Spiritual Material
What's the connection between 9/11 and the Occupy Wall Street movement?
In Money we trust.
I mean, “In God we trust”, the 4 words that are printed on our currency.
For many of us in the West and Global North, money has replaced God. American culture worships at the altar of billionaires, and accumulation is the name of the game. Our economic system, which we’ve been strong arming the rest of the world into, operates with a very important reinforcing feedback loop. If you’re rich, you collect interest. If you’re poor, you pay interest. This reinforces each individual’s place in our socioeconomic system.
When I went to grad school I learned a lot about our financial system. The TL:DR? The system isn’t broken, it’s operating exactly how it’s designed to. In 2008 many of us witnessed what happens when complex financial “instruments” (inventions!) like “derivatives” are created, and when markets are deregulated.
Capitalism itself might not have started out inherently sinister (barring the whole chattel slavery and land theft elements); it’s worth acknowledging that there are different types of capitalism. Most notably we started with “productive capitalism”, where capital moved around and was, well, productive:
You have extra money.
I want to start a business.
You loan me money to cover the startup costs.
I pay you back once I’ve gotten things off the ground.
In this system money is moved around “productively”. However we now have some hybridized version of crony capitalism mixed with “speculative capitalism” where people are now placing bets on whether I’ll pay back the loan or not. Then someone places a bet on that bet, and another bet on a bet, and on it goes, into a circle jerk black box of obscure gambling that creates little-to-no value for society.
10 years, 10 days apart
The topic of the September 11th attacks is never an easy one to broach. My brother worked in one of the Towers. He had a meeting at 9am on the 80th floor. Luckily, and oddly like many similar stories, he was running late that day and missed the train. He then took the ferry to work, and watched it happen. He’s never been the same since, understandably so.
Before I get into it, I want to be clear that my intention with this post is not to make light of the horrific events of that day, but to highlight a connection between two significant events, both taking place in New York City, exactly 10 years 10 days apart. A connection I’ve seen nearly no one else make.
I think we’re all familiar with the events that took place on September 11th, 2001. 10 years and 10 days later on September 17th, 2011 we had the Occupy Wall Street movement. As a refresher:
“Occupy Wall Street was a left-wing populist movement against economic inequality, corporate greed, big finance, and the influence of money in politics that began in Zuccotti Park, located in New York City's Financial District, and lasted for fifty-nine days—from September 17 to November 15, 2011.” - Source
The following series of images can be found by doing a google image search of “Occupy Wall Street” and selecting the usage rights as “Creative Commons licenses”.
So two events separated by a decade. One an external terror attack, the other a peaceful protest by Americans, both occurring at the epicenter of the global financial system. The through-line being a focus on an economic system that is just as extractive as it is exploitative, pushing us to the brink of collapse while inducing mass psychosis.
I remember being a teenager and literally raging against the machine. It was apparent to me back then that in order to make a lot of money you either needed to exploit people and/or extract resources, and I wanted no part in that. Sensing that money was the root of all evil, I had a deep inner yearning to help humans transcend money and move beyond currency. Then I grew up. I put those pie-in-the-sky dreams on the shelf. I searched for a way to create an ethical, meaningful livelihood. I spent my entire adult career working in the nonprofit sector with only a couple brief pit stops at mission driven, for-profit businesses. I went back to school to study sustainable systems, with a focus on business.
My thinking has come a bit full circle, where capitalism seems to be Colonization 2.0. And while I do see money as an agnostic tool, and the human tendency of greed as the “evil”, many of us exist in a system that is set up to extract as much productivity out of us for as little compensation as possible. For the working class the cards are stacked against us and economic inequality grows. A resurgence in union organizing and labor rights has been one of the few balancing feedback loops to come out of the last few years.
We’ve seen for-profit businesses take a page out of the nonprofit playbook and try to embed purpose into their business model by developing things like mission and vision statements. And vice versa with nonprofits seeking to operate more like a business by running leaner operations, with higher revenue goals and cost cutting measures. The “nonprofit industrial complex” is a thing.
We need not look farther than one of the greatest teachers of all time, Mother Nature, as a source of inspiration for how to design a new economic system. Scarcity is baked into the current cake. It does not have to be this way. We can unravel and detach from this social conditioning to accumulate and hoard. Our money system is completely made up. Money and currency only have value because we collectively agree this is what we use to represent and exchange value. The tipping point will be the moment a critical mass of us realize that this system is no longer working for the majority of us, and that it’s time we come up with a new agreement.
It’s.
All.
Invented.
…So let’s co-create!
