It was every parent’s worst nightmare. Sixteen years old and in possession of my father’s car for the first time, I decided to speed as fast as I could down a winding road. I knew my father wouldn’t have wanted me to race, but I held a curve doing 100. In fact, I did it because he wouldn’t like it. I was listening to my inner rebel.
You too, probably have an inner rebel. If he hasn’t killed you, yet; you have the rebel to thank if you’re not just like everyone else. The rebel will show you the way to self-actualization.
Sixteen-years old was not the first time my rebel made an appearance. He initially showed up when I was two. You know the scene. A parent is out in public with her two-year-old and he gets it in his head that he wants something, or doesn’t want something, and throws a fit in front of everyone till he gets his way. Parents call it the terrible twos. It’s an early assertion of the child’s point of view, when the kid insists on an acknowledgement of his agency. It’s the emergence of the child’s inner rebel, the beginning of self-actualization.
The Inner Rebel
You may not be a two-year-old, or an adolescent any longer, but you still have an inner rebel pushing against limits. The rebel has a solution to a problem nature has. Nature needs to stir the pot. It wants you to get out, take chances, spread your seed, and do stuff. Furthermore, it needs you to be a little different from everyone else, so the species can benefit from natural variation.
However, nature also made you a social creature. You can’t survive on your own. You must get along with others if you want to thrive. Getting along with others requires a level of conformity, so that we can trust each other. Nature needs you to be both cooperative and independent, compatible and unique, to grow roots and to move around, to be to others what they need you to be and to be authentic.
What does nature do to resolve these contradictions? Nothing. It creates two opposing drives in you and expects you to figure it out.
In the beginning of your life, everything favored cooperation. You needed to understand what others wanted of you because your life depended on it. You couldn’t live without them. But if you tried to live under their rule forever, everyone would love you, but you wouldn’t be you. You’d fail to live up to your own potential. You’d feel like a fraud on the outside and dead inside.
The rebel’s job is to make sure you don’t cave in and lose yourself to others. The inner rebel’s mission is to help you claim feelings, beliefs, and practices as your own, distinct from others. He guards your individuality. The rebel says you’re a unique combination of genetic makeup and experiences. There never was anyone like you ever before and there never will be anyone like you ever again. There’s no good reason to throw away that distinctiveness for the sake of what other people think. Therefore, the rebel says you must assert yourself and defend yourself against all those who might limit you.
How to function in a society, while being authentically who you are is the million-dollar question that you and everyone try to answer continuously. The optimum compromise between being yourself and belonging to others keeps changing; so, as soon as you answer the question once, you’ve got to answer it again.
The Shirt Tail
A few years before I had a car, I was in middle school. The Student Council succeeded in getting some parts of the school’s dress code revised. It was 1968 and the faculty couldn’t resist the overwhelming tide of change any longer, so they gave in on this one little thing. I remember the excitement when the day came when everything would be different. The girls could wear miniskirts. Us boys could leave our shirts untucked. I got dressed that day with my shirt tail in so my mother wouldn’t yell at me but pulled it out as soon as I left the house. My shirt tail flapped freely all day long.
This went on for a few days until my rebel prepared a little speech for my mother. This is a free country… I should be able to do what I want and there’s no good reason to tuck in a shirt tail. Finally, I got up the nerve to leave for school untucked, so my mother could see me.
She didn’t notice. The mental image I had of my mother may have cared whether I tucked in my shirt tail, but my real mother had other things to do. I had an image of her as a fascist dictator, bent on controlling me. She may have been when I was younger and needed close monitoring; but just like the faculty of my middle school, she was learning to let go. A child cannot conceive of his mother as adaptable, though. He assumes she’s an inert establishment his rebel pushes against. By testing my mother, I found out who she really was.
New Tyrannies
After winning one battle, your inner rebel is apt to get exhausted. It just can’t fight anymore. The interests of conformity take over, causing you to compromise away your individuality in favor of getting along. You rebel against your parents, only to go as far as making new parents out of an employer, a partner, or a cause. You live under the rule of the new regimes until the quarter-life crisis, or the mid-life crisis causes you to reassess what you have given away, bringing the rebel back to life.
Once my rebel updated the image I had of my mother, he could have just stopped there, and conformed to the expectations of my peers. This is how revolution gives over to a new tyranny. But my rebel was made of sterner stuff. He looked for other things to rebel against. I continued to go to school for a few days with my shirt tail flapping until I realized I didn’t like it that way. As soon as the rebel was done rebelling against my mother with my shirt tail, he started a rebellion against my peers. He won the right to untuck my shirt from the concept I had of my mother, but now I needed to march against my peers, or they would be the next oppressors.
It was far harder to rebel against my peers than my mother. I could always avoid her, but my friends were my life. I was afraid they’d say I was an old fogey; that I was letting the Student Council down after they fought so hard for our freedom; that I’d look like a nerd. But the rebel in me prepared a speech. It will not do to break free from the tyranny of one dress code, just to comply to another. The Sixties’ revolution was all about letting people do their own thing. Doing my own thing should mean tucking in my shirt if that’s what I want to do.
Eventually, I got up the nerve to go to school with my shirt tail tucked back in and braced myself for the inevitable onslaught of abuse from my peers. Again, no one noticed. I guess it was the concept I had of my peers who were ready to shame me for not conforming. My actual peers had other things to do.
