The human eye has a blind spot – a small portion of the visual field, about the size of a pencil eraser – where the optic disk is located. We aren’t normally aware of this blind spot, but with one eye closed, any object passing through this small area will disappear momentarily. Our visual field appears seamless because of an optical illusion: Our mind conspires to fill in the blank area with the colors of what surrounds it. We have other blind spots too – a whole series of what psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls “cognitive illusions” – that our minds and our culture work to obscure.

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman, a Nobel laureate for his work in behavioral economics, uncovers several mental blind spots. There is, for example, the “focusing illusion”: When we focus on a single factor like how much money we make, we inevitably overestimate its importance to our overall well-being. This explains why surveys consistently report that people think they would be happier if they were wealthier while also proving on the contrary that rich people are no more happy than the less wealthy. The same distortion of reality happens when we focus on any single factor, from whether we live in California to whether we own the latest gadget.

Some cognitive illusions are more pernicious than others. Kahneman has identified one cognitive illusion in particular that overturns the core assumptions of capitalism. He calls it the “endowment effect”: we exaggerate the value of objects that we possess. In one experiment, Kahneman collected a random group of students. Half the students were given a coffee mug and the other half were asked to buy those very same mugs from their classmates with their own money. Typical economic theory would say that the two sides would haggle and eventually come to a mutually agreeable price – that the market would self-regulate. In a review of Thinking, Fast and Slow, Freeman Dyson explains what actually happened: “The average prices offered in a typical experiment were: sellers $7.12, buyers $2.87. Because the price gap was so large few mugs actually sold.” Sellers ground the market to a halt, overvaluing their mug simply because they possessed it. “The experiment convincingly demolished the central dogma of classical economics,” Dyson writes.

Kahneman’s “illusion of validity” describes the tendency of experts to trust their own judgment. Dyson refers to the example of the “Apgar score” (a statistical formula that uses heart rate, breathing, reflexes, muscle tone and color to judge the health of newborn babies) to illustrate this illusion. Turns out that the Apgar score “does better than the average doctor in deciding whether the baby needs immediate help.” In other words, a basic formula anyone can do consistently outperforms the opinion of a trained medical professional.

Applying the illusion of validity undermines experts across all disciplines, including economics. After studying the “investment outcomes of some twenty-five anonymous wealth advisers” over the course of eight consecutive years, Kahneman discovered that they performed just about as well as random chance. Their management of financial flows, Kahneman concluded, is a “dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill.” And yet, Kahneman also found that these same experts will persist in believing their intuitive judgments are correct, forcing them on us all, even in the face of tremendous counter-evidence. As Dyson puts it, “the illusion of validity does not disappear just because facts prove it to be false.” Breaking through this barrier is the essential crux and challenge of cultural jammers.

We live in a world where a constellation of cognitive illusions – that infinite growth can be sustained on a finite planet, that consumerism can make us happy, that corporations are persons – are dragging us into an ecological apocalypse. These cognitive illusions won’t disappear because they’ve been proven false – they must be overcome at a deeper level. We need something other than rationality, statistics, scientific thought … we need something more, even, than what has passed for activism thus far. We must spark an epiphany, a worldwide flash of insight that renders our blind spots visible once and for all. This collective awakening begins the moment we look inward and ask ourselves: Am I caught inside a grand cognitive illusion?

Micah White is an activist consultant, the American creator of the Occupy Wall Street meme and former editor of Adbusters magazine. He is recognized internationally as one of North America's most innovative social activists. Micah is writing a book about the future of protest.

A new spiritual militancy is rising in the East . . . whose philosophical catalyst is a widespread epiphany, induced by Occupy Wall Street, that the core struggle is economic and not just political.

“When Egyptians rose up last year,” writes anthropologist Jason Hickel for Al Jazeera, “it was not only against tyranny and political repression, but also against the neoliberal economic order – designed by the United States – that has generated hunger, poverty and inequality in Egypt since the 1980s.” Now the failure of populist Islamic parties – especially Turkey’s AKP and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood – to break with this capitalist neoliberal economic order is pushing many revolutionary-minded Muslim jammers, theologians, and activists to embrace a militant anti-capitalism inspired by Occupy.

Istanbul’s Taksim square was packed on May Day 2012 with “red-flagged masses” who erupted in a “roar of delight,” reports journalist Susanne Güsten, “when the Anti-Capitalist Muslim Youth column marched in under a black banner bearing the slogan God – Bread – Freedom.” Other prominent slogans that day were “All Property Belongs to God” and “All Oppressed Are Equal” but it was an immense banner proclaiming FEKKU RAGABE (“Freedom to Slaves”) that fired up the people’s imagination. This slogan, a reference to the 13th verse of the Balad Surah of the Quran, and a reminder that the prophet Muhammad’s adopted son was a slave he’d personally freed, has struck a chord in Turkey, quickly becoming a rallying cry that could spark the next season of the Global Spring.

“We have a government that calls itself Muslim, but since they came to power, the number of banks in this street has risen from 10 to 25,” Mem Aslan, a 29-year-old Turkish anti-capitalist Muslim revolutionary says. “Some people have become rich, while others struggle to survive. We are talking about people who are sucking our blood.”

Tactically inspired, as one organizer put it, by “the rebellious Pirate Party,” the most prominent face of this new politics is the Anti-Capitalist Muslim Youth movement in Turkey which uses social media to organize horizontally. Their ideological positions are cosmopolitan and pluralistic, blending left and right while still being Islamic and deeply anti-capitalist. They take fearlessly controversial stands on hot issues – they unofficially support gay rights, recognition of the Armenian genocide, the rights of the Kurdish minority, an end to nuclear energy, a right to conscientious objection and an end to Turkey’s head scarf ban – while maintaining a strictly revolutionary agenda that is compatible with the blue-green-black, psycho-eco-politico, platform emerging from the West.

“God, Bread and Freedom – those demands express the soul of this region and its societies,” explains Ihsan Eliaçik, a Muslim theologian who is widely considered the spiritual mentor of the anti-capitalist movement in Turkey. Eliaçik’s philosophical approach is reminiscent of Christian liberation theology.

In an interview following May Day, still enjoying the afterglow of the large crowds who spontaneously showed up to their inaugural event, Eliaçik was forthright about his hopes for the future: “Capitalism is teetering, and people are searching for alternatives. Communism tried to provide an alternative without religion, but that didn’t work. Now people are looking for faith-based alternatives to capitalism. Islam has the capacity to offer that alternative.”

The tantalizing possibility behind the marriage of Islam with Occupy is that an East-West hybrid blue-green-black world party could emerge. If this happens … if anti-capitalist Muslim youth can launch an anti-usury and anti-poverty meme war that Western jammers can throw their weight behind, then we may finally have the strength to smash our financial shackles and free the billions of people enslaved by capitalism.

What is our one demand? Free the Slaves! FEKKU RAGABE!

Adbusters Articles by Micah White