This calling that I had in my teens - to help humanity transcend currency - I sensed would likely not be accomplished in my lifetime. But if I am to even just lay a bit more groundwork, create a few more stepping stones, that will fulfill what I believe to be one of my soul purposes.
Secular materialism vs. faith
Many years ago, I came into possession of an Adbuster’s magazine. The issue is titled “Spiritual Pollution”, and I tore out and saved the last couple pages of the magazine. It’s been with me all these years later, and in many ways, I’m still processing it.
The text to the right in the image above reads:
Why are so many Islamic fundamentalists willing to fight and die in the name of their religion? How does a life of austerity and faithfulness win out over instant gratification and self-indulgence? This is one of the great mysteries that we in the West just cannot comprehend. After half a century of increasing devotion to secular materialism, many of us have forgotten how powerful a force deep spirituality and faith can be. In the Winter 2005 issue of New Perspectives Quarterly, editor Nathan Gardels shed some light on the question:
After 9/11, the Bush Administration launched an international public relations campaign premised on the notion that “if the Muslim world only understood our good intentions, all would be OK.” But the propaganda of postmodern America - our globalized mass cultural presence - had been out there a long time already and was understood by the Muslim world. The problem was not that angry Muslims didn't understand America, but that they did. They understood that the faithless, materialistic, sexually immodest, permissive message projected by the American mass media was a threat to the conservative and pious civilization of Islam.
The impiety and materialism that is the face of America presented by the mass media is a challenge to a civilization based on faith, a civilization where praying is still more important to most Muslims than shopping (except at the Dubai airport and among the Saudi royal family!).
This is what the Pakistani scholar and diplomat Akbar Ahmed means when he talks about the “media Mongols” being “at the gates of Baghdad” - a reference to the Mongol hordes in 1258 who shattered the greatest Arab Empire in history. But this time, as Akbar and many Muslims see it, the challenge is not one of armies and territories alone, but worse - a challenge to the very idea of a life centered around faith.
“The age of the media and Muslim Society has dawned,” Akbar wrote in his seminal book, Postmodernism and Islam. “Muslims need to face up to the fact that there is no escape now, no retreat, no hiding place, from the demon. The more traditional religious culture in our age of the media, the greater the pressure upon it to yield. The collision between the global civilization emanating from the west and Islam is a straight-out fight between two approaches to the world, two opposed philosophies. One is based in secular materialism, the other in faith.”
There’s a poem that I wrote 3 years ago called “The Fable of the Bees” that incorporates many of the themes here. I hope to hear your thoughts and any reactions to these topics that I’m still trying to make sense of myself.
“The Fable of the Bees”
But don’t the lawyers need crime?
And doesn’t shopping kill time?
The colony will collapse
If we fall into altruistic traps
First we had the tribe
Then the church beat us to subscribe
As an act of defiance
Now we have science
That frees us from the tyranny of religion
Less spiritual, it’s a more material place we live in
But we build things
Useless things
And consumption quells
The god-sized hole that swells
In our hearts
Because we get advertising darts
Bullseyes to the brain
These musings on the sacred mundane
Or did the “c” and the “a” switch?
And now we’re just scared capitalists?
We used to have markets with people and scenes
Now we silently just push buttons on screens
How do we remember our creative maker production roots?
And that we didn’t always live with disposable suits and boots?
Sacred shopping
Holy bar hopping
Drinking to get buzzed
Or maybe just to forget about a life that once was
That dream deferred
Those visions blurred
How can we unite in this fight to see ourselves than more
Than the consumer identity we’ve been programmed with long before
We let go of our aspirations
To thrive on a planet post-nations
Post-currency
I have to believe
That one of the reasons we got here
Is because of “The Fable of the Bees”
Hey thanks for reading all the way to the end. Did you know that in July I quit my environmental nonprofit job to pursue my music and writing full-time? It was a tough decision but it’s been a really exciting time, and I’ve never felt more alive. Also, did you know I have a band called Soil & Soul and we’ve been playing out all around the Hudson Valley? We are available for any of your live or recorded music needs, wants, whims, or wild hairs.
To my paid subscribers- from the top and bottom of my heart THANK YOU!! You’ve been the wind in my sails, and the vote of confidence to take this leap of faith. If you’re not a paid subscriber, please know I’ll always keep my posts free, but in the event that you did want to become a paid subscriber, know that you would make my month, and I will snail mail you a handwritten thank you. I can even now include a Soil & Soul hologram sticker!
Big Love as we bumble through this together.
Yours in Co-Creation & Building Beloved Community,
Lisa Pellegrino