Ecotrain Question of the Week: Are Activists Who Inconvenience The General Public Justified?

_{Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash}

The answer is simple: Yes.

At this point, with the level of influence of both big business and military intelligence (whose very existence creates the constant geopolitical power struggle, creating endless wars) on government policy and active debate. Activists are completely justified in disrupting society as a whole, and in fact, I would argue that it's often their duty in defining themselves as activists, rather than protestors.

The reasoning behind my opinion is rather less simple than my 'Yes' answer and revolves around two fundamental factors, which are most often dodged in debate yet they are the reason nothing changes, or changes so slowly that it will make no difference in the end.

_{Image by John Hain from Pixabay}

One: Social conditioning - the majority who haven't disrupted their social conditioning contribute to a mass delusion that government policies don't perpetuate pollution, climate change, and potentially catastrophic environmental degradation that is destroying our world. We are conditioned by society, and our family members, to believe certain things.

It's essential to put the needs and concerns of family first above all else.

Work hard all your life and you will be rewarded.

Trust your government - this is the most ridiculous one as governments should be constantly scrutinized, questioned, and put to the test by the public to ensure that corruption isn't allowed to fester, as it does now in so many countries around the world.

Do what your teacher tells you (this has caused so much pain for autistic people and others with learning difficulties).

You can achieve anything if you put your mind to it.

You are special.

Your opinion matters.

Judge people by their actions.

Money equals status.

Hierarchy is important and must be followed.

You are an individual who must compete to be better than the others.

And on I could go with at least a few hundred more if I really dredged my memory banks as to what my grandparents in particular used to try to condition me to believe, and what I have seen repeated on TV news, newspapers, and other media outlets. But that final conditioning I mentioned about separateness is perhaps the most important in my view. It took me well over four years to deconstruct that conditioning and rediscover that as a child I was deeply compassionate and empathetic, traits that were punished by a certain relative, and I've only now found are the strength at the core of my being.

This is something that I think is unique to humans, this social conditioning, that can occasionally be of use, but in most cases just causes us to follow each other like sheep. The way social conditioning works is something of a Pavlovian response as most children conform to what is being fed to them whether subconsciously or consciously so as to fit in. We are after all social animals.

I find it ironic though that many business leaders, politicians, and other people that operate in positions of power where they could implement huge changes in reducing poverty, curbing the business of war, or improving environmental impact, have also broken through much of their social conditioning.

But instead, they see this as the biggest excuse to act in the most selfish way imaginable, they are still ruled by the one social construct that has caused more human misery throughout the whole of our history, identification with self (ego).

The important part of the quote below is that unlike animals 'we also pass on our opinions, judgments, value structures, beliefs, and (often very divisive) social conditioning based on class/wealth status.'

Orangutang will meticulously watch the tool user, sometimes taking years to learn the craft before finding their own shaped stones and following the process to crack the hard outer shells of a particular species of nut.

You might say - so what, this is how humans learn as well, and this is true, we learn how to tie our shoelaces in exactly the same way in a one-to-one parent/child dynamic. But there is one distinct difference between us and the many animal species that live in harmony with nature; we also pass on our opinions, judgments, value structures, beliefs, and (often very divisive) social conditioning based on class/wealth status.

_{Quote from a recent post I wrote.}

_{Image by TwistedDoc from Pixabay}

Two: A military-industrial complex that the vast majority of the general public either don't know about, or do, but don't care.

A vast amount of activists are protesting - or taking direct action - against the arms trade.

This was certainly the case when recently in London many activists blocked traffic to try and stop military weaponry from reaching the recent London arms fair.

There is a monumental level of selfishness in the point of view that your inconvenience of maybe an hour waiting in a queue matters, when weighed against the devastation that our arms trade causes, mainly in third world countries, or in apartheid-like campaigns such as the one that Isreal currently perpetuates against the Palestinians.

These people taking direct action risk their lives, often as I will elaborate on further take brutal beatings from the police, all for trying to address the big issues that are entrenched in our governmental systems on a global scale such as the business of war, business-led pollution (or refusal to take the measures needed to rapidly slow down or halt environmental degradation) and third world debt slavery.

When you right-wing, flag touting morons who don't even understand the fundamental difference between socialism and communism as two separate and very different political systems, derived from philosophical texts such as those written by Carl Marx, but applied in completely different methodologies - when you loudly proclaim returning soldiers as heroes... well I'd respond with the truth.

Soldiers are trained, government-backed murderers.

