Growing up, I’ve observed there were four types of kids around me.
The first were the ardent rule-abiders. They aren’t the goody two-shoes. They were rather snobs. They would not only obey all the rules (both written and unwritten), they would also tell on kids who break the rules, even if they break them unknowingly. They usually sit close to the teacher, and do everything in their power to get their attention to show how good a student they are. They are the classic Chatur “Silencer” Ramalingams from the 2009 Hindi film 3 Idiots.
While the snobs were aggressively conventional, there’s another category that’s kind of conventional. They make sure they obey rules, but they are not a bunch of stuck-ups who would tell on their friends. They worry about the kids who break the rules. They might even warn them not to break the rules, but they don’t go out of their way to ensure the kid is punished if they break a rule. Majority of kids belong to this category.
Then comes the dreamy ones. They are the Ishan Awasthis from 2007’s Taare Zameen Par — yet another very-well-made Hindi film. They don’t care much about the rules. In most of the cases, they don’t even know what the rules are anyway. They kind of do their own thing and then deal with the consequences. They are usually fun and easy going. If you want to call someone to help you hide the body in the middle of the night, these are the folks you’d most likely go to.
Finally, we have the naughty ones. Their first impulse is to question a rule when they come across one. They’re aggressively independent. If they are told to do something, they are pathologically inclined to do the exact opposite. They just can’t help but question and challenge authority. These are the anarchists, and they are a rare species.
It’s obvious that it’s a bit of a challenge to raise unruly kids. It’s of common wisdom that these kids cause more harm than good. Call me delusional but I’d argue that the conformists — NOT the anarchists — are responsible for a disproportionate amount of problems in the world.
As kids, the rules they follow, or question, or break are defined by their schools and parents. As these kids grow older, the source of their rules usually are peers, society, and dogma. Now I don’t have any scientific evidence, but apart from a few exceptions, the conformists go on to remain conformists, even as adults, while the anarchists go on to become adult anarchists — regardless of the nature of the rules.
For example, while growing up we were certain that if we had been born in pre-independence India, especially during the time of Bhagat Singh1 (of whom we all were huge fans), we would have surely taken part in the freedom struggle. (We detested characters in movies who either stayed away from the fight or supported the British Raj.)
But of course, most of us wouldn’t have. Those of us who are conformists now would have been conformists then as well. Like I said, conformism or anarchism is a temperament. It has very little to do with the time and age you are living and the rules or the government you have to follow.
IT TAKES A VERY LOUD NOISE TO MAKE THE DEAF HEAR
I love children’s books that aren’t reductive to the level that they are written for simpletons. I believe it’s important to teach good lessons to kids, but it’s equally important to teach lessons that are grounded in reality and not overly dumbed down.
Ron’s Big Mission, written by Rose Blue and Corinne J. Naden, and illustrated by Don Tate, tells a powerful story set in the racially segregated South Carolina of 1950s United States. It follows a young boy named Ron, who loves reading and dreams of becoming a pilot one day. Despite his passion for books, Ron knows that in his town, only white people are allowed to check out books from the library.
Determined to challenge this rule that seems utterly nonsensical to him, Ron sets out on a mission to borrow a book under his own name.
After the usual disappointment of finding hardly any books with children who look like him, Ron selects some books about aeroplanes and approaches the desk. When a kind older white lady offers to check the books out for him, Ron declines her politely and lays the books on the counter. The desk clerk doesn’t even look at him.
When she continues to disregard him, he does the most logical thing by the undiluted logic of a child that we adults have relinquished in favour of the “polite pretensions” we call propriety: He jumps on the counter and restates his wish to check out the books.
Everyone is aghast! Ron is reminded of the rule. Again and again. They even call the police. “Let someone check out the books for you, son,” one of them pleads with Ron. Ron refuses.
Then Ron’s mother is called. She too reminds Ron of the rule — the rule he has known all along, the rule that Ron believes is not a matter of reminding but of resisting. When this nine-year-old states simply that the rule is wrong and unfair, and asks, “Why can’t I check out books like everyone else?” all the adults are dumbfounded.
The political philosopher Hannah Arendt insists that, “under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not … Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.”
Back in the day, if a bunch of anarchists wouldn’t have questioned the rules and regulations set by some authority; if they wouldn’t have questioned the authority itself and asked it to justify its position, then we wouldn’t have had any kind of revolution or social change whatsoever.
Anarchism has a lot of negative connotation attached to it (“anarchy is nothing but bomb-throwing mayhem”), so I’m gonna call it “naughtiness” just to keep things in perspective. So, had Ron not been naughty that fine day in South Carolina in 1959; had he been obedient and followed the rules that were enacted by some authority he didn’t know based on some prejudice he couldn’t make any sense of; had he not put his foot down — literally — and challenged the rule, the librarian wouldn’t have stopped to give this rule a moment’s thought. As the legendary Indian freedom fighter and my personal hero Bhagat Singh once said: It takes a very loud noise to make the deaf hear.
