May 1, 2017

Protests Feed What They Oppose

By Joe Brewer / medium.com
Protests Feed What They Oppose

A “memetic” observation about all the resistance marches since Trump took office… the protests feed what they oppose.

There is a finite amount of emotional energy available in the world — the aggregate of all things that people are thinking about and acting on in any given moment. As one of my friends said last week, she finds it exhausting going from one march to another while trying to make time for her 18 month old child and all of the busy work being a working professional while being a mother.

Literally millions of “person hours” have been put into resistance efforts in the last several months. None of this energy has gone into alternative business models, permaculture projects to heal ecosystems, or any of a myriad other things that the world actively and urgently needs right now.

In parallel with this, those in power within the current system have sped up the pace of rape and pillage. Each passing week there is more devastating legislation passed and more wealth transferred from public coffers to the bank accounts of the super rich. In a word, we are losing.

And so I invite you to ponder your memetic strategy.

The future will emerge from the thoughts and actions in aggregate from each present moment. Pathways of development will close off some options along the way and open others to further expansion. What we are seeing now is a tremendous missed opportunity that we will never have again.

As millions of people squander their emotional energy by directing it at (and thus further legitimizing) the system they DON’T want, very little is left to invest in imagining the future they DO want.

Let this sink in. And then re-align your own mental landscape for the future you want to see emerge.

Onward, fellow humans.


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