Why Occupy Wall Street Is Bound To Not Succeed

"But since then [The French Revolution] the revolutionary or speculative mind of Europe (and since the 1960's the West in general) has been weakened by shrinking from any proposal because of the limits of that proposal. Liberalism has been degraded into liberality. Men have tried to turn 'revolutionise' (sic) from a transitive to an intransitive verb. The Jacobin (French revolutionary) could tell you not only the system he would rebel against, but what was more important, the system he would not rebel against, the system he would trust. But the new rebel is a sceptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. Thus...(a)s a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is a waste of time. A Russian pessimist (by which he refers to Anton Chekhov, I think) will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself...A man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts (a reference to Darwinism). In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite sceptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for the purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost the right to rebel against anything."

-Gilbert Keith Chesterton

What I find most remarkable about this passage is that nothing has changed in the 103 years since it was written. For fear of being found offensive to somebody or to provide justification for increasingly immoral behavior, the West has only been in a bigger hurry to rid itself of any guiding moral structure since the turn of the last century. What we are seeing now may be, and hopefully is, the last display of a terminally myopic view of reality. More and more people are coming to understand that in the absence of an ideal, change can only be destructive. But to hold an ideal, to cling to something dear not yet real, one must make a choice not to hold to some other ideal. These protesters who hold nothing dear are merely apparitions and will quickly enough evaporate away in the face of a strongly held conviction based upon a clear ideal. What will not fade so readily will be those hiding among this mass who do hold a clear conviction whose ideal depends upon support from the anarchists. Can these people possibly have in mind the best interests of anybody but themselves?