, if they realized that arbitrary credit/money creation is the cause of booms and busts, then maybe they would restrain their indefinite creation of credit/money. This seems very unlikely. More likely more laws and rules would have to be made and enforced. If enough people in general realized that running up big debts on credit cards is unwise (or to be very blunt — costly, foolish, crazy, stupid (or maybe it is none of these things if the person knows the banks will never be able to collect since he has no or little money or property)), then maybe more and more people stop using credit cards and they just fade away. There are many ways in which changes in the individual behaviors of enough people will change the system, will change its structure.

The more basic question: How do we stage the revolution? What do we do first? Then what do we do next? It may be ridiculous to try to plan ahead like this. What we do second may be impossible to decide until the first stage is done. So then the question really becomes: At any point in time, what should we do next? Or: What should we do now? Since the revolution is changing people’s minds toward the revolutionary goals and methods, and since any individual person can only build on what they already know at any point in time, different people will need different new knowledge at any point in time. We must send out multiple messages at any one time. Depending on the specific knowledge an individual person has at any time, only some of our messages will make sense to that person. We can try to direct specific knowledge to specific groups such as bankers, traders, economists, the rich, workers, students, scientists, etc. But we can’t be sure that everyone in a specific group gets our message. And some people in other groups will get messages not specifically directed toward them. This is one reason all our messages must be consistent with our goals and methods. Some politicians make the mistake of sending inconsistent messages to different groups. They may say one thing to one group and the opposite to another group. Information leaks, always. So some people at least will see that the politician is lying. We must be as transparent and truthful and consistent and science based as we can be regarding our goals and methods and in all our activities. Consistent messages are easier to accept than inconsistent ones. Consistent messages will spread farther and faster.

How are we going to spread our revolutionary messages? Now in developed countries there are mass media on the one hand and everything else on the other. The everything else includes person to person conversation unmediated — the people communicating are physically close enough to each other that they can hear and see each other directly. Each can hear the words and see the facial and bodily expressions of the other. There are cell phones. There is the internet with typed words and some videos. Different individuals select different methods of getting information about the society and cuilture, the operations of the political and economic systems. Some watch TV, some listen to the radio, some read newspapers, some read books, some read internet blogs. Individuals select their sources of information.

Some blogs are already more or less dedicated to spreading revolutionary ideas, although they may not see it that way. These are critique blogs. They comment on particular areas of our society — politics, economics, banking, the law, civil rights, particular ideologies, etc. In so far as they point out deficiencies in their area of concern, they are spreading maybe the first revolutionary idea — namely that things are so bad, so out of whack, so dysfunctional, so harmful that drastic changes are needed; a revolution is needed.

So our challenge is to determine which of these methods of communication to use where and when to develop and spread our revolutionary ideas.

It is very interesting that direct person to person communication — the most complete form of human to human communication — unmediated communication — is being used by OWS (Occupy Wall Street) and the other Occupys in their general assemblies. And the repetition instead of electric amplification reinforces the information, the messages, into the minds of those hearing and repeating the messages. This is amazing. Obviously it can’t scale directly to a group of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. Rather it seems to be scaling like bacterial colonies as new Occupys spring up in other cities like a new bacterial colony can start from a single bacterium wafted through the air.

Within any one Occupy the direct person to person communication with repetition may be a very good way to reach strong consensus. And if the different Occupys have essentially the same goals for changing our systems — towards social justice — there may be little difference in their resulting actions. There may be differences as to what to do first. But maybe that doesn’t matter too much. Try something. Try many different things. Keep trying. This may be a good strategy. Notice I don’t say “the best” strategy because we can waste much time and energy about what the best strategy is when there are many possibilities that as far as we can tell now are likely to be more or less equally good.

Maybe the same applies to our question of which revolutionary knowledge to send out to which people when. Maybe a good strategy is to just send it all out to as many people as possible whatever their class or role in our culture through as many communication channels as we can. For every person we should have revolutionary information that will make sense to them and all our messages must be true and consistent with our goals and methods, with social justice — a fair distribution of the products and services we make from the earth’s limited resources, sustainably, non-violently.