That was not the last time I was rebellious. I could go on and on. Even now, as an old man, my rebel shows up daily, no doubt making me a difficult person to get along with. I suspect it’ll get worse as I grow more and more dependent on the people around me. I expect to become known as stubborn and cantankerous, if I am not already.
Benefits of the Rebel
Nonetheless, I have my rebel to thank for many things. It showed me how well I could drive. It taught me what my mother really cared about. It urged me to go my own way, in opposition to the herd. I would never know my limits if the Rebel didn’t make me push them.
The rebel doesn’t just resist other people, he rebels against life on life’s terms. There is so much about life we have no control over, where and when we were born, the content of our genetic code, the course of history, and the laws we must obey. We didn’t invent the language we speak. We didn’t ask to be born. Then, we’ve got to die. It’s a rotten deal, so the inner rebel pushes against it all because, you never know, sometimes things can change.
You have your rebel to thank whenever you made things better for yourself. When you moved from one place to another, the rebel helped you pack your bags. All human knowledge is expanded by a rebel who is not satisfied with the way things are. If you altered history, laws, or cultural norms, no matter how slightly, the rebel led the march. If you put things in your own words, turned a new phrase, made a metaphor, or produced something that was not there before, the rebel guided your hand. However, the rebel has a blind spot. There’s one threat he never sees coming. It can lead to your downfall, or at least some unhappy times.
The Rebel’s Blind Spot
The rebel is like those politicians who claim to speak for a silent majority. He claims to speak for the self. He uses the self to assert sovereign authority against outside influences. He asserts that others are foreign invaders, interlopers who seek to subjugate the self. He would build a wall and expel them if he could.
However, the rebel makes a mistake when he believes self and other are a binary, diametrically opposed. In truth, self and other overlap to such a degree that they cannot exist apart.
What the rebel calls the self is really the self-concept, a collection of beliefs you have about yourself. The self-concept is a blinkered version of yourself. The true self is larger than the rebel imagines; it includes what we think are others. The self-concept is formed in childhood, so it is a child’s version of the self and lacks the complexity that a grownup’s version would have.
For instance, when I thought I was rebelling against my mother’s command that I tuck my shirt in, I was actually rebelling against a part of me. What I learned was that my actual mother had no such command. I was making her out as more of a tyrant than she was. This mother in my mind had some of the features of my actual mother, so that I mistook one for the other; but it was a part of my own self, a straw man I had constructed, that I could proceed to demolish. The same could be said of the concept I had of my peers. I had a child’s version of others that lacked the complexity that a grownup’s version would have.
Furthermore, the very idea of the rebel is a creation of my social environment. I conform to social expectations whenever I rebel. As an American, I was raised to venerate the rebels of the American Revolution. I read Emerson who urged me to not be the slave of my own past. I reveled in James Dean, who didn’t even need a cause to rebel for, it was enough just to rebel. One part of my culture has indoctrinated me into rejecting the other part. Why would it do that? I don’t know, but it sells a lot of leather jackets and motorcycles.
Wait, maybe I do know why my culture has glorified the rebel. A healthy culture needs the rebel to test the establishment in the same way that a person needs a rebel within. Governments govern better when there is a loyal opposition representing interests that can be steam rolled by majorities. They act as a devil’s advocate ensuring that the government is not consumed by group think. When the urge to rebel remains loyal, when it coexists with the urge to conform, the two can blend together in a kind of counterpointal harmony. The rebel tests the concept of my mind, like my mother-concept, by pushing against it, to see if it’s true. Then the urge to conform would update the concept in accordance with what was revealed. In this way, by both rebelling against and taking within, I can discover what my mother really wants and how we can get along better. The rebel can help me discover what’s real and work with it, rather than fighting objects of my own imagination.
Unfortunately, sometimes the rebel is not a loyal opposition, he’s just an opposition and goes to war against the forces of conformity. Ironically, it’s when he insists on having things his own way that he will invariably hand the revolution over to an unexpected despot. After shaking off the chains of foreign invaders, the rebel crowns what he believes is the self, king. He doesn’t realize that what he calls the self is a pretender to the throne. It’s only the self-concept. The true self is more democratic than the self-concept. The concept of the mother and the concept of the peers are like assimilated emigres, not foreign invaders; they are really parts of the self. When the rebel puts the self-concept on the throne, you become what we call selfish.
Selfishness
It seems like whenever there was trouble and failure in my life, the rebel was in the middle of it. He has no concern for safety or the feelings of others. To the degree the rebel gets his way, I’m unfit to live in society, because I make it all about me. I become unable to have stable relationships or a good job. Moreover, I’d must forgo more refined pleasures. The sixty-five-year-old hedonist, having opted for immediate gratification all his life, cannot afford to see Paris. Nor is he even free, for pleasure has made him its slave. A rebel checked by the urge to conform can guide me beyond instantly gratifying temptations to the things that really set me free.
The Rebel by himself cannot take you all the way to self-actualization. He’s only a two-year-old with an affinity for rhetoric. He takes a step in that direction, but then he goes the wrong way. He plays a critical role as a counterweight of the demands on others. He’s right; if it wasn’t for the rebel in me, I’d be just like everyone else and have nothing to add. But he’s wrong when he thinks the self-concept should be sovereign. The self should share its power with others, forming a democracy of the true self.
Keith Wilson - Counseling 