We’re all rebels to some degree while we’re growing up, a process that can take some of us a long time, while others are quite quick. The important thing is to learn how to be ourselves, regardless of the wishes of parents and family, of schools and governments, and of all those who would like to mould us into what they would feel most comfortable with. We don’t owe to anybody the obligation to make them feel comfortable! To achieve true autonomy, we have to be able to be totally selfish in persuing our own desires and ambitions, and defying all who want to stand in our way.
I’m not suggesting that we should grow to be totally selfish bastards who spurn the needs or wishes of everybody else. It’s possible to do one’s own thing and still be considerate of others where this is not destructive of our own needs. But how many people, expecially women, subordinate their personal needs to the compulsions of mothers and others who want them to be obedient puppets? They injure themselves severely in the process. So, of course, do some sons, particularly those who have fathers who want to make their sons into everything that they themselves wanted to be. The selfishness of this kind of desire is monumental and inhuman.
From natural rebellion come the misfits, the criminals, the terrorists, and the full-time revolutionaries and protestors. They take the process to a level of ‘reductio ad absurdum’ where it ceases to benefit them and instead sets them on to a downward spiral of harm and alienation. All extremism is best avoided, if one is to have a satisfying and productive life, but unfortunately some individuals are insanely compulsive about their refusal to cooperate with the rest of humanity. They are sick.
Evil results ‘when good people do nothing’. Unless we are prepared to defy authority, even mildly, in some degree, the result is autocracy, dictatorship of an apalling degree. The worst kind is that based on ‘religion’, the theocracy which tells people every detail of how they must live, sometimes on pain of death. We all know about this, and it’s one of those human aberrations which is particularly hard to stamp out, dependent as it is on brainwashing from childhood on. Those of us who really believe in individual autonomy have to believe that others are entitled to believe in its opposite, meaning that we concede the advantage to our deadly opponents.
How, then, are we to retain the fragile flower of what we call ‘democracy’, where power is limited by consensus, and the powerful and wealthy are constrained by laws which are enforced on all citizens, and the persons in power hold their positions only temporarily? We see this process defied in every nation where the ‘leader’ insists on another term, or on appointment in perpetuity. As for the rich and powerful, how many pay their way in society rather than battening on the labour or thousands or millions of workers? I laugh when I read of billionaires like Bill Gates giving away millions, which are as nothing to him, and only noticed by his accountants. Does he pay tax at the same rate as one of his Chinese factory workers? I don’t think so!
Malcolm Miller's Poems 