Resistance is not futile—obedience is.

Don’t believe me?

Think about it.

You obey and what happens? More obedience is required. You go to work, you pay your bills, you pay your taxes, you support your candidates, and so on.

And what happens? More work, more bills, more taxes, more unjust laws. It never ends—just more debt, i.e., obedience. “Obedience” is a code word for slavery. “Authority” is a code word for master.

What if you just didn’t obey? What if you resisted? That’s where the freedom is—in resistance.

The worst that could happen is…you’d be free…

The best that can happen with obedience?  Well, ask The Godfathers…

Where does resistance get you?  Think Rosa Parks.  Or George Washington.  Or MLK.  Or Bolivar.  Malala.  Tank Man.  The results may not be immediate or immediately desirable, and getting to the results will not be easy.  Not at first, anyway.

Resistance is vital, and it’s everywhere in the news right now—Colin Kaepernick and his growing protest, the Native peoples fighting the pipeline.

Resistance is life—every day we resist hunger, thirst, disease, injury.  We daily refuse to obey the dictates of the world that constantly reminds us that it could do without us.

Some of the best writing on the detrimental effects of obedience I have ever read is from Arthur Silber:

By demanding obedience above all from a child (whether by physical punishment, by psychological means, or through some combination of both), parents forbid the child from fostering an authentic sense of self. Because children are completely dependent on their parents, they dare not question their parents’ goodness, or their “good intentions.” As a result, when children are punished, even if they are punished for no reason or for a reason that makes no sense, they blame themselves and believe that the fault lies within them. In this way, the idealization of the authority figure is allowed to continue. In addition, the child cannot allow himself to experience fully his own pain, because that, too, might lead to questioning of his parents.
In this manner, the child is prevented from developing a genuine, authentic sense of self. As he grows older, this deadening of his soul desensitizes the child to the pain of others. Eventually, the maturing adult will seek to express his repressed anger on external targets, since he has never been allowed to experience and express it in ways that would not be destructive. By such means, the cycle of violence is continued into another generation (using “violence” in the broadest sense). One of the additional consequences is that the adult, who has never developed an authentic self, can easily transfer his idealization of his parents to a new authority figure. As Miller says [emphasis added]:
“This perfect adaptation to society’s norms–in other words, to what is called “healthy normality”–carries with it the danger that such a person can be used for practically any purpose. It is not a loss of autonomy that occurs here, because this autonomy never existed, but a switching of values, which in themselves are of no importance anyway for the person in question as long as his whole value system is dominated by the principle of obedience. He has never gone beyond the stage of idealizing his parents with their demands for unquestioning obedience; this idealization can easily be transferred to a Fuhrer or to an ideology.”

Go forth and resist death and slavery knowing that it is NOT futility!