Reform and Revolution: Radical Democracy and the Red Meme

                It becomes clearer every day that our formal democracy cannot reform itself fast enough to cope with the political, economic or environmental challenges we face.  The slow pace of change that formal democracy produces is too easily side-tracked by special interests and institutional protocols.  We can see the same problem with education, where it seems increasingly difficult not just to change but to even ask the right questions.  The institutions of modernity were designed to resist sudden shifts in popular thought and action.  The oligarchy that runs those institutions has perfected the ability to stall, delay and, in the end, defer action as it works to protect its own status and interests.  It’s hard to see how reform in any of the major institutions of our society is going to be enough, not just to appease the growing sense of anger and despair but to remedy or confront the existential threats we face.  While reform may not satisfy the moment, revolution is a tricky proposition in the quest for a radical democracy.

                Our typical view of revolution centers around a violent conflict.  I admit that there are days I think a thousand guillotines in Battery Park at the foot of Wall Street wouldn’t be a bad start, but would another revolution lead to a radical democracy?  When the revolution is over, it’s the people who lead the revolution that end up in power.  That can be pretty cool if the name of the leader is Washington, but not so much if they’re named Robespierre or Stalin.  The Russian anarchist, Bakunin, warned that the people who lead the fight shouldn’t lead the society the revolution created, but that never happens.  Revolutions may be necessary, and violence may be justified, but that kind of revolution has a limited horizon when it comes to what happens next.  American school kids learn about the glory of the American Revolution but very little about the purging of loyalists or the attempts of the American Aristocracy to suppress real democracy.  Radical democracy didn’t emerge from the French, American or Russian revolutions.

                The philosopher, Ken Wilber, once proposed a scheme of memes or states of consciousness that determined how advanced a social order could be.  In his scheme, the problematic meme was the red meme, the meme of anger and fear.  If a society couldn‘t find a way to move beyond the red meme, the politics and actions of the culture were doomed to an endless cycle of fear and retribution instead of sustainable collaboration.  If we desire a radical democracy, we have to find a way to work beyond the red meme, that is, we have to have a revolution that doesn’t succeed because of violence.  Radical democracy demands a level of consciousness that resists the urge to turn everything into an us vs. them, right or wrong struggle for dominance.  It demands an ecology of thought that recognizes the interconnected fate of our existence. 

                Beyond the red meme means beyond an economic system that produces obscene differences between winners and losers, or an economic system that reduces everything in the world to its material worth.  Beyond the red meme means a sense of diversity and inclusion grounded in the common need to express ourselves as we are.  Beyond the red meme means totally revising our ideas of leadership and participation.  Beyond the red meme means creating an educational system that connects people to their communities instead of sorting them for exploitation by the rich.  Beyond the red meme isn’t an option or a utopian fantasy; it’s our only chance at survival. 

                These kinds of revolutions have happened before.  The introduction of Aristotle and the ideas from the North Sea revitalized a Europe devastated by plague and feudalism.  The New Science sparked a change in thought that ended religious conflict in Europe and brought on the Enlightenment.  Our revolution, like those that proceeded it, will have its flaws and limitations, but it will provide a way to move beyond the stalemate we are now facing.  We don’t need a general or a political leader; we need a billion souls committed to a new vision.