(Dis)obey.
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“It has always happened that tyrants, in order to strengthen their power, have made every effort to train their people not only in obedience and servility toward themselves, but also in adoration.”
— Étienne de La Boétie
“When one human being tells another human what is ‘real,’ what they are actually doing is making a demand for obedience. They are asserting that they have a privileged view of reality.”
— Humberto Maturana
I had three paper rounds as a kid - morning papers, evening papers and the Sunday papers, the latter of which I blame for my recurrent back problems.
For a while, before I found a bike, I did these routes on foot, covering a few miles around the centre and south east of our town. This meant an early start for my morning route, which started a couple of miles from home and had to be finished in time for me to get back, quaff some milk and head to school.
I was often late. Sometimes late getting out of bed, sometimes late getting to the newsagents, sometimes distracted by some caper along my route. It was on one of these occasions that I was close to the end of my route with just a couple more deliveries to make. To get to them, I had to cross one of the busiest roads in the town, which was full of rush hour traffic.
On this particular day, the lane closest to me was stationary, a logjam of cars backed up bumper to bumper. The other side was flowing freely, although I wasn’t quite tall enough to see when cars were coming.
I waited impatiently, shifting my weight from foot to foot. This lasted no more than thirty seconds before I thought I had ‘intuited’ a gap in traffic and decided to make a dash across the road.
I sprinted in between the bumpers of two static cars, my front foot landing on the other side of the white line in the middle of the tarmac road, only to realise there was a car coming at full speed less than a few metres away.
With no time to think, my body instead took over, and I instinctively threw my arms upwards as my back foot arrived next to my front foot and I arched my back slightly outwards, creating a kind of f-shape with my body, just as the car arrived.
A stuntman could not have timed it better. The car passed so close to me that I felt a rush of wind against my hands from the roof, the wing mirror brushing my coat and - incredibly - the front and back tyres running over the front of my feet. The car was moving fast enough that the weight of this had no time to register.
The car passed, and I ran to the safety of the opposite pavement, feeling a rush of adrenaline that manifested as me chuckling to myself uncontrollably. A left turn on the pavement, and then a sharp right, and I was heading downhill towards one of my last deliveries.
Still high on the rush of it, and still feeling the sensation of car tyres across the top of my grubby white trainers, which had faint tread marks on them, I had the thought that I would have a great story to tell my mates at school, although it was unlikely to be believed.
Halfway down the road, I heard a shout from behind and turned to see a distraught-looking woman running towards me, underdressed for the bitter cold of a winter morning. She stopped in front of me, gasping frantically, “Are you ok? Are you ok?” as she looked me up and down.
“Yeah, I’m fine”, I said after a pause, bemused and awkward in the face of these adult emotions from a stranger.
“I almost ran you over!” she exclaimed. I realised now why she had no coat on and was on the verge of tears.
“Oh, yeah…. I’m fine,” I repeated.
“Did I hit you? Where did I hit you? Are you ok?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Honestly.”
She looked me up and down once more, and then her face hardened. “You should be more careful, I could have killed you!”
A sheepish “Sorry” was the best I could muster in response. She turned and rushed back up the hill, and within a few seconds, I was already embellishing the story I would tell my pals at school.
In my inevitable innocence at the age of 13, I was barely aware of how upsetting it would be for an adult to think they might have hit a child with their car.
This memory came back to me a few days ago as I walked through our neighbourhood with my son. We’d just been to see some late afternoon music in a local bar and were ambling home as the sun was setting. He was in a typically playful mood, wanting to run, hide and climb things.
At one street corner, he clambered onto a temporary street sign, a base of a few weighted slabs holding a pole upright. “Papa, guck mal!” (“Dad, look!”) he shouted as he stood on the base and grabbed the pole.
He was less than a foot off the ground when a woman walked past, frowning at him, then at me, then back at him. This continued as she moved slowly past us, as if to emphasise her disapproval.
This is not an uncommon experience in Berlin. People here, particularly older Berliners, seem to get agitated by small and harmless contraventions of social etiquette.
It is a city of contradictions when it comes to strictness. On the one hand, no one seems to mind the adverts dotted around the streets for the sex shop Dildo King, with its prominent waving phallus logo. Berliners, and Germans in general, are much more comfortable with sex and nudity than we prudish Brits.
On the other hand, if you nip across a pedestrian crossing when the road is empty but the lights are red, some people will glance at you the way you might look at someone defecating in the street.
I smiled politely at the passing woman, resisting the childish urge to offer a passive-aggressive greeting, and it sparked in me again, an ongoing reflection on the nature of rules, freedom and risk, especially in how I father my son.
It’s a basic function of parenting to teach a child good habits and things that help to keep them safe and healthy: cross on the green light, put your shoes away, eat some vegetables, don’t eat things you find on the street (that last one is particularly important in Neukölln).
