This is the second in a series of micro-essays I developed from a talk I gave in 2018. The talk and essays explore foundational truths I’ve learned during the first half of my statistically-expected life.
Rebellion and conformance are the same sin.
Applying slightly different vocabulary: Rebellion is conformance with reversed polarity. Both are an abdication of one’s agency in favor of an outside decision maker’s direction or anti-direction. Lack of agency/freedom generally prevents a person from making decisions or taking actions that benefit them, and instead redirects their time and energy to the benefit of someone else. This often comes at direct—and often extreme—cost to the person.
You’re already familiar with many ways a person’s agency gets whittled away to varying degrees:
- addictive substances
- monopolistic companies
- excessive debt
- slavery
The word captive is often used when describing situations like these, in which one entity suspends the freedoms of another. It should be clear enough how each example above reduces the agency of the individual. It should be equally clear how this lopsided relationship harms the individual on one side of the relationship in order to maximize the benefit of the entity on the opposite side. I won’t belabor that point here.
Now, back to rebellion and conformance. Understanding their parallel and dependent nature, and their relationship to other forms of captivity, leads directly to a few interesting realizations:
- Condoning one while condemning the other is hypocrisy.
- Neither the rebellious nor the conformant exhibit novel thinking.
- Both the conformant and the rebellious are extremely predictable. This predictability is often leveraged to control the person’s behavior, often at direct harm to that person.
- Rebellion and conformance are both forms of dogma. Dogma is always wrong. (HA! See what I did there?)
- Rebellion and conformance generally paint the world in black and white, ignoring the vast array of options between the two extremes.
To be clear, behaving in a way that aligns with someone else’s direction isn’t inherently harmful. And no matter your actions, you’ll find yourself aligned with rebellious/conformant people. Your goal should simply be to consciously choose your actions and not defer to an outside authority by default. Learning to filter choices through the cognitive portion of your brain will help you identify situations where a rebellious/conformant non-decision might work against you.
Similarly, the goal in removing a person’s agency is rarely to inflict harm. The controller’s objective is primarily their own benefit, independent of the impact on the controlled. But once in a position of control, the captor will systematically extract as much benefit as possible. I’ve never seen (and haven’t been able to invent) a real-world scenario where a captive agent isn’t eventualy harmed by their captor. And this tends to happen very quickly since extracting something tangible which was made with someone else’s resources and energy has immediate benefit for the taker.
TAKEAWAY: Always be thinking, planning, scheming, and acting. Sincere, analytical inspection of any assertion is rational, healthy, and honorable. Preserving your agency will keep you free to work toward your own benefit instead of someone else’s. In decision making, most dichotomies are false ones.
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