Movements and Frameworks

What is a Movement?

There is a tendency for people to want to be a part of something bigger. They want a sense of purpose, a meaning behind their day to day activities. This is why we have religion and family. The following is not about religion or family, but rather the something called a movement.

Something being a movement implies that there is an inherent purpose, some goal to move towards, something with values and statements. A movement is a synthetic version of a religion, which means at its core is a call to action. As such, you will find a similar life-cycle (although much shorter) in a movement as a religion: formation, addition of rules, disagreement, schism, reformation, redefinition, over and over and over as it gets diluted and misrepresented and not agreed upon.

Being “in a movement” is an attractive idea for disenfranchised individuals. Being disenfranchised can be justified or not, it depends on the person, but the reason for the disenfranchisement is irrelevant, because a movement appeals to the most desperate more than the comfortable and this creates an environment that pulls everything downward and degrades over time.

Who are attracted to a “movement”? The desperate, lower class, weak, poor, emotional, naive, young, scammers, and merchants. Those are the people who will join a movement. There are also more milquetoast normal individuals but they are filler that exist everywhere and do not matter or do anything besides give a small amount of money, energy, and validity to others.

A “movement” is a marketing term that results in fast growth and lots of energy, but is doomed to failure because of this very reason. It’s too unstable and attracts people with unrealistic expectations who are looking to turn their losing streaks into winning streaks. What really happens is that the few winners that are attracted to the “movement” will eventually leave the “movement” in a splinter group or by themselves and form their own offshoots and the same thing will happen until they figure out the pattern and stop investing time in these things altogether.

What is a Framework?

An important way to begin defining a framework is by defining what it is not: a movement. A movement can contain one or many frameworks that are compatible or incompatible with each other. A framework does not contain any movement. A framework is a tool. A movement is a conglomeration of tools that work with each other to varying degrees.

A good framework is not self contradictory. More details are added to the framework as time goes on. A framework is a tool. Like all tools there are poorly made frameworks. If built a shovel poorly, the shovel wouldn’t work well. It would still be a shovel just a bad one. The same pattern is true with frameworks and all other tools. They’re as good/bad as they are constructed.

A framework does not have values or emotional baggage or presidents or generals, it has a way of processing information and sorting it. It’s agnostic in the sense that anybody who is capable of understanding the framework can use it. It doesn’t matter if you’re black, white, jewish, asian, male, female, heterosexual, homosexual, transsexual, bisexual, old, young, or any other personal trait. It’s a tool anybody can use (properly or improperly), not something working towards internal goals.

A more clear illustration of frameworks would be the metric or imperial systems. Those are both tools for understanding and communicating reality, but they’re not “teams” in any real sense (although people have preferences.) Since they’re just tools, very few people getting upset or emotionally invested in somebody else’s opinion on either framework. There are always edge cases but it’s of no use to elaborate on them so lets pretend they don’t exist.

Because a framework is a tool that is seen as smaller than the person interacting with it, people with unhappy lives are not going to take life or death stances on the existence of one brand of shovel over another. People will use the framework for whatever they’re using it for, and then go do something else. A framework is ideally a complimentary asset to the person who uses it.

A movement is the inverse, in that it is generally seen as bigger than the person who is interacting with it. As such it attracts people who want to go from less to greater. This isn’t always bad, for example when there are things that need to be done on a collective scale, but it tends to attract the inverse type of person than a framework attracts. A framework is something that people use. A movement is something that people are used by, willingly or not.

(posted from essays.paul.town)