The Importance of Seeming Earnest

My neighbor poisoned my cat. Therefore, I'm going to travel to
New York City, sleep in the streets indefinitely, and surf the web
on my MacBook. I am going to be just like hundreds of other people
who are now "occupying" Wall Street.

Voluntary homelessness is on the rise in the Big Apple thanks to
"Occupy Wall Street," a self-described "leaderless resistance
movement" representing just about everyone. "We are the 99
percent," it humbly claims on its website.
But even as its numbers have grown, Occupy Wall Street is as
message-less as it is leaderless. More and more people are
occupying Wall Street, and fewer and fewer people know why.

The stated grievances range from corporate greed and social
inequality to housing, health care and pollution. The 99 percenters
say they "are
getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything."
Occupy Wall Street is an anti-greed crusade by self-interested
individuals with a long list of nonspecific wishes. They are the
non-silent majority taking aim at a minority.

The protesters have been camping out in Lower Manhattan since
September 17, and they have no plans to stop. With no exit strategy
in sight or mind, they have made "occupation" their occupation.

It seems odd to target Wall Street, a small strip of land with
no leaders of its own. It is not an institution but represents a
large and diverse collection of interests and individuals. But --
as a 19-year-old protester
said -- "people on Wall Street have all the power."

According to the protesters' logic, the best way to wrest power
from Wall Street is by moving Halloween up a few weeks. Hundreds
recently descended on the New York Stock Exchange dressed as
"corporate zombies," much as anti-nuclear activists did in the
early 1980s. But unlike today's protesters, they at least knew why
they were protesting.

"I'm angry because I don't have millions of dollars to give to
my representative, so my voice is invalidated,"
said 21-year-old college student Amanda Clarke. Among her
complaints are "that I'm graduating with tens of thousands of
dollars in loans and there's no job market."

The fight, however, is not merely between college students and
their future bills. It is so broad that it is indecipherable. "This
is not about left versus right,"
said Christopher Walsh, a 25-year-old photographer. "It's about
hierarchy versus autonomy."

What makes the Wall Street occupiers so frivolous is their utter
lack of purpose. Their deep-sounding words mask their arrant
superficiality. Furthermore, anyone who uncritically claims to
speak for 99 percent of the populace is -- 99 percent of the time
-- deluded and incorrect. Occupy Wall Street is less for the
downtrodden than it is for the bored and self-important, which
explains why so many kids and actress Susan Sarandon are getting
involved.

In an interview this week, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH)
said the protests are "about freedom of speech [and] the right
to assemble." In other words, the protests are about
protesting.

What the late Irving Kristol observed about the student
radicalism of the 1960s applies to the events in New York. There is
"a passion behind the protests that refuses to be satisfied by the
various topics which incite it." That's because the only thing
Occupy Wall Street is about is itself.

Occupy Wall Street is for those who romanticize the act of
protesting. These are people to whom protesting over an issue is
more important than the issue itself. They see protests not as a
means but as an end.

The protesters in New York talk incessantly about getting their
"message" across, yet they have no intelligible message. They want
their "voices" to be heard, but all their voices say is that their
voices should be heard. Yet again, it is those who have the least
to say who are saying the most.

Rarely does a protest succeed in persuading people outside its
ranks. What protests do is give protesters what P.J. O'Rourke
called "a nice sense of false accomplishment." When they go out and
"do something," they feel as if they are (actually) doing
something. For such people, nothing feels better than an inflated
sense of one's importance.

Annie Duke, a 34-year-old protester, when asked what she did for
a living,
replied, "I'm a revolutionary." Her answer is simultaneously
flippant and over-serious. When you fill out a form and list
"revolutionary" as your vocation, you are giving no information as
well as too much information.

And just what, by the way, does a revolutionary do?

Oscar Wilde defined revolution as "a successful effort to get
rid of a bad government and set up a worse." This definition
obviously does not apply to Occupy Wall Street, which has achieved
no success because it has no intention of replacing our current
government with another one. Its purpose is unconstructive
criticism.

"It's about taking down systems," one woman
explained. "It doesn't matter what you're protesting. Just
protest." That's "revolution" in a nutshell: protesting for the
sake of protesting and taking down systems because they are
systematic.

Unfortunately for the protesters, they do not live in an
oppressive society. There are no gulags in Iowa or concentration
camps in Maine. America has issues but no totalitarian horrors. Its
wrongs, if you listen to the Wall Street occupiers, are frequently
abstractions. Along with the lessening of transgressions comes a
trivialization of complaints. There is no Gestapo, but the NYPD can
be a little rude from time to time.

When injustices are on the wane, it becomes harder to whine.
This is a problem for professional protesters, who -- to quote
Bruno Bettelheim -- "have nothing to push against because
everything gives way."

"In democratic societies," wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, "each
citizen is habitually busy with the contemplation of a very petty
object, which is himself." To a large extent, self-centeredness is
a necessity for survival, which explains why the protesters are so
self-centered. When they say their voices are not being heard, they
are saying their relevance is vanishing. They think they are 99
percent of the country when in reality they are closer to 0.99
percent.