Originally posted by me elsewhere on 10/09/2011
If you have watched any footage of the protesters who are part of the Occupy-Wall-Street movement, you may have noticed they have adopted the creepy custom of repeating whatever the person addressing them says. At first I thought that they were doing this so an unamplified voice could be heard over a large distance. However I have since noted that they are continuing to engage in this practice even if the speaker is electronically amplifying his voice with a bullhorn. So it has occurred to me that this repeat-everything custom has a certain liturgical quality and helps with the development of the hive mind that is growing there.
What’s a hive mind? The hive mind was featured in several of the Star Trek features. It is the mind of the collective that is known as the Borg. All individuals are submerged into a singular consciousness. So that’s what I was thinking when I came across this YouTube video. In it the civil rights leader John Lewis has appeared among the protesters in Atlanta with the aim of addressing their group. In an almost-too-painful-to-watch process, Lewis is sent packing because the hive mind asserts that no person alive is more important than any other person alive and John Lewis’ years of service and dedication to civil rights in no way elevates him over any of the people on the street.
In addition through a show of hands it actually appears as though the majority of people there want to hear John Lewis speak. But despite the chants of This is what democracy looks like!, the hive mind doesn’t buy into majority rule. The man with the bullhorn in the video is emphatic that the group’s ground rule is that they only pursue a course of action if there is consensus. Since there were dissenters, they were going to go about doing whatever was on their agenda before Lewis appeared and leave him cooling his jets. At this point Lewis left.
Okay, now time for the irony alert! In March of 2010 John Lewis complained that tea party protesters had shouted the N-word at him as he passed through their midst in Washington – a claim that BigGovernment has taken issue with. In addition the tea party movement has been much maligned because those showing up at protests were said to be “overwhelmingly white.” But as John Lewis looked out at the hive mind, he must have noticed that all those folks who couldn’t reach consensus on granting him permission to speak were… well, they were overwhelmingly white.
By the way, as Lewis was leaving the site, one of the protesters was trying to offer an apology to him on behalf of the hive mind, but this riled up the hive mind who shouted the apologizer down with repeated chants of “I object!”.
[youtube:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=3QZlp3eGMNI%5D
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