What is now happing is a rebellion rather than a protest, and that's why there are no explicit demands. All rebellions are basically spiritual — about "righteousness." When a critical mass of people feels deeply wronged, they rise up in anger. Their demand is wholesale change.
The catalyst for rebellion is almost always material. So, very often a proximate cause is mistaken for the actual cause. It may seem that the Occupy Wall Street protest or the London riots, or the rioting in Greece, Spain and Chile are about money and jobs, and the Arab Spring was about rising food prices. But these are just the sparks that set off a bonfire globally that had been years in the making. This is about a youth that sees no future for itself in the world under the existing system.
This rebellion is against false authority, and it is grounded in real outrage over a lot of things other than what media pundits are bloviating about — mass murder (neo-imperialism, neo-colonialism), violation of human rights (torture, war crimes), widespread lying and hypocrisy, endemic political corruption, unbridled lust for money and power, and unprecedented greed, etc. all leading to economic chaos.
This rebellion is not astroturf. It is grass roots and it is global. Most significantly it is inspired and lead by youth in a leaderless movement that has arisen spontaneously. However, it has been decades in the making, and it is has broad and deep intellectual underpinning. The media idea that this is a flash in the pan, a "return of the hippies," is wishful thinking on the part of the entrenched.
The people in charge of governing have violated their charge and have lost the spiritual basis of their authority. Al they retain is the material basis, which ultimately rests on the state's monopoly on violence. However, resort to violence has seldom worked for long against a determined and focused populace that feels deeply wronged. The velvet revolutions proved this.
Governing is about ordering a society for and toward good. When a critical mass of people comes to think that the elite has hijacked not only the country instead, but are also destroying the world and the future in the process, then expect agitation for change to be coming.
This is a long way from being over. It is a developing trend that will be with us for some time, and it will have an impact socially, politically and economically on the whole world.
The beginnings of this rebellion, which has gone global, can be traced to the velvet revolutions that toppled the USSR. This is the same "spiritual force" at work, which Hegel called the Zeitgeist, that is, the "the spirit of the time." The entire world is now in the throes of an ongoing velvet revolution that will last out this decade and transform the world one way or another. The outcome is still very uncertain and many scenarios can come into play before the dust settles on a new era.
This is pretty much the way that Ravi Bata approaches it in The New Golden Age: The Coming Revolution against Political Corruption and Economic Chaos (2007), and Straus & Howe also in The Fourth Turning (1997). Indeed, Batra foresaw the coming social, political and economic revolution decades ago in The Coming Downfall of Communism and Capitalism (1978). He got the timing of the fall of communism about right but was late with respect to capitalism. His 2007 book seems to have corrected that. Strauss & Howe were pretty much on target.
Both view this in terms of the temporal and historical unfolding of a spiritual force rather than the result of some purely material cause, although they give different reasons for their views. They agree, however, that it is the confluence of both objective, historical conditions and the subjective mindset of a generation ready to rise to awesome challenge since its future is at stake and they see nothing to lose in risking all. So expect big things to be happening, but not all at once or linearly — unless the world is very, very lucky.
