Have David Graeber And Robert Cialdini Read Each Other Yet?

For Christmas this year, I'm giving my dad David Graeber's book Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Or maybe I should give the book instead to Donald Trump, who will give me a Ferrarri in return, hopefully. If recipocity and obligation work for Hare Krishnas, it's gotta work for me, right? Robert Cialdini said so in his book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Or maybe I'll give both...

After I read Graeber's recent piece Occupy Wall Street's Anarchist Roots, I had an "a-ha moment." It turned out that Scott Crow, whom I interviewed in October, gave me an abbreviated history of modern anarchism. In his 2002 piece The New Anarchists, Graeber had me filling in more gaps in my knowledge of history as well as reminicing about my own life prior to 9/11.

See: I was (and still am) your typical "bourgeois defeatist" or what Graeber may call a "liberal." My first experience to the revolutionary politics in Graeber's vein was Rage Against The Machine's MTV video Freedom, not to be confused with George Michael's Freedom '90. I even wore the RATM "Evil Empire" baseball shirt. It was an elysian yet pretentious time, for me anyhow.

It's been an awakening ever since I voted for Nader, not Gore, in Gov. George W. Bush's Texas. I've had subscriptions to Rolling Stone, Texas Observer, The Hightower Lowdown, and Private Eye, but oddly enough, for some reason, not Adbusters, though I noted its style resembled Chuck Palahniuk's, who I heard was a member of (and drew inspiration from) The Cacophony Society. 

When Graeber's New Left Review piece mentioned "Billionaires and clowns," I was home. And as I listened to more of Graeber's talks on debt on Democracy Now, and here and here, and here and here, I realized that he was correct: "It’s hard to think of another time when there has been such a gulf between intellectuals and activists." Well, unless you're Robert Cialdini.

Business folk might not immediately think of themselves as activsts, but they are, and they certainly rely on academia to justify their actions. The thing is, the history of debt is rooted in the same psychological system humans have evolved to use. Cialdini might know the trick but not its history. But the One Percent has used reciprocity-and-obligation rules to great effect on the 99 Percent...

Or so it seemed until people's uprisings took place in the 1990s in South America (Argentina), North America (Seattle, Wash., and Chiapas, Mexico) and South Asia (South Korea) against neo-liberal trade/debt policies. Now, after the domino effect picked up steam in Iceland, Greece, Spain, and the Middle East, we're seeing Wall Street under pressure.

Remember Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club (the movie, too)? Yeah, this uprising near Wall Street didn't develop exactly like it, but thanks to Graeber and others, the ball got rolling using the very organizational tools fellow activists developed over the course of decades. And it hasn't ended with a fireworks stunt spectacular inspired by Guy Fawkes either. And it won't. Why?

Because that's not how anarchists roll, man. As Greaber pointed out, anarchists as far back as the mid-19th century figured out that violence doesn't work. And they inspired Gandhi. And Gandhi inspired Martin Luther King, Jr. And MLK inspired I Have A Dreamsicle! It's all the same creamy goodness, if The Daily Show would stop mocking its 99-Percent brethren.

At any rate, if you want to know where the Occupy Wall Street movement in North America is going, look at where it's been: Iceland, Greece, Spain, the Middle East and North Africa, Argentina, Chiapas... Yeah, I believe Scott Crow and David Graeber on this one. I don't believe Rick Perry and his followers' belief in the "War on Christmas." They obviously haven't heard of Oliver Cromwell.