That is their job, it is what they're trained for, and I do care massively for soldiers with PTSD. It just goes to show that no amount of brainwashing or conditioning can stop a human from having emotions. Only a small percentage of soldiers are psychopaths or sociopaths, the rest suffer the pain of knowing they murdered just the same as anyone else would.

And I'm sure the same flag touting morons would be the first to say, activists, inconveniencing the general public are completely unjustified. Yet, when it was a bunch of lunatic activists from your side of the 'political opinion pond' it was affirmative action.

Hypocrites make me sick.

And the worst case of this level of hypocrisy I've seen in modern times is the comparative treatment by the police of a mob of armed mainly white people marched on the Whitehouse at the end of Trump's term, compared to the many images I've seen of black people being killed by police cars mowing them down at high speed during the BLM campaign.

Now I'm no expert... but it seems to me that regardless of 'the right to bear arms' if a thousand strong group of black people had marched on any government building with even a minority of them carrying sub-machine guns, they would have been shot dead.

Seems like white = Right

and

Black = Police attack.

But the institutionalized and systemic racism in the USA is one for a whole different post I think. It would take too much space to write about it here, but nonetheless, I want to point out the fckn vile hypocrisy.

For me, many activists are much closer to the definition of a hero as I see it - a person acting boldly, with no thought to personal safety, to try and change things for the better for everyone.

And no matter how ineffective they may seem, if everyone started to take the same attitude about saving the planet we inhabit as the activists that I support, fundamental systemic change would take place through majority consensus. But here comes the social conditioning again.

Impossible, it would mean changing everything and that means changing economic models on a global scale, it would be chaos.

Maybe, but all change comes at a cost. Doing nothing will ensure a slow miserable death of our planet, something akin to our planet contracting cancer, and any future generations living through the worst stages of that slow death will live in suffering we could only imagine at this point.

_{Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay}

I read some of the comments in the @ecotrain QOTW post and they highlighted what I talked about in my section on social conditioning, and also show the level of intolerance formed around some people's social conditioning.

Once you endanger my family, all bets are off. I will drive a detour around you, but if you block me and threaten me you are roadkill.

I've never heard of an activist threatening a member of the public. What I think this commenter means, without really saying it, is that by blocking them the activist is threatening them. It is exactly that type of crap I hear come out of the mouth of Tories here in the UK... 'me and mine' (myself and family) are all I care about and will defend to the death.

But guess what?

I care about you and your family as much as I do myself, because I recognize that we're essentially connected, living different iterations of consciousness through matter constructs.

I also recognize that your social conditioning causes your level of violence of thought, but once you break through your own social conditioning, you see the fallacy at the heart of most opinion/belief systems.

String theory is a potential “theory of everything”, uniting all matter and forces in a single theoretical framework, which describes the fundamental level of the universe in terms of vibrating strings rather than particles.
_{Source: physicsworld.com}

I have myself been beaten badly by the police at a protest when all I was doing was taking part in a planned protest march in London, they waited until a certain point and then said they were redirecting a march that had been planned, and agreed upon for months.

At which point, out came the riot shields, and batons, and by that very act they instigated violence from some people who knew what was coming. I actually turned around and tried to leave but by this point, the police had purposefully hemmed in a group from the main mass of the march, essentially they had got an order from someone to remove a certain amount of people from the march.

In this instance, the police were acting against the March structure that had been agreed upon by the organizations behind the March, and, most importantly, government representatives.

I have also known other people who were activists in the 1990's Manchester Airport protest badly beaten by the police.

The vast majority of activists don't go around threatening people, it isn't even in their nature as most are highly emotional people who have become proactive in taking direct action to try and stop the continued rape of our planet.

They are most often the ones taking a beating from corrupt police who are known by police Super Intendants to be a last resort shock tactic to try and force activists out of an area. That is certainly what happened in the Manchester protests at the end as I was there for a short time, and my friend was there for the whole protest until they managed to extract him from his tree-top dwelling, and dragged him into the back of a van before producing the yellow pages (a thick paper phone book good for wrapping around batons to cause lighter bruising when administering a beating to the body) and taking turns.

Activists would gain more respect from their opponents if they were more willing to host open debates with their opponents. Even opponents want to hear good ideas on how we can work together without outright ruining the lives of people who are working hard just for their households to survive. I won't respect anyone forcing their opponents and allies to be silent, be late for work, or be fired while being forced to listen to repetitive angry chants. Saying something over and over doesn't make it more true, it drives people to follow or take the lead away from them.

Activists are disrupting society (inconveniencing the general public) because the debates that reflect their position are never allowed to happen. They aren't looking for respect from any opponents, as they're simply not given a platform to express their views as with the direct action against the arms fares in London, and the one I was proud to be involved with in my home city. In both instances they were refused any forum to discuss that there might be a large consensus of people who didn't want arms fares to be held in our country.

