When the movie, “Rebel Without a Cause” came out in 1955, I felt as if they had made it about me. Being adolescent in a time of gang warfare, football hero worship, drag racing, and back seat bingo – none of which applied to me – put me in a peripheral category. Being a peripheral adolescent is not fun, especially if it includes life at home, a place where I was pretty much just in the way. Mom and Dad both had careers and their expectations for me were that I be a scholar and keep quiet. Neither of which appealed to me, both which I ignored. I felt marginalized and without a definition of being anyone.
In those days, they cracked down on peripheral slackers. These days I suppose slackers and peripherals get lots of sympathy, and co-dependent support. I got cracked down on. James Dean got co-dependent support in the movie. Either way, rebellion is inevitable, because there is no way to develop a sense of ownership of one’s own self, if that self is controlled by someone else. Adolescent rebellion is one of the ways that youth sheds dependence and becomes. It is the need to become that drives rebellion, the need to differentiate oneself, to become autonomous, and in control. In adolescents, it is normal.
Not long after the James Dean movie, the James Bond movies started coming out. Talk about cool and in control. Bond always survived the worst attacks and then had sex with the most beautiful women. Not so the peripheral adolescent. The lack of control became omnipresent and painfully so.
Yet with the acquisition of adult age, a self-financed degree, a good professional job, the peripheral adolescent in me should have disappeared. It faded, but never really seemed to disappear, in the sense that rebellion against authority was always still just subcutaneous, barely repressed but also not really visible to the casual observer.
Rebellion is a destructive force. When it is not released, it becomes an attitude, a worldview. As it gets worse, it metastasizes into internalized negativity, then externalized as a substitute for rational thought. In an adult, it is a toxin.
Here’s what I mean by that. Rebellion might originally have legitimate causes such as seeking oneself by eliminating the forces that control. But it has illegitimate tactics that go along with that, including a thoughtless rejection of articles that are perceived as threats, which really are not. The pursuit for autonomy can and frequently does eliminate every input from standard cultural sources as wrong, and then: evil.
Such rebellion, when not abated in adulthood, can become stultifyingly irascible, belligerent, reflexive, uncompromising and destructive to rationality. This sort of individual finds support from like minded belligerents who come to feel that their pain is a source of moral superiority, a source that cannot be comprehended by the “Other”. Rebellion thus becomes a moral statement, a decree against almost everything cultural which might inhibit or control the rebel. Rebellion becomes a force against the tyranny of others, the tyranny of external control, of standards, of rules, of mores and of ethos. Rebellion leads to a reflexive rejection of most everything which the host culture values.
It is this reflexive rejection that gives chronic rebellion its irrational character. The adult rebel will immediately reject or deny a cultural standard without a shred of evidence to support his premise. The common path of rebel thought includes rejection, Reductio Ad Absurdum, ridicule, Ad Hominem attacks, and verbal violence upon foes. The adult rebel automatically knows better than his foes, still without a shred of supporting evidence. Generally seen as a fractious belligerent, the rebel will not succumb to reasoned debate, but will frequently explode tangentially into a non-coherent tantrum in the face of persistent logic.
This sort of worldview is seen by the rebel as freedom, total freedom of thought. Rather, he is captive to negative reflexion away from standards, all standards, whether rational or not, beneficial or not, moral or not. The rebel’s morality is merely to reject.
What suffers for the rebel is the loss of contact with universals. To present universals to a rebel is to meet with instantaneous rejection. Sometimes the rejection is based on scientism. No matter, the just the idea of universals is an idea of external control: psychologically anathema to the rebel.
But for rationality, universal reality is the only guideline we have. Coherence can only be derived from a condition of universal consistency, a trait that we can observe ourselves without external coercion. In fact, universal reality is deduced after inductive observation of the characteristics of the universe; it is falsifiable by continuous observation, and philosophical observations over millennia have observed some consistent characteristics that are inherent to the basic construction of the universe, and which render it coherent. These principles allow the deduction of First Principles, which apply to reality, and how we can think about reality coherently and produce valid thoughts through structured processes of thought. Such structured thinking about universal realities is called “logic”. And symbolic math. And ultimately science.
But rebellion is against the external control of things like roots, which demand subservience as they require recognition of their validity. Here again, reflexive rebellion goes astray, goes awry, as it rejects the implacable validity of the universal characteristics to which we are subject. Misreading roots as threats rather than foundations for valid thinking is endemic in rebels.
The freedom that rebels crave, they also reject because freedom of thought comes with the ability to apply rationality to every and all propositions, at least those subject to rational analysis.
And this brings us to morality. The rebel’s presumed morality, mentioned above, is derived from the pain produced by the rebellion, which the rebel presumes confers moral authority upon himself. But it can be seen that irrationality rules the rebel; so why would morality be invested upon such an individual? And invested by whom?
The intellectual world is infested with rebels of the sort discussed above. Their forte’ is to reject all the norms for thought and behavior that are present in the culture which provides for them. And they self-anoint (in Sowell’s terminology) with mantles of extraordinary morality, priests of differentiated thinking and Consequentialism. They gather into groups of self-appellated intellectuals, remaining in and taking control of university lounges, and venturing into government advisory positions from which to pontificate and maneuver the masses.
But their rebellious rejectionism remains a distinctive characteristic, the immediate defiance in the presence of rational alternatives to their “moral advances” and progressivism for the herd. Again, a mark of the irrational rebel is that they know better than us about everything (and in a moral way), without a shred of supporting evidence, in fact despite the masses of evidence to the contrary. Morality is not influenced by evidence, if you are possessed of irrational rebellion. The lack of personal freedom that the rebel incurs for himself everyday is to be compensated by the removal of personal freedoms from the Other, leveling the field once and for all, and this is morality. As Alinsky said in his tenth rule, “…clothe it in moral garments.” He didn’t mean be moral. He meant, make it look moral, regardless of the tactic: make the ends look moral, and the means will justify themselves: Consequentialism.
The inevitable Consequentialism of the rebellious is merely a self-justification for doing whatever they wish (frequently to whoever they wish). This illusion of freedom results in either incarceration of the Consequentialist in a just world, or abuse of the Consequentialist’s fellow man, in a Consequentialist world. Frequently in history it has been the latter, at least for those who aspire to control rather than be controlled. Rebellion in adults is not without victims, not in the victimology sense of co-dependence, but real victims. The first victim is the rebel himself, trapped in a fearful state of perceived persecution by forces that want to control him, unable to free himself into rational thought and worldview behaviors, because that requires his submission – subservience – to outside forces, the universals which cannot be recognized. Rejection of these necessary roots is fatal to rationality, and the rebel suffers under his own constrictions, imprisoned away from the reality of the universe as shown through its coherence.
In short, the rebel is miserable and frequently without recourse. The rebel is frustrated by the refusal of the Other to abandon rationality and join him in his irrational, miserable state. So he is also angry. And an angry, miserable, irrational Consequentialist is not a pleasant companion. Or correspondent. Or politician.
Rebels are beyond help, at least logical help. It is a deep seated psychological issue. But like most mental issues these days, it is not considered pathological until an actual crime is committed. The damage they do can be controlled, until they seize the three branches of government. Uh oh. Our reality is changing, and not to the more rational state.
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