For Equality and Human Rights?

From books like Common Sense to the Common Laws, equality–or lack thereof–has driven many revolutions and movements. The Civil Rights Movement was about equal treatment for all races; the Brown Berets strove for equal treatment of the Latino race; the Women’s Rights Movement strove for gender equality and the list continues. The catchy phrase of Occupy Wall Street is “We are the 99%.” What they want to get across could be anyone’s guess but from photographs, the easiest conclusion is that 99% of the United States populations is struggling to make ends meet in some way or another (although it is usually monetary).

What they believe in are citizen rights. Citizen rights are differentiated from human rights as the right “to work, just pay, a standard of living adequate for health and well-being, including housing and medical care, social security and education.” Human rights, as defined by Feinberg, are “moral rights of a fundamentally important kind held equally by all human beings, unconditionally and unalterably.” Human rights are ideally universal and should remain the same throughout the globe. This is not the case and it is visible on every news channel in the world. This is the primary motivation of the movement according the the photograph and the interviews, is for the moving of citizen rights to be human rights.

This is a huge thing and it makes sense why some would call those in the movement “entitled“. That’s the theory basis of it. If we were to look at the movement as a blob. Which it isn’t and that’s where psychological motivation comes into play. But to interview every single person–as the Handbook of Motivation and Cognition suggests–is nearly impossible and there are always chances that people will lie about their real reasons.

As more articles come about about possible motivations for Occupiers (members of the Occupy Wall Street Movement), I will try and connect them with research done about human motivation. There are false articles and misinformation all about but theories are proven.

Dolores