This document from the NYPD (apparently taken from a paddy wagon by an arrested protester on the day Zuccotti was razed and pillaged) explains a lot about the psychological dynamics of the Bloomberg Police State (referred to as BPS from here on). I'll go through some of the prominent bullet points and offer some commentary.
- Your appearance is critical: What you look like means everything; who you are means nothing. You are only successful insofar as you can merge into the body of the collective (see below). To the extent that we all look, act, and think exactly alike, we are safe. "A strong military appearance" means more than any human skill.
- Follow directions of your supervisor: This goes to the heart of the tensions between the BPS and #Occupy. If the Occupiers had designated leaders or "supervisors," I'm certain the tensions would be far lighter than they are. The fact that #Occupy has no leaders, no bosses, no generals, no hierarchy, makes it difficult to deal with from the narrow perspective of the collective. This point is enlarged in the next bullet point...
- Do not act independently -- work as a team: We have two large groups with utterly different missions and mandates -- and I'm not even talking yet about the politics or the economic beliefs here, just the respective group psychologies. The BPS is about uniformity (see point 1 above, "ensure your uniform and required equipment are in proper working order"); #Occupy is about unity. As a leaderless organization, the Occupy groups function as a living organism rather than as a moving array of rigidly ranked boxes from an Excel spreadsheet. I've been to their marches and seen this: sub-groups within the main body break off and act independently, several of them separating and moving far afield in seeming chaos; and then they merge, as if spontaneously, even randomly, at a critical point in time and space. The #N17 demonstrations were a wonderful example of this -- those movements could not possibly have been choreographed more effectively, yet I doubt there was any command-and-control apparatus in place to guide the 30,000 or so marchers. It all just happened. And again, this reveals a fundamental clash between the BPS and Occupy that exists before any street confrontation occurs: in the BPS, the individual must merge as far as possible into the collective; in Occupy, independence is encouraged, because inter-dependence is assumed -- that is, individuals and sub-groups are comfortable working independently because they are conscious of their inter-dependence with others. Metaphorically, you might say that BPS consists of dark, stone blocks, each identical to the next, pushed across a lined map in rigid, rectilinear order ("when advancing...stay in formation"); while #Occupy is a web whose distinct strands arc simultaneously away from and toward a continually moving center, in a net of inter-dependence.
The rest of the document is notable for items that are obviously honored more in the breach than the observance (e.g., "maintain firearms discipline," "do not engage in unnecessary conversation," "do not congregate with other officers on post"). If I were a message-maker for any of the #Occupy groups (I am not; I am merely an observer, a witness to history being made), I would spend some time and energy focusing the attention of both my fellow Occupiers and the general public on the movement's unique, though natural, dynamics, as distinguished from the collective mindset of the BPS. Here, the point would be in turning back the reversal of figure and ground that has occurred in our media and other collective institutions. The behavior of #Occupy is not strange, aberrational, or freakish; the reality is quite the contrary. It is the rigid cult of control within the BPS (which also governs many of our corporate and governmental ideologies) that is weird and unnatural. Yet we are all used to the BPS mindset: there must be leaders, hierarchies, haves and have-nots, insiders and outsiders, emperors and subjects, oppressors and the oppressed. That is the way we exist; the way we've been taught, conditioned to exist. #Occupy is offering an alternative: living, rather than existence; self-governance rather than subjection to authority; independence and inter-dependence rather than assimilation into a collective. It's a challenging point to raise with people so used to the known, so it seems important to help them realize that the unknown is far less fearsome than what we have, the iron shroud of Control, under which we all suffocate.
The psychological truth that I hear most frequently within the message and actions of #Occupy is this: Revolution is about getting new leaders; replacing the "bad" bosses with new and "better" bosses. The problem with Revolution is the same as the problem with the BPS mindset itself: it reinforces inequality by
assuming subservience -- not only is subjection to power the
only way of being; it is the
safest, and therefore the
preferred way of being. That is, we wind up becoming as dependent on our own subservience as we are on the power that compels it. Thus you have Arendt's famous observation about the the most radical rebel who becomes a conservative the day after the revolution.
The message of Occupy, at its clearest and brightest, at least, is different. It's about Renewal rather than mere Revolution. Renewal is about overthrowing the cult of the Boss and discovering exactly how we as individuals and as a society might behave and prosper differently when the slavish dependence on authority and subservience is firmly and enduringly abandoned.