As Ron’s mother and the policemen and the other folks in the library tried to put sense into that little kid’s head, the librarian disappeared into her office. After she emerged a few minutes later, she handed Ron a library card with his very own name on it. Faith in humanity… restored!
The best part is, this is a fictionalised version of a true story. Ron or Ronald McNair went on to become a physicist and celebrated NASA astronaut.2
WHY JOIN THE NAVY WHEN YOU CAN BE NAUGHTY?
“Truth always rests with the minority,” the great Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote in his diary in 1846 as he contemplated the individual vs. the crowd and why we conform, “because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion.”
An anarchist isn’t someone who thinks we should overthrow the government tomorrow. An anarchist isn’t someone who decides not to take part in this unjust game called capitalism. An anarchist isn’t someone who believes we should burn everything down and start from scratch. These people do exist and they are basically a bunch of rednecks who have no clue of what they are talking about. Like that in the Bon Jovi song, they give anarchism a bad name.
The philosopher Noam Chomsky was once asked how he defines anarchism. The answer he gives acts as a good starting point to understand the whole philosophy of being naughty.
So, whenever there’s an authority of some kind, particularly a hierarchical authority, Chomsky believes a very crucial part of the job of this authority is to justify its existence. “It has a burden of proof to bear.” It has to demonstrate that it’s legitimate. Because “authority” is not a self-justifying thing. If it can demonstrate that it’s legit, then all is great. If not, it has to be dismantled. That’s anarchism.
It doesn’t matter who the authority is — it can be a pandit who’s running a company, a monk who went on a safari, an elected prime minister or president of a country, even the police, and even a man running the family. For all these people — no matter how good their intentions are — the ultimate question is this: Can they justify their position of authority? An anarchist is just someone who takes this question very very seriously.
An anarchist is someone who insists on knowing how exactly is a certain group of people being in charge or a certain kind of rules being followed is serving everyone better than if they didn’t exist at all.
An anarchist is someone who meditates deeply upon the current nature of things. Do we have corporations OR are they some kind of privatised tyrannies that control the materials people build their lives with? Do we have media OR are they just some sort of apparatus that’s being used to control people’s ideas and shape their worldview? Do we have schools and colleges that promote freethinking and enquiry OR do we have brick and mortar institutions that’s only in the business of preserving prevalent norms and taboos?
Chomsky gives the example of women. Women and men had fixed roles for a long time. A woman’s job was to handle the domestic side of life and take care of the kids. A man’s job was to go die in a war for some rich dude or work himself into an early grave. Even when things become a little better, women were not able to vote, not able to get an education, or be independent. People — most people — accepted this as the natural order of things.
A modern day anarchist may ask, “Are we doing the exact same thing when we look at how things are currently structured and can’t imagine how the world would ever survive without it?”
To erase any confusion whatsoever, anarchists — or, as I like to call them, naughty people — are basically good human beings. They are naughty, but they aren’t mean or evil. They’re not Mr. Goody Two-Shoes type good either. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but they don’t bother much about observing proprieties, i.e., conforming to socially acceptable behaviour, customs, and norms. They are more like pirates than common sailors. They delight in breaking rules, but NOT the rules that really matter.
All of us come up with good ideas every now and then, but to be successfully naughty, it’s not enough just to be right (abolish slavery) or to have a ludicrously fantastic idea (let’s colonise Mars). You have to be right when everyone else is wrong, and you have to follow through when everyone is either against you or thinks you’re just another idiot with a pipedream. Conventional-minded people usually cannot do that. This is one of the reasons all successful founders are not only non-conformists (they challenge and they change things) but also aggressively independent-minded (they challenge and they change things against all odds). Societies prosper only when they nurture the naughty and keep the conformist at bay.
CONFORMISTS CONFORM, ESPECIALLY TO NAUGHTY PEOPLE
Now, it’s one thing to nurture naughtiness — I think we all can agree about its importance in society — but I kind of had a hard time in figuring out and convincing myself why we must not only nurture naughtism but also aggressively keep conformists at bay, until I read a chapter on social justice in Tim Urban’s extremely well-written and illustrated What’s Our Problem? I’ve had a revelation after reading it. Now I would go as far as to claim that it’s necessary to keep conformists at bay much much more than it’s necessary to nurture naughtism in a society.
In 2019, The Washington Post published an opinion piece titled “Can black women and white women be true friends?”3 in which the author explained why she believed the answer is no:
Generally speaking, it’s not that I dislike white women. Generally speaking, it’s that I do not trust them. Generally speaking, most black women don’t. … This is what black women know: When push comes to shove, white women choose race over gender: Every. Single. Time. … The brutal truth is that many white women, like much of white America in general, do not consider black women vulnerable. Which means they do not consider us to be fully human. … Friendship is not possible between a human being and one who doubts her humanity.
