On Disobedience and Other Essays
🔗Connect
🔼Topic:: Political Philosophy (MOC)
✒️ Note-Making
💡Clarify
🔈 Summary of main ideas
- Disobedience is an act of creation - to disobey is to work towards something, not just against something, an act of will and reason, despite the powers at be that try to hold you back, to bring something new into existence
🗒️Relate
⛓ Life lessons, action items
🔍Critique
✅ by following this method, what will happen?
❌ the logical jumps, holes or simply cases where it is wrong... The last chapter focuses on socialism and how it should be, but gives no reason as to why it wouldn't fall to the same traps that communism did. It's more of a manifest for socialism than an argument for it
🧱 Implementations and limitations of it are...
🗨️Review
💭 my opinions on the book, the writers style... The book is short enough and interesting, deeply affected by the time where capitalism and socialism where head to head, and lack some depth.
📒 Notes
Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem
Disobedience is like an act of Creative Destruction, it is through acts of going against the common beliefs, whether political or scientific that we progress as humans.
If we only obey, we are slaves, but if we only disobey, we rebel for rebel sake, an outburst of anger, not of progress. That's why we need both, to Balance Extremes
We tend to obey as default because Conformism provides social safety.
- Man has continued to evolve by acts of disobedience. Not only was his spiritual development possible only because there were men who dared to say no to the powers that be in the name of their conscience or their faith, but also his intellectual development was dependent on the capacity for being disobedient—disobedient to authorities who tried to muzzle new thoughts and to the authority of long-established opinions which declared a change to be nonsense. (Location 41)
- If a man can only obey and not disobey, he is a slave; if he can only disobey and not obey, he is a rebel (not a revolutionary); he acts out of anger, disappointment, resentment, yet not in the name of a conviction or a principle. (Location 59)
- A person can become free through acts of disobedience by learning to say no to power. (Location 99)
- The organization man has lost the capacity to disobey, he is not even aware of the fact that he obeys. At this point in history the capacity to doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilization. (Location 123)
Prophets and Priests
There are two kinds of people:
- Prophets - those who speak their truth, they live by it, they care about others and talk about a different world, a better world, If we only acted differently to be moral is to act moral
- Priests - they speak the "truth" of others, they don't live by it, they judge, they accuse, and they spread fear as their main source of power. Image vs core
To disobey is like being a prophet. You don't act against something, but rather for something. It is the expression of your will and reason. An act of belief that this is the best course of actions. Meanwhile most of us are disciples of priests, whether religious, political, etc. we live within a system and we are blind to it's influence on us. We "just happen" to support whatever they preach, as if it's our authentic expression, while in reality it's far from it
- It is exceedingly difficult for a man to be moved by ideas, and to grasp a truth. In order to do that, he needs to overcome deep-seated resistances of inertia, fear of being wrong, or of straying away from the herd. (Location 135)
- The individual becomes a number, transforms himself into a thing. But just because there is no overt authority, because he is not “forced” to obey, the individual is under the illusion that he acts voluntarily, that he follows only “rational” authority. (Location 216)
- Disobedience, then, in the sense in which we use it here, is an act of the affirmation of reason and will. It is not primarily an attitude directed against something, but for something: for man’s capacity to see, to say what he sees, and to refuse to say what he does not see. (Location 230)
Let Man Prevail
Two economical systems, both glorify the freedom of the individual, both fail to do so and are based on obedience, Capitalism and Communism.
Capitalism has turned people into machines, not only in the production but also in consumption. It has transferred power to the managers, while the workers are cogs in the machine, working to serve the capital, while being alienated from their work. In their "free time", they are also told to consume, to fill themselves with tv and other distractions, to keep the economical machine flowing. Alienation consumerism This empty life is hard for the individual, which seeks to escape in every way possible, only to find the forces of the economy stronger than him, he is completely powerless, subdued by it, indoctrinated by it's values. He has no ability to think, no tools for critical thinking, he has become a (Aka:: one-dimensional being.
Communism, which was based on socialism which tried to free the worker of these forces and create a society where man is free and in the center, also lost purpose. They created unity, ideology and hierarchy only to keep the state going, instead of improving the citizens lives.
- The giant corporations which control the economic, and to a large degree the political, destiny of the country constitute the very opposite of the democratic process; they represent power without control by those submitted to it. (Location 435)
- While our economic system has enriched man materially, it has impoverished him humanly. (Location 467)
Humanist Socialist
To be a socialist means to attempt to implement what it's original values were all about, to support critical thinking, diversity, decentralization of power, of humanistic wealth over material one, to develop the transcendence of man, and allow true freedom.
- The supreme value in all social and economic arrangements is man; the goal of society is to offer the conditions for the full development of man’s potentialities, his reason, his love, his creativity; (Location 616)