Conformity And Rebellion Quotes

Rebel children, I urge you, fight the turgid slick of conformity with which they seek to smother your glory.

Never rebel for the sake of rebelling, but always rebel for the sake of truth.

You can't be a rebel without the scars that come with it. Truth is, some days scars are just as ugly as they are beautiful.

Which path do you intend to take, Nell?' said the Constable, sounding very interested. 'Conformity or rebellion?' Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded - they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity.

We are usually on bended knee before laws or angrily reacting against them, both immature responses.

From the cave to the skyscraper, from the club to weapons of mass destruction, from the tautological life of the tribe to the era of globalization, the fictions of literature have multiplied human experiences, preventing us from succumbing to lethargy, self-absorption, resignation. Nothing has sown so much disquiet, so disturbed our imagination and our desires as the life of lies we add, thanks to literature, to the one we have, so we can be protagonists in the great adventures, the great passions real life will never give us. The lies of literature become truths through us, the readers transformed, infected with longings and, through the fault of fiction, permanently questioning a mediocre reality. Sorcery, when literature offers us the hope of having what we do not have, being what we are not, acceding to that impossible existence where like pagan gods we feel mortal and eternal at the same time, that introduces into our spirits non-conformity and rebellion, which are behind all the heroic deeds that have contributed to the reduction of violence in human relationships. Reducing violence, not ending it. Because ours will always be, fortunately, an unfinished story. That is why we have to continue dreaming, reading, and writing, the most effective way we have found to alleviate our mortal condition, to defeat the corrosion of time, and to transform the impossible into possibility.

Nell did not imagine that Constable Moore wanted to get into a detailed discussion of recent events, so she changed the subject. "I think I have finally worked out what you were trying to tell me, years ago, about being intelligent," she said. The Constable brightened all at once. "Pleased to hear it." The Vickys have an elaborate code of morals and conduct. It grew out of the moral squalor of an earlier generation, just as the original Victorians were preceded by the Georgians and the Regency. The old guard believe in that code because they came to it the hard way. They raise their children to believe in that code– but their children believe it for entirely different reasons." They believe it," the Constable said, "because they have been indoctrinated to believe it." Yes. Some of them never challenge it– they grow up to be smallminded people, who can tell you what they believe but not why they believe it. Others become disillusioned by the hypocrisy of the society and rebel– as did Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw." Which path do you intend to take, Nell?" said the Constable, sounding very interested. "Conformity or rebellion?" Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded– they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity.

Society tells me to follow my own truth, but I don't let society tell me what to do. If you need someone to tell you that, chances are you're part of the crowd that will move on to the next fashion that comes around.

Taoism is the profoundest nonconformism that has ever been evolved anywhere in the world, at any time in history; essentially it is rebellion.

The societies kids naturally form are tribal. Gangs, clubs, packs. But we're herded into schools and terrified into behaving. Taught how we're supposed to pretend to be, taught to parrot all kinds of nonsense at the flick of a switch, taught to keep our heads down and our elbows in and shut off our minds and shut off our sex. We learn we can't even piss when we have to. That's how we learn to be plastic and dumb.

She asked God, without fear, if he really believed that people were made of iron in order to bear so many troubles and mortifications; and asking over and over she was stirring up her own confusion and she felt irrepressible desires to let herself go and scamper about like a foreigner and allow herself at last an instant of rebellion, that instant yearned for so many times and so many times postponed, putting her resignation aside and shitting on everything once and for all and drawing out of her heart the infinite stacks of bad words that she had been forced to swallow over a century of conformity.

Most girls, however much they resent their mothers, do become very much like them. Rebellion can rarely survive the aversion therapy that passes for being brought up female. Male violence acts directly on the girl through her father or brother or uncle or any number of male professionals or strangers, as it did and does on her mother, and she too is forced to learn to conform in order to survive. A girl may, as she enters adulthood, repudiate the particular set of males with whom her mother is allied, run with a different pack as it were, but she will replicate her mother’s patterns in acquiescing to male authority within her own chosen set. Using both force and threat, men in all camps demand that women accept abuse in silence and shame, tie themselves to hearth and home with rope made of self-blame, unspoken rage, grief, and resentment.

