Of course the biggest flaw in the Occupy movement is that they are wrong, they’ve misapprehended the nature of the problem and, to the extent they talk about solutions, as economic authoritarians, they have the wrong solutions.

Scenes of enthusiastic teenagers gathered in circles eerily repeating the words of speakers are a hint at how badly direct democracy works at scale. The way they have set up the camp as a communal space with a communal food supply has predictably attracted vulnerable and unstable people to the camps, in a microcosm of the welfare state we live in.

Then there is the nature of the beast, which is apparently that of a Starfish, surviving without the benefit of a central nervous system the starfish :

reproduce asexually by fragmentation, often with part of an arm becoming detached and eventually developing into an independent individual sea star. Sea stars can be pests to fishermen who make their living on the capture of clams and other mollusks at sea as sea stars prey on these. The fishermen would think they had killed the sea stars by chopping them up and disposing of them at sea, but each fragment would regenerate into a complete adult, ultimately leading to their increased numbers until the issue was better understood^{[citation needed]}.

This is fascinating scientifically, but Giles Fraser explains the relevance to this blog:

it is precisely because Occupy is self-consciously leaderless and maddeningly amorphous that it has so much potential to regenerate the public conversation. Writing about the rise of leaderless organisations, the Stanford MBAs Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom have coined a useful distinction between the starfish and the spider. The great survival advantage of the starfish is that is has a decentralised nervous system. If you cut off the spider’s head, it dies. Even if you cut off its leg, it’s done for. In contrast, cut a leg off the starfish and it regenerates; indeed, the severed limb can grow a new body. Like the starfish, the power of Occupy is that is has no centralised nervous system.

All of which is a bit of a nightmare for those who would seek to build a relationship with or get any sort of agreement from protest movements like Occupy and UK Uncut. There is no one to phone up …

Though mooted as an advantage for it’s survival, it is ultimately a practical disadvantage. Asexual reproduction, the mechanism of Occupy’s regenerative ability, does not for allow for genetic variation. The animal continues to survive and to strive for the success without really changing. As we know success for the left looks pretty awful, having already gone wrong at point A progress from B to C will turn Britain into Cuba, or worse North Korea. Occupy could do untold harm by pressurising the establishment to move slightly in that direction before fizzling out. I hope, perhaps vainly, that they will be conscientiously ignored by a Conservative government that understands the consequences of Occupy’s meta-contextual errors. So, since they are wrong (philosophically, ethically and economically) and assuming they genuinely seek prosperity then in order to get there they must change their minds. The killer flaw is that changing their mind is not possible for a creature that does not have a mind to change.

If they are wrong philosophically, ethically and economically, but they genuinely seek prosperity for all, then in order to get there they must change their minds. The killer flaw is that changing their mind is not possible for a creature that does not have a mind to change.

Let’s imagine we printed 10,000 copies of Galt’s 72 page speech and dropped them from a helicopter onto the Occupy camps in London and invaded with an army of activists to follow up one-on-one.  There are many barriers to changing the mind of each individual in this way, the individual must actually read something or talk to an activist, they must take the trouble to check their premisses, overcome the inherent pain of finding out they are wrong and the temptation to evade thinking about it, then finally overcome the peer pressure to conform ideologically. Afterwards, would any rational person then stay with the movement? Would the movement stay with the dissenters? Even if they were not alienated they would have to influence the General Assembly – the ultimate nightmare committee – to achieve democratic consensus for any minor variation in plan, let alone a fundamental rethink. We would be incredibly lucky if 10 Occupiers actually changed their minds and the only option for them to make progress would be to leave and  fragment  the movement, to pull off an arm of the starfish and watch the body regenerate anyway with the same genetic material – the same ideological errors – driving it onwards in the same wrong direction.

Without the intellectual processes of  leadership,  Occupy is an animal lacking the faculty to make rational decisions. It will act on instinct and is unable to evolve it’s instinct due to it’s nature.  In fact, without a leader to force the adoption of better policies, as Blair did for Labour, Occupy will treat a rational decision to change course as if it were an injury, regenerate, and just carry on. The same is true of any intellectual compromise that might enable Occupy to evolve and win, even on it’s own leftist terms. Like the starfish, Occupy may be around as a curiosity for a long while, surviving in niches, but without the rational faculty which defines this planet’s dominant species, the starfish and any organisation which apes it will never dominate.