I know I have not been involved with your group for long, however because I share many of your goals and admire the dedication and efforts you are putting forward, I am writing to explain my decision to withdraw. I want to share, with those of you who may be interested, my grave concerns about the direction of the Occupy movement. Let me preface this with the statement that I believe in the good intent of all of you and I ask that my observations and criticisms not be viewed as personal attacks against any of the good people, just trying to figure things out, and trying to be of service to something greater than ourselves.
There has been a lot of talk about the difference between violence and non-violence in words, actions, and I might add processes. I deeply believe that there is a great subtle violence lurking within how OWSNC is organizing itself. Ironically, the last time I felt this group violence directed at me was at a meeting of the Move to Amend group at the Social Forum in Detroit. I had spent $2,000 of my scarce resources, had taken a week of my equally scarce time, spent hundreds of dollars duplicating materials and endless hours preparing to go to the forum so that I could moderate a workshop on the issue of Corporate Personhood -- where I asked the question "What if a Corporation could be a People, not a Person? The small and enthusiastic group that attended had some interesting insights and ideas and I went to the Assembly on the topic, hosted by the Move to Amend organization, to represent the consensus of this group. At the Assembly, organized by the same Consensus rules you are now implementing, I was repeatedly denied the right to participate by the "facilitators" from Move to Amend. I was not asking for a disproportional level of participation, but simply asked to participate at a level equal to the other participants and to share the work of our little group. They were operating by what Sharon last night gave me the language for, which is a "Progressive Stack", i.e "some people are more equal than others". I might add that progressive stacking was not a concept consensed upon and was arbitraritly imposed by the facilitators and most of us were unaware of the existence of those hidden rules.
Repeatedly, I was denied the chance to report. At the Forum, the phrase "Check yourself" was repeatedly used when someone thought that a speaker needed to reflect upon their own actions and biases. Faced with the real possibility that all the time, effort, and money I had invested, in wanting to be of service to change, would evaporate, naively I had the audacity to suggest that the Facilitator might want to check her own racial and sexual biases in how she ran the stack and controlled the direction of the conversation. Well, let's just say that "the shit hit the fan". I became the focus of the most intense group violence I have ever felt in my life (it made the harassment of my youth seem benign) -- and it did not come from the majority of the group (who seemed willing to accept my statement and reflect upon its relevance, as they were also unaware of the undemocratic imposition of progressive stacking), but instead by the small group of "facilitators" from Move to Amend. The head of the organization decided that my simple suggestion for the main facilitator to reflect on whether she had biases that might be impeding a constructive group dynamic was such a sacrilege that the leader of the group moved to amend his sitting position to directly beside me and proceeded to stare me down in what can only be described as a look of blood lust and hatred. I came to fear that he actually intended to physically assault me if I did not leave the room immediately. After some moments of stubborn, but trying my best to be peaceful, resistance to his violence I finally decided that I could no longer face the intense group pressure that was being directed at me and left the meeting. Afterwards, several people (none of them white males) came up to me and said that the Move to Amend Founder was out of line, and that they had seen nothing in my comment that had warranted that kind of aggressive response. I now know that there
was in fact a racial and sexual bias that was indeed in play and as of last night I now know its name.
I have thought deeply about where the tears I shed last night came from. My first instinct was that my feelings of insecurity and self doubt had bubbled up and that I was transported to my childhood and the group schoolyard taints that caused me such pain as boy. Or, that the pain of my recent divorce, the struggle to minimize its effects on my children, the impending lose of my business broke thru. But what I now believe is that I needed a release of the emotional intensity that was required to stand up to the power of group think and the pressure from the great energy that is needed to oppose a powerful leader of a group that does not want your ideas to derail the much lauded "consensus" (if you doubt the power of a "facilitator" I would refer you to the work on
Jigsaw Classrooms of Elliot Aronson and his identification of the power of a teacher as the omnipotent bestower of all favors and punishments in a classroom)
This deeply flawed dynamic lies at the heart of the consensus process. True group consensus is a near mathematical impossibility. This can be best illustrated by the Movie Picking Problem. One person can easily pick the time, place, and movie to see. Two people is not twice as hard, but is actually two times two times harder, because they have to agree upon time, place, and movie. The complexity of three people deciding a movie is then exponentially multiplied again. So, by the time you get to the small group size of 5 it becomes almost mathematically impossible to pick a movie as a group, and one person usually steps up, makes a decision, and then everyone else has only the decision of whether to go or not. If something as simple as picking a movie as a group is impossible, how can any more complex decision hope to reach consensus.
The practical reality is that it can't. So "facilitators" of consensus processes learn to force consensus by picking dissenting voices to ignore. Whether thru tools like progressive stacking, or by simply marginalizing people who raise doubts and concerns (usually in the name of "getting everyone home on time"). There is also a preference for simple decisions as opposed to complicated, contentious ones and the latter are "tabled for future discussion" where a small group meets between meetings, comes to an agreement amongst themselves, and then returns to the council and works as a coordinated sub-group to "encourage" consensus around the solution they have decided upon separately.
Here is where I see the possible evil that can arise from this whole thing and I beg of you to guard against. Move to Amend has publicly announced that their goal is to "destroy capitalism". I definitely think that capitalism needs vigorous old fashion competition, however the Move to Amend group has also publicly supported socialism and communism to replace capitalism. I am not one who sees the communist boogie man under every non-Republican rock, but I see real possibilities for a resurgence of these failed ideologies in the Occupy movement. The appeal of these Isms was so prevalent in the Detroit Social Forum that former Marxist organizer, 95 year old Grace Boggs took the unprecedented action of warning the packed Assembly hall of young, enthusiastic organizers to be cautious of embracing Communism and Socialism as those systems have severe deficiencies in the preservation of individual liberty and the rights of minorities and she referred to Castro's assault against homosexuals specifically. In one side forum, an intense, earnest 22 year old moderator was laying out his idea for a new economic system, and a elderly white male asked what would happen under the young man's system if someone didn't want to participate, and the budding Fascist said coldly and sternly that "we" would require participation.
Many organizers of the Occupy Movement come from this extreme leftist history of organizing, and the consensus process is directly taken from the brutal "worker's" cooperatives of collective farms from the former Soviet Union and the revolutions of Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba. I believe that "Leaderless" "Consensus" processes are easily taken over by faceless coordinators and bureaucrats and need to, by mathematical necessity, stifle and ostracize dissenters for the "good of the people, the party, or even the 99%". They end up as powerful "group-think" machines, incapable of dealing with the complexities of the world, that implement successive failed 5 year economic plans and need to exert more and more violence to maintain their authority long after the people stop giving it voluntarily -- but by then it is too late and we have a new tyranny to replace the old one.
I know that none of you have any of what I have said as a conscious goal, however if we have learned anything in the 20th century it should be the Law of Unintended Consequences. I wish you luck on your efforts. I believe deeply in your goals but have grave concerns about the path you are following.
-- Michael Rogers Box 38 Shinneyboo, CA 95724 530-587-5160 michael@shinneyboocreek.com www.shinneyboocreek.com “Great things are wanting to be done.” -- John Adams, 2nd President of the United States
