Category Archives: Sociology

One of the human species’ defining traits may be our need to find meaning. We are born into a world that seems devoid of objective purpose, yet we strive all the same to create and express subjective values, understanding, one hopes, that these senses of meaning are personal and not necessarily universal. All the same, as social animals, we seem driven to find common ground, to generate ideas around which we can build our societies and not only survive, but thrive.

Toward that goal, we fashion what become the dominant memes of our societies—we labor to express our individual and collective answers to the question “What’s it all about?” through philosophy and religion, through science and art, comedy and drama. Government, in the modern Western sense, seems to be (at least in theory) an attempt to codify what we hope are the best of these memes, to fairly secure our individual and collective liberty and happiness. Yet government, like any group or concept, remains a non-entity, incapable of generating meaning; so too, the Occupation movement cannot in and of itself create or define the purpose of its own existence—that task is left to us, the individuals who represent the 99%. The weary march of history has set us with the task of answering the question, “What’s this all about?” And until we can give solid answers to that question, as individuals and as a community, we lack the agency to create and control our nation’s future. Continue reading →