A lot of people can sympathise with the author, knowing very well that black folks are usually at a bit of disadvantage in the US. But most people won’t most likely be calling this opinion racist. But it is racist, and it only becomes apparent when you read a slightly modified version of it, written from the point-of-view of a white woman:
Generally speaking, it’s not that I dislike black women. Generally speaking, it’s that I do not trust them. Generally speaking, most white women don’t. … This is what white women know: When push comes to shove, black women choose race over gender: Every. Single. Time. … The brutal truth is that many black women, like much of black America in general, do not consider white women vulnerable. Which means they do not consider us to be fully human. … Friendship is not possible between a human being and one who doubts her humanity.
Any kind of negative generalisation of a giant group of people — be it ”white women” or “black women” — would certainly qualify as racist to any independent thinker who knows how to look at things objectively. But any person whose primary job is to conform to the latest trending woke opinion without actually thinking deeply about the issue at hand is bound to hold this opinion piece in high regard.
When we talk about a concept such as “racism,” we usually talk about some sort of discrimination, bias, or negative stereotyping against individuals or groups based on immutable characteristics like skin colour, sex, or sexual orientation. But a woke and distorted version of this definition sees racism not merely as a certain way of thinking or of treating people, but as an expression of the way society has been designed by a certain group of people to oppress another group of people. In other words, “Only white people can be racist.”
So when you see a Social Justice Keyboard Warrior with nothing better to do saying, “All white people are racist,” they’re not referring to the behaviour of individual white people, but as Urban puts it the way Syracuse professor Barbara Applebaum describes it in her book Being White, Being Good: “White people, through the practices of whiteness and by benefiting from white privilege, contribute to the maintenance of systemic racial injustice.”
You could easily substitute “racism” with sexism, homophobia, transphobia, islamophobia, xenophobia, some other -ism, some other -phobia, or any other word for identity-related bigotry or oppression, and the glove would still fit.
This is the problem when you let conformists have their way. While redneck anarchism is always some version of, “Let’s overthrow the government tomorrow,” this is the pathology of redneck conformism: Follow a rebellious idea after it becomes the norm (sexism is bad), but then don’t stop just there. Stretch the idea to such an extreme that it loses its meaning and morphs into something else altogether which has very little to do with the original idea (being male is equivalent to being sexist).
It was a group of naughty folks who questioned the authority and brought down an entire empire to establish the credo of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” It was a bunch of naughty folks who realised that slavery is bad, that segregation based on race, sex, and colour is bad. It was a bunch of naughty folks who fought for gay rights, women rights, black rights, environmental rights, Dalit rights. Only when their fight became “cool,” a bunch of snobs decided to ride the wave without understanding much about it. These are the ultimate conformists, the societal parasites, the killers of common sense, the riders of the woke ark who should never ever get their way with anything, not just social justice.
I believe a lot of our customs that have evolved since the Enlightenment have been designed to protect the rest of us from the aggressive conformists. In particular, the transition from the notion of heresy to the principle of openly discussing and debating diverse ideas, even the ones that are considered unacceptable, without any punishment for those who try them out to see if they work, has been done so as to allow us to question or challenge our preconceived notions and assumptions and best practices every now and then.
But if the customs protecting free enquiry are weakened in the service of a “greater good” (depending on what they want to prohibit, the greater good is always something different); if the conformists get the upper hand and want to shut down the discussion of, not all ideas per se, but perhaps “just the bad ones,” I believe we are setting up a very very dangerous precedent.
See, when you put limits on talking about certain subjects, it doesn’t just affect those specific topics. The restrictions spread out and impact other areas that are related to the forbidden topics. It’s like a ripple effect — if you stop the flow of conversation on one thing, it affects discussions on other related things too. As Paul Graham put it so eloquently: “Having ideas in a world where some ideas are banned is like playing soccer on a pitch that has a minefield in one corner.” You don’t play the same game anymore. You play a much more subdued game, even on safer side of the pitch.
But all hope isn’t lost. Even if the conformists get the upper hand, I’m not so worried about it to be honest. Even if they try to put restrictions and prevent change from happening, the naughty ones are good at protecting themselves. If existing systems are compromised, they’re very likely to tear them down and create new ones. That, after all, is their speciality. And when a new order is in place, the conformists would start following it — the very thing they tried to resist — which, after all, is their speciality.
Bhagat Singh was just 23 when he was executed along with his friends Rajguru and Sukhdev. The catch is that he surrendered himself (after the bombing of the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi to protest against the passage of repressive laws) so that he could use the courtroom as a platform to express the revolutionary ideals of his political party the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA) to the nation. The 2003 Hindi film The Legend of Bhagat Singh is a pretty good biopic on him.
Ronald McNair was aboard the ill-fated Space Shuttle Challenger and was killed at the age of 35.