Tak długo byliście antykonformistami, aż wreszcie upadły ostatnie normy, przeciw którym można się było jeszcze buntować. Dla mnie nie zostawiliście już nic, nic! Brak norm stał się waszą normą. A ja mogę się buntować tylko przeciw wam, czyli przeciwko waszemu rozpasaniu.

The snowflake revolution will not be televised - it will be pirated online, go viral and rapidly dissipate in the quicksand of post-millennial conformity.

It can undermine the most sincere parental commitment and force adoptees to suffer in private, choosing either rebellion or conformity as a mode of relating.

It's both rebellion and conformity that attack you with success.

The old guard believe in that code because they came to it the hard way. They raise their children to believe in that code—but their children believe it for entirely different reasons." "They believe it," the Constable said, "because they have been indoctrinated to believe it." "Yes. Some of them never challenge it—they grow up to be small minded people, who can tell you what they believe but not why they believe it. Others become disillusioned by the hypocrisy of the society and rebel—as did Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw." "Which path do you intend to take, Nell?" said the Constable, sounding very interested. "Conformity or rebellion?" "Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded—they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity.

When had all this conformity and sameness set in? How had it happened? When had the varied carols turned into a single corporate advertising jingle?

Every human had the seed of rebellion hardwired into their heart. Squeeze the shell of conformity hard enough and it cracks, allowing the spirit of resistance to burst forth.

Conformist thinking is self-defeating because it knows only the categories of punishment and submission, but not the potential that lies in understanding. The image of the enemy must be maintained at all costs; for this reason, the "enemy" must never be humanized. Both the revolutionary and the conformist depend on the image of the enemy; they need it in order to rationalize their violence to maintain their positions.

Why were rebellion and maturity continually represented as incompatible? [...] Because if rebellion is the dominion of the young, it is presented as something you should grow out of. Because a mature rebel is harder to dismiss. Because framing adulthood as synonymous with passive conformity excuses adults from an engaged notion of civic ethics, hooks them into compensatory consumption, and provides the young with a reason not to listen.

In the United States teen rebellion is considered standard, putting the American adolescent in the awkward position of having to rebel in order to conform to societal expectations. For an obedient rule-following teen like I was, this is utterly flummoxing.

Hope does not mean that our protests will suddenly awaken the dead consciences, the atrophied souls, of the plutocrats running Halliburton, Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil or the government. Hope does not mean we will reform Wall Street swindlers and speculators. Hope does not mean that the nation’s ministers and rabbis, who know the words of the great Hebrew prophets, will leave their houses of worship to practice the religious beliefs they preach. Most clerics like fine, abstract words about justice and full collection plates, but know little of real hope. Hope knows that unless we physically defy government control we are complicit in the violence of the state. All who resist keep hope alive. All who succumb to fear, despair and apathy become enemies of hope. Hope has a cost. Hope is not comfortable or easy. Hope requires personal risk. Hope does not come with the right attitude. Hope is not about peace of mind. Hope is an action. Hope is doing something. Hope, which is always nonviolent, exposes in its powerlessness the lies, fraud and coercion employed by the state. Hope does not believe in force. Hope knows that an injustice visited on our neighbor is an injustice visited on us all. Hope sees in our enemy our own face. Hope is not for the practical and the sophisticated, the cynics and the complacent, the defeated and the fearful. Hope is what the corporate state, which saturates our airwaves with lies, seeks to obliterate. Hope is what our corporate overlords are determined to crush. Be afraid, they tell us. Surrender your liberties to us so we can make the world safe from terror. Don’t resist. Embrace the alienation of our cheerful conformity. Buy our products. Without them you are worthless. Become our brands. Do not look up from your electronic hallucinations to think. No. Above all do not think. Obey. The powerful do not understand hope. Hope is not part of their vocabulary. They speak in the cold, dead words of national security, global markets, electoral strategy, staying on message, image and money. Those addicted to power, blinded by self-exaltation, cannot decipher the words of hope any more than most of us can decipher hieroglyphics. Hope to Wall Street bankers and politicians, to the masters of war and commerce, is not practical. It is gibberish. It means nothing. I cannot promise you fine weather or an easy time. I cannot pretend that being handcuffed is pleasant. If we resist and carry out acts, no matter how small, of open defiance, hope will not be extinguished. Any act of rebellion, any physical defiance of those who make war, of those who perpetuate corporate greed and are responsible for state crimes, anything that seeks to draw the good to the good, nourishes our souls and holds out the possibility that we can touch and transform the souls of others. Hope affirms that which we must affirm. And every act that imparts hope is a victory in itself.

