The fact that I’m still writing about the Occupy movement — and more importantly, that you’re still taking the time to read another column about it — would seem to indicate some level of campus support for the populist upwelling that has captured headlines around the globe. But you’d never know it based on the rather lackluster showing of Occupy Stanford, the movement’s arm on the Farm. In fact, were you to visit White Plaza during one of OS’s poorly attended sit-ins, walk-outs or stand-ups, you might not even realize Occupy Stanford existed at all.

Whatever The Review might say, Occupy Stanford’s lukewarm reception on campus is not a microcosm of the movement’s larger faults and foibles or a harbinger of the imminent implosion of the liberal project. But it does illuminate — and powerfully so — the maze of contradictions, paradoxes, schisms and hidden undercurrents that lies unseen at the heart of Stanford life.

Paradox number one: Stanford students are, almost by definition, those for whom The System has worked beautifully, even as we are constantly told to work against it. Fight The Man, we hear — we who got here by doing precisely the opposite, and doing it well.

Gone for good are the ‘70s. Here to stay are David Brooks’ Organization Kids: hardworking, optimistic, lovers of order and progress, believers in the system that got us where we are and that promises to get us where we hope to go. One of Stanford’s representatives at Occupy Palo Alto said it best: “Honestly, I should probably be studying.” We rage against the machine, even as its cogs are being forged, its gears oiled, its nuts and bolts tightened in classrooms and lecture halls all around us. We vociferously deny the morality of hoop-jumping, and then, as one of the greatest professors at this school has astutely pointed out, excel at jumping right through them.

We can see this wrenching cognitive dissonance at the soul of the Occupy Stanford movement itself. Consider the widely advertised General Assembly of last Wednesday. A few students showed up dutifully at a prescribed time — 11 a.m., to be exact — and calmly discussed the Occupy movement before filing respectfully away at 2. It was so quintessentially, though unintentionally, Stanford: protest within ordered boundaries, moral outrage within reason, furiously working against the system by working politely within a system — more week-eight IHUM lecture than Zuccotti Park, and similarly attended. No weeklong sit-ins here: there are problem sets to be done, after all.

Paradox number two is the paradox of class. Despite all signs and posters to the contrary, we are not, in fact, the 99 percent. We are the 1 percent. We are a school largely (though thankfully not entirely) composed of the sons of lawyers and doctors, the daughters of engineers and executives, the scions of success and the progeny of privilege, Neiman Marxists trying desperately to identify with the proletariat. As Yale professor William Deresiewicz put it in “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education,” too many Stanford students have been put in the “paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it.”

We are therefore torn, both socially and spatially; our geography mirrors our collective psychology. Campus sits conveniently near both East Palo Alto and Facebook headquarters. On University Avenue, Maseratis idle, rumbling, next to the homeless. The Haas Center’s not far from the Business School. We are a student body and faculty with an anti-capitalist ethos situated at the geographical heart of entrepreneurial capitalism, sitting in a university built by a railroad baron and sustained by donations from the rich.

Our advisers tell us to think outside the box; our exams command us to fill in the box. Our student government trumpets entrepreneurialism; half of us love it, and half of us hate it.

We take life seriously — too seriously, sometimes — but we can also be spectacularly, gloriously, deeply irreverent. We halfheartedly “like” Occupy Stanford on Facebook before gleefully sharing the “I am the 2 percent” milk photo and promptly forgetting all about it or scheming to hold an “Occupy Lag” protest to demand that the cinnamon rolls be brought back for weekend brunch (I’m in if you are).

So who should we blame, or praise, for the failure of Occupy Stanford? To quote a great man as I write this November the 5th: “Truth be told, if you’re looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror.”

If I may ask what an equally great man once called a very personal question: what do you see in that mirror?

Miles would love to hear your thoughts, so email him at milesu1 “at” stanford “dot” edu.