Anarchy and Authority
The other day a former student, who is trans male, posted a picture of himself entering a men’s room while in North Carolina. It was captioned, “let’s do illegal stuff.” I chuckled. It was nicely done. It is in moments like this that our individualism and freedom are asserted. On a grander scale it is civil disobedience, on an individual level it’s non-compliance.
For many non-compliance is a bad thing. This is especially true in mental health, education, and policing. For them non-compliance means opposition to legitimate authority, and must be put down. I am sad to say that when working in mental health I was part of the process of putting mentally disabled people in physical restraints due to non-compliance. I wince at the memory. In education, even at the college level, there are faculty who take personally what they consider non-compliance, to them it’s a sign of personal disrespect, and they will retaliate harshly against the student. Of course, we have all seen the consequences of non-compliance with police officers – you get shot.
Non-compliance is considered a bad thing in the capitalist workplace also. Strict rules and restrictions, which if enforced by government would produce riots, are accepted passively when required by bosses. Workers must submit to drug tests, all workers, even non-shift workers, must follow a strict schedule, the workers are told how to dress, even speech is restricted. Failure to comply generally results in dismissal from the job. I can’t remember how often in the past I had to fight battles with employers over even little things like hair length. I still now, as a tenured professor, have do deal with authoritarian tendencies from some put in positions of relative authority.
Many want this hierarchical, law and order based society. It supplies certitude and security. I don’t. I have resisted authority since my school upbringing in England. I suffered from teachers who would punish, including corporal punishment, on a whim. In England they also specialized in public humiliation of the offender. Such arbitrary, often cruel, use of authority turned me into an anarchist. This tendency was reinforced by adult encounters with bullying police (not all!), petty tyrant bosses, and religious fundamentalists.
Christianity is a faith of non-compliance. The Christians I know are those who have a God of love, and who lead a Christian life above all other concerns. These Christians will help a prostitute as much as a neighbor. They live for the city of God, not the City of man. However, the fundamentalists are the law and order Christians. Their God is a king who demands we prostrate ourselves before him and worship him. Their God has lots of rules, rules on who has sex with whom, on how much to drink, about blasphemy, and many more. They want these rules as laws. Non-compliance with these rules means punishment from the state, and then from the king/god.
It is not easy to break out of this cult of compliance. It effects government, religion, and the workplace. Change must happen fundamentally to cross all aspects of society. We can, for example, introduce economic democracy in the workplace by replacing the hierarchy with worker control (it’s called socialism). We must change the mentality of the security and police state. That means less focus on secrecy and security, and retraining of police back to the concept of “to protect and to serve.” By the way, this is why I don’t care about Clinton’s emailing from her own server, but do care about Philando Castile getting shot by a police officer who was trained to shoot first think later. The churches are going to have to purge their own fundamentalists, just like we constantly ask Muslims to do so.
My classroom may be seen as chaotic by students, my following my own path seen as non-compliance to my supervisors, my politics viewed as way out there and naïve, my beliefs wishy-washy, but I’ll proudly accept all that rather than spend a life bowed down to authority.
Never give up.