To further illustrate my point, in the comment above the author states that protestors chant just to try and make their opinions more true. This is laughable, it's a skewed version of reality considering we're talking about some people blocking a road, and perhaps the author of the comment has never been involved in a protest movement. I suspect this to be the case.

In all protests that I have been involved with, they are chanting slogans that highlight issues that the government will not address, and if they do debate those issues they are brushed under the rug and have been brushed under the rug for decades, in the case of environmental degradation, ever since evidence started to become conclusive of the damage we have wrought on our planet since the advent of the industrial revolution. Business and economic interests were much too important to listen to scientists, or even worse intelligent informed citizens.

THEY SHOUT BECAUSE NO ONE IS LISTENING, OR IF THEY ARE, THE GOVERNMENT IS IGNORING OR SPINNING THE ISSUE SO THAT IT NEVER RECEIVES OPEN FAIR DEBATE.

When the issue is the destruction of the world we all inhabit together, then chanting, shouting, and even inconveniencing 'the general public' is a needed and noble cause.

For example, let's say a debate around the idea of passing a law forcing banks and investment firms to remove third world debt and return any acquired natural resources (diamond, gold, or silicon mines) on the proviso that those countries use the profits derived from their natural resources to improve infrastructure and lift their populous out of high levels of poverty gets fielded in parliament.

I'm from the UK so in this hypothetical, we're talking about the House of Commons and the Lords.

This debate, if it ever happened which I highly doubt, would be shut down almost immediately by a majority of MP's who are unanimous in their support of banking entities and big business partners who lobby them into their position of power.

Business leaders are not answerable in any way to me, or you, or pretty much anyone, unless perhaps a political ally who supports their operations for some type of mutual gain.

_{Quote from a post I wrote in a recent post, but most often it is the other way around and the politician is answerable to the business leader.}

And this is where the activist is a hero in my view, and justified in inconveniencing a few angry commuters.

Because quite honestly, fck you if you are late to work. And before you ask, yes I've had to commute an hour each day down a motorway to a job working for a charity in the past, and it is not a pleasant experience, and to have to queue is a massive pain.

But, do you want your grandchildren to grow up in a world where vast portions of the world's landmass have disappeared beneath the sea, and people have to habitually undergo oxygen therapy to try and alleviate the effects of air pollution?

Do you want to live in a world where the oceans are a desert, bereft of life which is a scientific certainty if the mass coral bleaching isn't stopped causing the disappearance of majestic coral reefs, and the ecosystems they maintain?

Coral reefs cover less than 1 percent of the world’s oceans but are home to more than a quarter of all marine life, including the clownfish, seahorses, and other creatures that make these ecosystems special. But coral reefs are slipping away. Warming seas, diseases, and other threats have already wiped out more than half of the world’s corals.

_{Source: vox.com- coral reef restoration}

Do you want to never eat fish again unless you're a millionaire? As that will be the case if all reef systems disappear as only a very small percentage of fish species nursery in other environments and there is no telling the cumulative effect on the food chain if such a massive part of it becomes completely devastated.

Do you want our food to increasingly become more and more poisonous? Causing increasing 'so called' mystery chronic illnesses to become endemic and perhaps develop into life-threatening conditions.

Do you want pandemics to become a more regular occurrence? As we cause increasing habitat destruction and species extinction, pandemics will become more focused due to the lack of diversity for viral entities to move through. But don't trust me...

a number of researchers today think that it is actually humanity’s destruction of biodiversity that creates the conditions for new viruses and diseases like COVID-19, the viral disease that emerged in China in December 2019, to arise—with profound health and economic impacts in rich and poor countries alike.

_{Read about it at scientificamerican.com.}

But screw all that, because you might be late for a meeting!

My final point: Apartheid in South Africa was only overthrown by the actions of activists, and I'm sure they inconvenienced the racist white citizenship, and government, before managing to remove the final iteration of an openly racist government on our planet. Fingers crossed 🤞 Never Again!

I realize I may have just offended a lot of people but that's fine. These are only my opinions and I'm neither married to them, nor do I identify with them.

If you're interested in hearing an intelligent, well-researched rap about the arms trade and how it is a business and NOT a necessity. Check out 'Keep Your Hand on Your Gun' By Lowkey in the comments section below.

Thanks for reading.

The images used in this post are all creative commons licence, linked to credit beneath the picture. If you have enjoyed this post, please check out my other work on my homepage @raj808.

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