Think it not enough, that you can bear the denial of sinful desires; but presently destroy the desires themselves. For if you let alone the desires, they may at last lay hold upon their prey, before you are aware: or if you should be guilty of nothing but the desires themselves, it is no small iniquity; being the corruption of the heart, and the rebellion and adultery of the principal faculty, which should be kept loyal and chaste to God. The crossness of thy will to the will of God, is the sum of all the evil and impiety of the soul; and the subjection and conformity of thy will to his, is the heart of the new creature, and of thy rectitude and sanctification.

Conformity is one of the nihilistic temptations of rebellion which dominate a large part of our intellectual history. It demonstrates how the rebel who takes to action is tempted to succumb, if he forgets his origins, to the most absolute conformity. And so it explains the twentieth century. Lautreamont, who is usually hailed as the bard of pure rebellion, on the contrary proclaims the advent of the taste for intellectual servitude which flourishes in the contemporary world.

There is a foolproof way to distinguish peer-distorted counterwill from the genuine drive for autonomy: the maturing, individuating child resists coercion whatever the source may be, including pressure from peers. In healthy rebellion, true independence is the goal. One does not seek freedom from one person only to succumb to the influence and will of another. When counterwill is the result of skewed attachments, the liberty that the child strives for is not the liberty to be his true self but the opportunity to conform to his peers. To do so, he will suppress his own feelings and camouflage his own opinions, should they differ from those of his peers. Are we saying that it may not be natural, for example, that a teenager may want to stay out late with his friends? No, the teen may want to hang out with his pals not because he is driven by peer orientation, but simply because on occasion that's just what he feels like doing. The question is, is he willing to discuss the matter with his parents? Is he respectful of their perspective? Is he able to say no to his friends when he has other responsibilities or family events or when he simply may prefer being on his own? The peer-oriented teenager will brook no obstacle and experiences intense frustration when his need for peer contact is thwarted. He is unable to assert himself in the face of peer expectations and will, proportionately, resent and oppose his parents’ desires.

Úrsula wondered if it was not preferable to lie down once and for all in her grave and let them throw the earth over her, and she asked God, without fear, if he really believed that people were made of iron in order to bear so many troubles and mortifications; and asking over and over she was stirring up her own confusion and she felt irrepressible desires to let herself go and scamper about like a foreigner and allow herself at last an instant of rebellion, that instant yearned for so many times and so many times postponed, putting her resignation aside and shitting on everything once and for all and drawing out of her heart the infinite stacks of bad words that she had been forced to swallow over a century of conformity. “Shit!” she shouted.

The person who is a lost sinner has a problem with sin. That is, he is under God’s wrath and curse, at alienation with God, an enemy of truth and righteousness. His relationship with God is warfare! And until one bows down to God in humble confession and commits himself in faith to Jesus Christ, he will never be reconciled to God. That’s the essence of sin: rebellion against the living God. The saved sinner, on the other hand, struggles with sins (plural). He now walks with Christ, but by the same faith seeks grace to overcome remaining habits and failures as the Spirit works to conform him to the image of Christ. What does this mean in practice? I do not spend time talking with a non-Christian about his sins. That’s not his problem. His problem is his sin: his broken relationship with God.

