Art Religion Philosophy Science

Rebel Without An Effect (I)

Rebellion is something encouraged in democratic societies where Secret Services do not commit abuses against innocent population. Democracy is based primarily on freedom of expression. There is an entire debate over what freedom of expression is (not).

What is rebellion? What does it stand for? Is rebellion a state of mind, is it an attitude, is it a trend, or all of these? Rebellion is considered by psychologists an abnormal state, which expresses unsolved psychological conflicts generated by subconscious or rather unconscious tensions impossible to rule out because the underlying energies cause a powerful, discouraging rebellious behaviour, characterised by an aggressive tendency to impose one's own point of view over others' by way of cancelling the validity of the opinion system supported by the opponents more or less reasonably.

Paradoxically, rebellion, although disconsidered by psychologists and labelled as insanity in most of the cases, was a necessary step towards modernity. It is rebellion that helped people bring democracy back, it is rebellion that helped people fight all sorts of abuses, it is rebellion that made Jesus seem like a mad representation of God, anti-system, acting like a violent defender of human values. It was rebellion that changed the political reality of Eastern-European countries, turning it into a realm of capitalistic values tied to the idea of freedom and development.

We don't know whether rebellion is good or bad, and it's pointless to argue that it's either way. It's legit to develop on the phenomenology of rebellion, but arguing on the morality of rebellion is old fashioned and dangerous. Rebellion denotes a latent need for change. What is change, if not a proof that the world is composed of infinite particles moving and conflicting each other in(de)finitely? There is no control, whatever our (humans) struggle to achieve it. The illusion that we can "control" stands as a continuous limitation of our egotistical inclinations towards the extension of those conservative self-preserving instinctual structures that keep on cutting off the efforts of liberation that the "other" side of our personality-coin shadows. There is no way for our conservative half to give up, that's why it's always difficult to be rebellious and, at the same time, happy to benefit from "what you already have". It's so difficult to imagine a lake continuously changing itself, and so easy to picture a river bringing change every moment.

Rebellion without education is not possible. People that have no education are not rebels. They're just beings governed by pure instinct; no matter what they are told to do, they are against; no matter the help they ought to receive from others, they're just against it; no matter their possible happiness, they're not capable of appreciating the efforts put together to open their eyes, to make them see beyond their own ideas of change, most of them borrowed from people that look or think like them. Rebels with no effect are rebels without a cause. Rebels without a cause are lost in a transparent democracy: they don't want to change, because they don't understand what change is. They intuit that there is something to be changed, but they have no means to do it. Only a pseudo-heroic need to justify themselves is supporting their impulse to revolt, to demolish, to destroy what they think should be marked for destruction.

What is the meaning of rebellion? We shall see.