Yet I often find myself asking him to conform to certain rules that I’ve never really questioned. To sit a certain way on his chair when at the kitchen table or to turn his t-shirt around so it’s no back to front. And sometimes I catch myself doing this and ask, “Does it really matter? Who gives a fuck if he stands on his seat while eating his pasta?”.
One way or another, children learn that they can break rules and that, much of the time, this has little or no consequence. They learn that not all rules are equal, not all are useful, and some are completely pointless.
It’s only by doing this that they sharpen their own discernment of the world. The external world presents endless paradoxes and contradictions, and this manifests even in how we advise children: we might teach them to always respect what elders say, but at the same time, to not talk to strangers.
We trust them to listen to their instincts and make their own exceptions to these rules - despite his eldership, the creepy old man in the playground should not be obeyed.
But most of the time, most kids become adults having learned a deep-rooted sense of obedience that is rarely questioned. Parents, education systems, institutions and the socialising effect of other people and social groups require high degrees of conformity.
This is how a coherent society functions. Most people pay their taxes, most of them don’t throw their litter on the floor, most of them don’t steal from shops, and so on. The rules are important constraints.
The emphasis here is on following the rules and doing what is expected for things to work well. Yet whilst a level of obedience is essential for a functioning civil society, we rarely ask the cost of following the rules. What happens when you have a society of people who either blindly follow rules or are too timid to question or break them?
Disobedience is a virtue, too. Throughout history, huge strides have been made in social progress and justice by people refusing to submit to rules.
The French Revolution, the Suffragettes, Indian Independence and the Civil Rights Movement in the US all succeeded in their missions through varying degrees of disobedience and law-breaking. The law said Mahatma Gandhi could not collect his own salt, but he picked up a handful anyway - because he knew that morality, fairness and laws are not the same thing.
Erich Fromm, who fled Nazi Germany in 1933, was heavily influenced by that history when he wrote in 1980 of the psychological and social importance of disobedience: “Obedience to a person, institution or power (heteronomous obedience) is submission; it implies the abdication of my autonomy and the acceptance of a foreign will or judgment in place of my own. Obedience to my own reason or conviction (autonomous obedience) is not an act of submission but one of affirmation. My conviction and my judgment, if authentically mine, are part of me.”
Before Fromm, back in 1895, Gustav Le Bon reflected on the manipulation of crowds: “It is the need not of liberty but of servitude that is always predominant in the soul of crowds. They are so bent on obedience that they instinctively submit to whoever declares himself their master.”
And before Le Bon, back in the 16th century, it was another Frenchman, Étienne de La Boétie, who wrote, “Liberty is the natural condition of the people. Servitude, however, is fostered when people are raised in subjection. People are trained to adore rulers. While freedom is forgotten by many, there are always some who will never submit.”
There have been many more before, after and in between these three who have questioned the extent to which we should accept and obey rules - and their makers.
The journalist Sebastian Junger, who has researched and written on tribe cohesion, recently asked what we feel a sense of duty towards in our lives. Our families? Our neighbourhood? Our town or city? Our country? Our religion?
Somewhere in our answer to that question lies the edges of our obedience. Will we follow the laws of the land if that means our family suffers? If civil war breaks out, are we loyal to our city, the state or something else? If a member of our family leaves our religious community, where do our allegiances lie?
Learning a capacity for disobedience has always been essential to becoming a healthy adult, and I wonder the extent to which it is essential - and lacking - to the functioning of society and our current predicament.
Even in the military, an institution built on following orders, there is allowance for disobedience - soldiers can, for example, refuse to follow orders they deem to be illegal. What is deemed illegal in that case is usually something for which there is no moral justification, something that is worthy of reflection.
We all know that ‘just following orders’ is no longer an adequate defence when judgment arrives later. So what or who are we blindly obeying right now? Where in our lives are we just following the rules? What could a healthy dose of disobedience look like?
One day, my son will realise that waiting for the green light doesn’t always make sense, and that you can eat something off the pavement without certain death. He’ll make many other judgements about what is right and wrong, not based on what I’ve told him but on what feels true to him. My real work then is to ensure he has a moral education that allows for disobedience just as much as it encourages following the rules.
The breeding ground for undesirable forces in society is not just the conditions that lead people to take hostile, unjust or oppressive actions, it is also the conditions that lead even more people to take up the role of bystanders for fear of breaking the rules they’ve been conditioned to obey.
It can be a depressing and humbling realisation that we are not living as freely as we thought, but it is surely the first step towards a different kind of freedom.
“All the sacred rights of humanity are violated by insisting on blind obedience”.
— Mary Wollstonecraft
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[main image: Shepard Fairey’s Angela Davis from lostartgallery.com]