O my God! how much I long to be the missionary of Your holy will, and to teach all men that there is nothing more easy, more attainable, more within reach, and in the power of everyone, than sanctity. How I wish that I could make them understand that just as the good and the bad thief had the same things to do and to suffer; so also two persons, one of whom is worldly and the other leading an interior and wholly spiritual life have, neither of them, anything different to do or to suffer; but that one is sanctified and attains eternal happiness by submission to Your holy will in those very things by which the other is damned because he does them to please himself, or endures them with reluctance and rebellion. This proves that it is only the heart that is different. Oh! all you that read this, it will cost you no more than to do what you are doing, to suffer what you are suffering, only act and suffer in a holy manner. It is the heart that must be changed. When I say heart, I mean will. Sanctity, then, consists in willing all that God wills for us. Yes! sanctity of heart is a simple “fiat,” a conformity of will with the will of God. What could be more easy, and who could refuse to love a will so kind and so good? Let us love it then, and this love alone will make everything in us divine.

Heterosexual people, conforming to conventional dictate, are pillars of the society with which they are identified. Bisexuals and homosexuals, on the other hand, make valiant efforts to free themselves from the fetters of its conditioning power, and therefore come nearer to authentic behaviour. By reason of their rebellion, they are inclined to reject secondhand living as laid down by social conventions. It is not surprising that one finds many of them in the forefront of the fight for a new society, a society when authenticity is the guiding principle. But others are so much caught up in defensive behaviour that they neglect the pursuit of individual freedom in preference for a collective regimentation, which ensures a more successful battle against the cruel and subtle persecution by ‘normal people’. Nevertheless, they are, by virtue of their still precarious position, well endowed to realize that the assignment of roles which rules every aspect of behaviour, permeates society like an infectious disease, that there is a social sickness about which leads via hypocrisy and falsity to alienation. Their own fringe position makes them particularly sensitive to the schizoid shortcomings of our society where nobody knows what the other thinks, or feels, and where relationships lose their essential qualities—solidarity and trust.

It contrives the acceptance of injustice, crime, and falsehood by the promise of a miracle. Still greater production, still more power, uninterrupted labor, incessant suffering, permanent war, and then a moment will come when universal bondage in the totalitarian empire will be miraculously changed into its opposite: free leisure in a universal republic. Pseudo-revolutionary mystification has now acquired a formula: all freedom must be crushed in order to conquer the empire, and one day the empire will be the equivalent of freedom. And so the way to unity passes through totality.[...]Totality is, in effect, nothing other than the ancient dream of unity common to both believers and rebels, but projected horizontally onto an earth deprived of God. To renounce every value, therefore, amounts to renouncing rebellion in order to accept the Empire and slavery. Criticism of formal values cannot pass over the concept of freedom. Once the impossibility has been recognized of creating, by means of the forces of rebellion alone, the free individual of whom the romantics dreamed, freedom itself has also been incorporated in the movement of history. It has become freedom fighting for existence, which, in order to exist, must create itself. Identified with the dynamism of history, it cannot play its proper role until history comes to a stop, in the realization of the Universal City. Until then, every one of its victories will lead to an antithesis that will render it pointless. The German nation frees itself from its oppressors, but at the price of the freedom of every German. The individuals under a totalitarian regime are not free, even though man in the collective sense is free. Finally, when the Empire delivers the entire human species, freedom will reign over herds of slaves, who at least will be free in relation to God and, in general, in relation to every kind of transcendence. The dialectic miracle, the transformation of quantity into quality, is explained here: it is the decision to call total servitude freedom. Moreover, as in all the examples cited by Hegel and Marx, there is no objective transformation, but only a subjective change of denomination. In other words, there is no miracle. If the only hope of nihilism lies in thinking that millions of slaves can one day constitute a humanity which will be freed forever, then history is nothing but a desperate dream. Historical thought was to deliver man from subjection to a divinity; but this liberation demanded of him the most absolute subjection to historical evolution. Then man takes refuge in the permanence of the party in the same way that he formerly prostrated himself before the altar. That is why the era which dares to claim that it is the most rebellious that has ever existed only offers a choice of various types of conformity. The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.

