To perform an action in accordance with a set of beliefs, the action has to take root within a general psychological state of affirmation, the buoyancy of which provides the necessary system-wide thrust to initiate an action.
This psychological state is produced through a confluence of factors: the agent expects that a certain objective can be realistically met (whether the very expectation is realistic or not), the agent expects that his or her abilities satisfies the requirements for initiating and following through with the action, the agent assents to the direction this action will take his or her energies, and the agent is receptive neurochemically to the psychological state in the first place (he or she is not hopelessly depressed or suffering from some other debilitating mental condition), among other factors.
The threshold required for reaching this state varies in accordance with the action required. If the action is going to the kitchen to grab a bite to eat because one is hungry, the threshold is very low. If the action has to do with the attempt to make a sweeping change to one's own society or even immediate environment, the threshold is very high. We aren't talking just about the movement of energy - which of course is also important - but the relative strength of external resistance, as well as the capacities, dispositions, and tendencies of the acting agents, as well as a host of complex interacting conditions such as historical trajectory and the movement of energies across networks that take their shape from historical processes.
We rely on others (as well as certain environmental indicators) to signal to us whether a certain course of action is possible, or even desirable. And then there are some of those others that are quite naive to external indicators when it comes to a certain subject they are confident about (or which consumes them) and so they agitate and carry out actions towards whatever that end might be; additionally these actors are in states forged by other relationships and sets of circumstances that indirectly fuel their endeavors. This behavior is contagious, and soon enough even actors in a seeming state of despair (though internally they must still possess some kindling of hope) are ignited and so the energy spreads.
This contagion of activity pulls in a greater body of sympathetic potentials, transforming the potential energy into kinetic energy. Just before the Occupy movements, there was an electric buzzing of those activist and intellectual networks on the Internet - networks that were constantly cultivated and fed over decades - that then erupted into the physical gathering of people, which then spread all over the world. The vitality of these eruptions was amplified by the energy released by the prior Arab Spring, an explosion of said energy in places like Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, and Syria, this explosion itself triggered by an immense rupture of the social contract held by oppressed peoples in the Middle East, who were increasingly finding not only horrific foreign and state repression but massive unemployment and high food prices.
And so paradoxically, as external resistance grows on a body of actors, the potential energy set to erupt grows as well. You cannot deny an entire population its autonomy, and if you threaten your population's very means of survival you are in even more trouble. The energy can dissipate in politically harmless ways, such as in riots or acts of crime which can be repressed in a politically acceptable manner (for most of the observing population anyways). But the political radicals are those that record in memory the transgressions of the powerful, and build quietly the networks that are to sustain revolutionary activity.
Unfortunately the Arab Spring in many countries has degenerated into power struggles and violence, due in large part to the violent reactionary actions on the part of governments in power.
The Occupy movements in turn came up against certain irreconcilable constraints: despite the media blackouts it is well known in the underground that the movement was brutally crushed by a conglomeration of cooperating federal, state, and local institutions, represented by surveillance and heavily geared riot units.
And so the wave of this brilliant energy loses its thrust and falls back to where it erupted from. But the memory always remains. The high watermark of these events is inevitably seared into the collective political consciousness of the population. The remaining energy diverts to various avenues: you still hear of local chapters working within their communities to do what they can, and the political transformation that occurs within such a progression of events stays with people. People begin to see that there is something else possible.
You see these patterns come up everywhere, even on the individual level. Bipolar disorder exhibits these patterns especially: one's volition comes up against a briar patch of anxiety, terror, and personal restraint, which results in a crash, and a despair, which itself paves the way for a compensatory surge in manic energy, a burst of energy that can result in transformative events that can change one's conception of what is possible. Again, it is in the energy, this ineffable movement of mind and matter: it is never created or destroyed, it only moves, disperses, recollects, and erupts again. The more repression, the more a state seeks to emaciate and control its populace, the greater the eruption of energy in response.
The catch is, with an eruption of energy from the powerless masses, the institutions in turn compensate with counterrevolutionary force, and their networks contain a memory of their own: their fear of the populace grows, and their tools of repression become increasingly forceful. Such oscillations of energy betray deep instabilities within the old system, which must eventually disintegrate, hopefully leading to a constructive transformation in turn.
I say all this because I've got this strange feeling that all of that energy amidst the populace is coming back. These aren't prophetic words of course: it has to come back.
