“A recent study by Nathanael Fast at USC Marshall and Larissa Tiedens of Stanford found that blame spreads -- specifically, if you publicly scapegoat a person or organization, even if they are innocent, the odds of your message spreading virally increase. This explains, on the left, Occupy Wall Street's meme about the "1%" holding you down and, on the right, the Tea Party's attacks on Obama's ineptness to reboot the U.S. economy.”
I wrote in reply:
Blaming others is a very convenient strategy to avoid responsibility. But it comes at a cost: by transferring responsibility you also hand power over to those whom you blame. Instead of seizing the moment and empowering yourself, you volley the tennis-ball back to your opponent and leave the outcome up to them.
The most refreshing aspect of the Occupy movement is that it is more than a protest group. OWS has not issued any formal demands, because this would place the onus on others. What America needs right now, more than anything, is to re-examine our commitment to each other, to debate and reformulate the social contract which binds us together into a nation. What do we owe ourselves, each other, and our neighbors? The economic crisis exposed how unfair our economic system had become on top of how deeply this inequality corrupted our political institutions, turning democracy into a cynical sham. People gathering into encampments have triggered at long last this overdue debate. Furthermore, by arriving at group decisions through consensus in General Assemblies, the occupiers have not only modeled and practiced true democracy, but put the burden of responsibility squarely upon themselves. “Be the change you want to see!” has become, if not their motto, their practice.
There's plenty of blame to go around. It's time to move past it and begin to live as a free, self-determining nation again. Unafraid. Unintimidated. Open-minded and open-hearted. And just, above all just. E pluribus unum.
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