Late Friday morning I was driving toward Boulder. I was seated in "Doctor Lovebeads Cosmic Wonderbus and Mobile Mercantile." That entire phrase was painted in psychedelic colors on both sides of the van. But I left out the possessive apostrophe on "Lovebus[']" in order to show my contempt for bourgeois conformity.

Crushing the toddler’s autonomy and purposeful will is the most damaging form of shaming that can be done. When autonomy is crushed, toxic shame is manifested either as total conformity or rebellion against authority. Once willpower, anger and purpose are bound in shame, a child’s selfhood and personal power are severely wounded. His drive for separateness and autonomy are bound by shame. This has been called a “purpose shame bind.

On a social level, secularism is safe. As literally the world's most fundamental conformist, the secularist wants to call himself a revolutionary all in the same. In most parts of the present world, rebellion against Christianity is not really much of a rebellion if one is to consider 'rebellion' something of a courageous sort or a bold act. Long ago Christ was crucified, and in some form or another, to this day, the scorn continues for 'little Christs'. The world hates Christians, and according to Christ, it is supposed to hate Christians. A true Christianity is a true rebellion; and for one to be 'freed from Christianity' is for one to religiously conform to the pressures of the rest of the world, for one to be freed from freedom.

Perhaps the police could have shown me more mercy, but their brash confrontation of my rebellion taught me something just as important: the world did not revolve around me. No matter how badly I wanted everything to benefit me and work out in my favor the world did not revolve around, nor conform to, my every fleeting fancy.

Outer conformity masks inner rebellion. That’s you.

Being able to link into someone's desires, sexual or otherwise, gives people ideas about change, and that is a little too close to rebellion for the organization with a core mission to force conformity.

Conformity is one of the nihilistic temptations of rebellion which dominate a large part of our intellectual history. It demonstrates how the rebel who takes to action is tempted to succumb, if he forgets his origins, to the most absolute conformity. And so it explains the twentieth century.

No matter what controversy erupts, you'll find that artists just keep doing what artists have been doing since the beginning of time. Pushing the edges. Exploding the margins. Making something so compelling you can't look away even when it disturbs you, even when it awakens something dormant inside your being that threatens the status quo you depend on. We are here to rewire the rules of creation. Here to make work that refuses to be ignored. Writing and singing and dancing our way out of the closets and out of the churches and out of the pyres they built to burn us. It's our job as makers, as writers and singers and painters and dancers and actors and those born to act as mirrors to a world that sought to contain us inside a dogma meant only for the meek and compliant. It's the entire reason, full stop, the ending and the beginning of the story, of every story, Over and over and over again. So, the conservative talking heads, the hellfire and brimstone preachers, the right-wing bible thumpers, and those who have proclaimed themselves the bastions of moral superiority can keep clutching their pearls and beating their breasts. We'll just keep making art that moves you. You're welcome.

Ten years before, Ben's fear of a predictable future, the trappings of domestic routine, his hatred of authority and unthinking conformity, and an arrogant certainty in the imminence, benefits and permanence of a socialist revolution had been just a few of his reasons for leaving the village of his birth. Now, standing less than a mile from the 'Please Drive Safely Through Our Village' sign, Ben would have to admit that a need to rediscover those feelings was the reason for his return. He had always considered nostalgia the nemesis of rebellion: a process better at fossilising worthy tracts of his past than preserving them. And yet, as his thirtieth birthday approached, he was shocked to realise that nostalgia was the only thing keeping those feelings alive.

