The Crowded Zero Sum Forum

As the huge Live 8 deal is going on around the world, I was left to wonder about causes and the activists that they draw. It reminded me of when I was in undergrad, and one of those Greenpeace people trapped me and asked for a donation. Being broke, I told her I didn’t have any money to give. Then she suggested that I ask my mom for some money. I gave her the most dumbfounded look – which she reciprocated.

Like everything else that I’ve been learning here in NYC, everything is segmented by class – from the neighborhood you live in, the bars you can get into and even whether or not people will look you in the eye when you introduce yourself. And like everything else, I think causes and activism work the same way.

I think it’s fair to say that our personal histories allow us feel more compassion for certain causes. That compassion is also guided by the conflicts exposed to us during our formative years – so a poor person is exposed more to causes that are something like social justice and worker’s rights. And that a richer person would be exposed to something like environmentalism and famine in Africa.

In the end, it amounts to a concentration of resources for certain causes while others flounder – like Darwinism. Some causes become bourgeois and others become proletariat. The problem I have with this is that we’re working in a very crowded forum and it doesn’t help when we count cultural hegemony into the picture – the rich get richer.

Cultural hegemony assimilates fringe cultures into it’s massive folds of sameness and redefines their standards for them. Consequently, they take up their causes as well and what we see is a brain drain from those less mainstream causes. Without those resources and certainly without the brain power behind those smaller causes, they put tremendous stress on few who are still fighting it or it gets out of hand. Or nothing happens at all, but it doesn’t mean the problem disappeared.