Wandering is a Revolutionary Act
It doesn't make sense that a few should 'own' this planet and the rest should work for them. It's a dumb system that maximizes Total Gross Suffering and shortens the life-expectancy of our species.
I have no doubt we'd adopt something that worked better for everybody IF this current system wasn't intricately maintained by trickery and coercion.
And if we could see our way through the trickery, we could probably defeat the coercion.
That's where wandering comes in.
Your boss and your boss's boss and your boss's boss's boss... they don't want you to wander. They don't want you out in the world seeing what's happening on the other side of the fence.
They only want you to work, buy stuff, and stay in your lane, because at the top of the pyramid they know that humans make frequent advances by wandering, whether that's in the laboratory, the classroom, the artist's room, or out in the big broad world. So it's a bad idea to give people time to think and space to explore.
That's why the 'owners' have always taken it deadly-serious when people leave the fields or the factory and start milling about on the earth. It means the trickery isn't working (and the coercion will ratchet up soon).
The artist and revolutionary Guy Debord called this trickery The Spectacle - the pernicious and persistent need for industrial society to manipulate us by inserting imagery and meaning between we individual humans and our own lived experiences.
Debord and other members of the Situationist International used wandering to great effect, especially in the movement's early years, playing games in the urban landscape that laid the foundations of the significant-if-not-successful world-spanning humanist uprisings of 1968.
So yes, millions of people downing tools to go wander around, that is the definition of revolutionary action.
But even without collective action. Even as a lone individual obeying the rules of industrial society, wandering is subversive and threatening to the status quo. First, because it means you're not at work, and second, because it means your broad perspective will make you less willing to accept the trickery.
Ask yourself this:
When did I last feel unharried or unhurried?
When was I last free to be curious and playful and absorbed in the world around me?
When did I last not have something I was SUPPOSED to be doing?
When done well, wandering short-circuits the mundanity thrust upon us by industrial society. It lifts our moods, shifts our perspectives, and gives us a more detailed map of reality.
If that ain't revolutionary, then I don't know what is.
Go wander.
Dan Flag
Dan Flag
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