The conservative society accepts that rebellion and bad behaviour are natural and must be curbed. The liberal society requires all its citizens to be perfectly balanced, conforming to its ideals and aims with a happy heart and a willing mind

Ursula wondered if it was not preferable to lie down once and for all in her grave and let them throw earth over her, and she asked God, without fear if he really believed that people were made of iron in order to bear so many troubles and mortifications; and asking over and over she was stirring up her own confusion and she felt irrepressible desires to let herself go and scamper about like a foreigner and allow herself at last an instant of rebellion, that instant yearned for so many times and so many times postponed, putting her resignation aside and shitting on everything once and for all and drawing out her heart the infinite stacks of bad words that she had been forced to swallow over a century of conformity. "Shit!" she shouted

In the intoxication of being twenty and swept up by my reading, I hoped to live in the light of day, in joy, refusing submission, shackles and conformity.

1. Reaction—passively dominated by urgencies and pushy people. This results in a life that is a frazzled mess, disorganized, without a sense of priorities, half-finished tasks, running late, and a frantic lifestyle. 2. Conformity—succumbing to the fear of man and just being and doing what everyone else wants, which is not necessarily following God’s will for you and your family. This results in a boring life where everyone but God is pleased, and the person who is easily pushed around keeps busy and productive but is not passionate or free. 3. Independence—nonconforming rebellion in the name of freedom marked by doing only what you want and ignoring godly authority over you. This results in a life of defiance, independence, immaturity, self-reliance, and foolishness. 4. Intentionality—reverse-engineering your life and living it prayerfully and purposefully, journaling your thoughts throughout the day, and using silence and solitude to hear from God and organize your life. This results in a life that is purposeful and passionate to God’s glory, people’s good, and your joy. I

In the intoxication of being twenty and swept up by my reading, I hoped to live in the light of day, in joy, refusing submission, shackles and conformity.

Mid-twentieth-century Virginia congratulated itself on having devised the “Virginia Way,” a distinctive form of Jim Crow in which Blacks and whites lived peaceably together in lives of “separation by consent,” in the words of Douglas Southall Freeman, a Richmond newspaper editor and renowned Robert E. Lee biographer. Freeman acknowledged that this was a social order designed to perpetuate “the continued and unchallengeable dominance of Southern whites,” who, he told his readers, would work to provide the assurance of safety and security to Black Virginians in return for their acquiescence in the status quo. “Southern Negroes,” he explained, “have far more to gain by conforming than by rebellion … by deserving rather than demanding more.” Elite white Virginians, he posited, had inherited a legacy of gentility accompanied by the imperatives of noblesse oblige; Virginia’s Black people, in turn, were “inherently of a higher type than those of any other state.” Nowhere else, Freeman insisted, “are the Negroes more encouraged through the influence of friendship for and confidence in them, on the part of whites, to be law abiding and industrious.” But never to claim equality.5

And so, out there behind suburban doors, George and Martha run through the gamut of Kama Sutra positions (or so I imagine it, in my own undoubtedly lewd mind) and the smoke of Shiva fills the air, and the pope looks down on all of it, but cannot speak or object in any way. And, then, his rebellion acted out and cathartically discharged for a few days or a week, George rises in the morning, dresses in his middle-class uniform, and joins the terrapin multitude of other cars driving toward the city and the daily tasks of conformity and responsibility. Take away the pot and the picture of the pope and who knows what other form of rebellion (political? cultural? psychotic?) George and Martha might attempt next, to prove to themselves that they are individuals with free wills and not just actors in a bourgeois script authored by Dr. Laura Schlessinger.

rebel” is a person who sees the flaws and mistakes in the circumstances fate initially drops them into, and makes every effort to distance themselves from those shortcomings. This sort of non-conformity is very healthy for the individual and the society, because it allows the social unit to evolve and grow past its initial imperfections. A “rebel without a cause” is a person who does not want to conform with social norms, but doesn’t have a clear reason why and thus doesn’t have a clear idea of a better alternative. They are like winds that try to blow without a destination. Movement cannot proceed without a destination, so such rebellion and non-conformity only produces anxiety and anger in the individual and does not have a significant purifying effect on the social unit.

