Revolution Basics #1: Who cares what you think?

Once upon a time, a man informed George Bush Jr. that he didn’t like the President’s policies. Bush then said “who cares what you think?”

Bloomberg and Wall Street may not like Occupy Wall Street, but they aren’t going to negotiate in any meaningful sense.

Why should they?

What are the consequences, for them, of not cooperating? They have to see some noisy people. Does it appreciably reduce their income? No. The men or women they get to sleep with? No. The amount of power they have over DC? No. Their actual physical safety, or the safety of those they care about? No.

For Occupy to be successful, on its own terms, will require shutting down Wall Street and probably all of NYC. There must be so many people on the street that it is impossible to arrest them all or to get rid of them without resorting to a lot more than a whiff of grapeshot. The elites must be be faced with a decision tree “negotiate or lose a ton of money and be massively inconvenienced or shoot hundreds of thousands of people and build mass detention camps.” That will require two or three million people occupying New York City.

Remember, modern elites are trained to think in terms of cost-benefit analyses. If the cost to them of not giving in is less than the cost of not giving in, they won’t give in. It took trillions of dollars to bail out Wall Street. They take home billions of dollars in personal bonuses. You must cost them, personally, more than that, for them to want to give in.

If you want politicians to take out Wall Street for you, it has to be worth their while. Either the Koch Brothers have to pay them to take out one part of the elite on behalf of another part of the elite, or they have to know that not only will they lose their positions if they don’t do it (remember, the Soviet Politburo had more turnover than the Senate does) but that they will never have a good job afterwards, that whatever monied interests they have served either will not be able to give them a good life afterwards, or they will be unable to enjoy that good life.

You want a velvet revolution? A revolution in which you never so much as throw a punch? You’re still going to have to make the elites decide to give you what you want, or you will have to have the unilateral power to remove those elites and replace them with your own leaders.

Rephrase Bush’s “who cares what you think?’ as “Why should I care what you think?”

Don’t bother trying to appeal to shared morality, ethics or fellow feeling. These people were selected because they are functional sociopaths. They do not care about your suffering. Their ideology labels you as worthless eaters and them as the only truly productive people in society. Everything they have is because they earned it, and everything you have is because you sponged off your betters. That is what they believe.

They will not give you what you want, whatever that is, unless they either have no choice, or you make it rationally their best choice (and then they’ll screw you on the reverse side, everything they give you they will take away again, which is what you get for thinking you can cut a deal with such people).