The common denominator between all my cartoons is rebellion against blind conformity. (From 2004 in berkeleydailyplanet)

it is necessary to conform, to be disciplined, and to follow the rules—to do humbly what others do; but it is also necessary to use judgment, vision, and the truth that guides conscience to tell what is right, when the rules suggest otherwise. It is the ability to manage this combination that truly characterizes the fully developed personality: the true hero. A certain amount of arbitrary rule-ness must be tolerated—or welcomed, depending on your point of view—to keep the world and its inhabitants together. A certain amount of creativity and rebellion must be tolerated—or welcomed, depending on your point of view—to maintain the process of regeneration. Every rule was once a creative act, breaking other rules. Every creative act, genuine in its creativity, is likely to transform itself, with time, into a useful rule. It is the living interaction between social institutions and creative achievement that keeps the world balanced on the narrow line between too much order and too much chaos. This is a terrible conundrum, a true existential burden. We must support and value the past, and we need to do that with an attitude of gratitude and respect. At the same time, however, we must keep our eyes open—we, the visionary living—and repair the ancient mechanisms that stabilize and support us when they falter.

If the child needs a smack, he is a free individual who has overstepped the line. If he needs a child guidance clinic, there is something wrong with him which must be cured. The conservative society accepts that rebellion and bad behaviour are natural and must be curbed. The liberal society requires all its citizens to be perfectly balanced, conforming to its ideals and aims with a happy heart and a willing mind—a rather sickening thought for the reactionary who does not care what is in his neighbour’s heart provided he obeys the law. The same war between different principles lies behind the different ways of dealing with criminals, punishment versus rehabilitation, which have confronted each other throughout the century. This is revolutionary stuff, presented as kindness, undoubtedly the best way to present it, though not necessarily the most truthful way.

A question was a sign of insanity to them.

Ursula wondered if it was not preferable to lie down once and for all in her grave and let them throw the earth over her, and she asked God, without fear, if he really believed that people were made of iron in order to bear so many troubles and mortifications; and asking over and over she was stirring up her own confusion and she felt irrepressible desires to let herself go and scamper about like a foreigner and allow herself at last an instant of rebellion, that instant yearned for so many times and so many times postponed, putting her resignation aside and shitting on everything once and for all and drawIng out of her heart the infinite stacks of bad words that she had been forced to swallow over a century of conformity. 'Shit!' she shouted.

Which path do you intend to take, Nell?” said the Constable, sounding very interested. “Conformity or rebellion?” “Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded—they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity.

The ritual nature of ‘John Barleycorn’, ‘Jolly Old Hawk’ and ‘The Derby Ram’, and the sacrificial elements and destructive energy in ‘The Cutty Wren’, for example, he suspected derived from witch cults, frequently breeding grounds of rebellion and non-conformity.

Fascist regimes were particularly successful with young people. Fascist arrival in power sent a shock wave down through society to each neighborhood and village. Young Italians and Germans had to face the destruction of their social organizations (if they came from socialist or the anatomy of fascism communist families) as well as the attraction of new forms of sociability. The temptation to conform, to belong, and to achieve rank in the new fascist youth and leisure organizations (which I will discuss more fully below) was very powerful. Especially when fascism was still new, joining in its marching and uniformed squads was a way to declare one’s independence from smothering bourgeois homes and boring parents.94 Some young Germans and Italians of otherwise modest attainments found satisfaction in pushing other people around.95 Fascism was more fully than any other political movement a declaration of youthful rebellion, though it was far more than that. Women and men could hardly be expected to react in the same way to regimes that put a high priority on restoring women to the traditional spheres of homemaking and motherhood. Some conservative women approved. The female vote for Hitler was substantial (though impossible to measure precisely), and scholars have argued sharply about whether women should be considered accomplices or victims of his regime. In the end, women escaped from the roles Fascism and Nazism projected for them, less by direct resistance than simply by being themselves, aided by modern consumer society. Jazz Age lifestyles proved more powerful than party propaganda. In Fascist Italy, Edda Mussolini and other modern young women smoked and asserted an independent lifestyle like young women everywhere after World War I, while also participating in the regime’s institutions. The Italian birth rate did not rise on the Duce’s command. Hitler could not keep his promise to remove women from the workforce when the time came to mobilize fully for war.

Offer, a transplanted Israeli who came to Oxford after serving as a soldier in the 1967 war, said that the effectiveness of an ideology is measured by the amount of coercion it takes to keep a ruling elite in power. Reality, when it does not conform to the reigning ideology, he said, has to be “forcibly aligned.” The amount of coercion needed to make society adhere to the model is “a rough measure of the model’s validity.

The Vickys have an elaborate code of morals and conduct. It grew out of the moral squalor of an earlier generation, just as the original Victorians were preceded by the Georgians and the Regency. The old guard believe in that code because they came to it the hard way. They raise their children to believe in that code—but their children believe it for entirely different reasons.” “They believe it,” the Constable said, “because they have been indoctrinated to believe it.” “Yes. Some of them never challenge it—they grow up to be small-minded people, who can tell you what they believe but not why they believe it. Others become disillusioned by the hypocrisy of the society and rebel—as did Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw.” “Which path do you intend to take, Nell?” said the Constable, sounding very interested. “Conformity or rebellion?” “Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded—they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity.

Ursula wondered if it was not preferable to lie down once and for all in her grave and let them throw the earth over her, and she asked God, without fear, if He really believed that people were made of iron in order to bear so many troubles and fortifications; and asking over and over she was stirring up her own confusion and she felt irrepressible desires to let herself go and scamper about like a foreigner and alow herself at last an instant of rebellion, that instant yearned for so many times and so many times postponed, putting her resignation aside and shitting on everything once and for all and drawing out of her heart thee infinite stacks of bad words that she had been forced to swallow over a century if conformity.

The act of rebellion is seeded in doubt that SAFER-U is what it claims to be, and the search for some satisfaction outside of us. We can see what life without SAFER-U, lived in rebellion and fear, does to areas where people have not let SAFER-U gain control. The rebellious and non-conforming choose their poverty by rejecting the safety and riches of our U-City’s.

[T]he course of development most typical of our society is ... the transformation of a lively and promising human infant, through a period of indoctrination, disillusion and rebellion, into an emotionally constricted, competitively hostile adult saturated in the values of commodity consumption, desperately conforming, anxiously pursuing an ever-receding 'happiness', bereft of any ability to criticize the society in which he or she is located, pathetically eager to enjoy those of its 'fruits' (consumer durables) which are within reach. This is the great, inertially stable backbone of our society, the guardian of its values and the target of its mass media, working tirelessly in the interests of others and blindly against its own, forced by the crushing vice of economic power into reproducing itself reliably and endlessly in its children.

Those who rebelled were considered a threat to the group. Their very existence was proof enough of chaos.

I need to remind myself of the struggle that has to put up... against the allurement of rebellions whose apparent poetry conceals invisible appeals to conformity.

Thus Nazism, as it proceeded from practice to theory, had to deny expertness in thinking and then (this second process was never completed), in order to fill the vacuum, had to establish expert thinking of its own—that is, to find men of inferior or irresponsible caliber whose views conformed dishonestly or, worse yet, honestly to the Party line. The nonpolitical pastor satisfied Nazi requirements by being nonpolitical. But the nonpolitical schoolmaster was, by the very virtue of being nonpolitical, a dangerous man from the first. He himself would not rebel, nor would he, if he could help it, teach rebellion; but he could not help being dangerous—not if he went on teaching what was true. In order to be a theory and not just a practice, National Socialism required the destruction of academic independence.