Rebel Rebel

In 1968, there were a lot of student rebellions all over the world. In Czechoslovakia, in the US, in Mexico, in France. To a lot of people, it was a curious sight. These were the baby boomers in their teens, and especially in the US, they were the most pampered and indulged generation in history (although I think that succeeding generations were even more indulged.) Suddenly they thought that life wasn’t good enough for them?

The late 60s were a time for the counter culture. The postwar boom had created a standard of living that was higher than anything else you ever saw in human history (in the West anyway). But it also brought with it a stifling conformity. So counterculture was born. It was about young, idealistic teenagers rebelling against strict social codes (long hair, smoking pot, love and peace). Some of it was a rebellion against capitalism, against the Vietnam War, against the “straights” – the nerdy, conservative, square types.

Hippie culture has some enduring legacies. Body shop, with its emphasis on sustainable development and care for the earth, embodies some hippie culture values. A lot of the computer industry was founded on hippie values. The internet was designed to be democratic, so that no large organisation, or no government was able to control it. It’s not a surprise that much of Silicon Valley is located on the outskirts of San Francisco, which was the capital of the hippies. Steve Jobs was a hippie. Ben and Jerry’s was founded by 2 hippies. Although, considering that a lot of hippie culture was virulently anti-corporation in nature, you could say that at least some of the hippie values were betrayed in the process.

The green movement was also greatly connected to the hippies. They rightly saw that man was destroying his environment, and even though they met with varying degrees of resistance, people are finally realising that humans on this planet are living a basically unsustainable lifestyle. But people are selfish, and you cannot preach to them by saying, “look, you are destroying all these plants and animals.” They’ll tell you, “we have a right to our way of life”. So instead we call it Climate Change now, because the message now is, “you can destroy the plants and animals and pump poisonous gases into the sky. But after that you will suffer because the sea level will rise and life on this planet will be less livable.” This is also a reason why, when I hear the words “climate change”, it is with a sense of shame.

The hippie culture has also spawned a free love culture, where people were much less restrained when it came to sex. Pre-marital sex became much more common. It lasted around 15-20 years, and that lifestyle ended (or at least became much less widespread) when people started hearing about AIDS.

I’m thinking about the nature of rebellion, now from the vantage point of somebody well into adulthood.

Yes, I don’t like conformity. I’ve said it. I know I work in a place which values it above just about anything else. I know that to a large extent, you need to have common standards in order to make the organisation gel together. And I know that there are many workplaces which have an even stifling culture than mine. I still have to grapple with that problem.

My instinct has always tended towards rebellion. I was tardy about work at school, (although, when I did do my work, I always gave it my best shot). I made goofy comments in class. I often detested people for the simple reason that they followed the crowd, and took on the values of “society”.

During my film buff phase, I always had a weakness for films about teenage rebellion. OK, “Rebel Without a Cause” is too obvious. But I liked “400 Blows”, “And Your Mother Too”, “Dreamlife of Angels”, “Brighter Summer Day”. There were others about people making their way in this world, in the face of adversity, like “The Crowd”.

Ultimately, though, what does rebellion mean? On some levels, it is absolutely necessary. Revolutions were borne of rebellion. You just felt that you had to have a better life, and then you destroyed the old way of life, simply because anything else would be better. Sometimes this was true, but often it was not. The Russian Revolution was largely a tragedy for all concerned (except maybe a few top-ranking Communist Party cadres). Mao Zedong had a dictum, “we must destroy before we build”. A lot of his actions have turned out to be totally disastrous.

Rebellions were often an expression of democracy. The French Revolution was something that ushered in the modern democracy, even though people hardly commemorate the Terror that followed: you didn’t know who else would be guillotined in the morning. (Well maybe a few nutty people like Pol Pot thought it was a good thing.) It is a very useful check and balance against tyranny, and something that I feel could have been used a bit more.

I used to feel ashamed that people of my generation did not stage rebellions, and often deferred to the government. Then again, it is not always true that people in my generation are less rebellious. I wondered why the Vietnam War protests were so much more famous than the Iraq war protests. In a way a great amount of discredit has to go to the US public for allowing the Iraq war to happen. I don’t really know how much they are ashamed of themselves, or the torture of Iraqis that took place by the US Army. But later on I found out that there was a big protest in the UK, and a record turn-out, to demonstrate against the Iraq war. I can’t remember the figure – half a million? That was a great thing. But it scarcely went reported, because, unlike 1 generation ago, news broadcasters have become very wary of giving credence to that sort of thing. The Iraq war destroyed the reputation of Tony Blair, who had up til then been a hugely popular prime minister.

So what are rebels? Do people rebel just so that they felt good about themselves? Rebels do their work under very dangerous circumstances, and a lot of the great rebels of the past have attained great stature, simply for standing up against a system that was morally wrong. Gandhi. Martin Luther King. Mandela. And to a lesser extent, Aung San Suu Kyii and the Dalai Lama.

But my tendency towards rebellion is probably now tempered with some hard-nosed conservative thinking, and after all, you have to understand the system before you try to change it.

Does rebellion build anything? No. Rebellion is destructive. Destructive does not mean no good, because in many cultures, we understand that creation and destruction are both part of the great plan. Hinduism has a god for creation and another for destruction, even though I can’t remember their names offhand. Taoism has yin and yang, the cycle of life, where one begets the other. Even in the West, harvest is often equated to death, a tacit acknowledgement that some yield is gained from the destruction.

But rebellion alone does not build anything. Some of the regimes that came about as a result of a rebellion would be worse than what they replaced. There was ZANU-PF, which replaced the white rule in Zimbabwe. Living standards have plummeted since then. There is South Africa, which may or may not be faring better than under Apartheid. The feminist movement promised a better world for all, but at this point, the gains are quite modest compared to the promises, and for that matter, the ladies are beginning to realise that men live quite a shitty life (even if they don’t bitch about it as much as women.) And then there was communism in Russia – enough said.
It was the luck of the draw when it comes to changing regimes. Sometimes you will get LKY – a pain in the ass, but he makes life better for all. Sometimes you get Ferdinand Marcos.

The other thing about rebels – there are rebels who rebel because they want to shake things up and change. Then there are others who are merely dissatisfied with the current system, but offer no solutions. You’ve seen them before, those people who throw spanners for the sake of throwing them. And they talk vaguely about making things better. They offer no solutions. In fact, they are the people who just prefer to stew in their own juices all the time, and enjoy the benefits of being part of the system, and yet reserve for themselves the right to complain about things they don’t like. Most of us are like that some of the time, and that is not unusual. However it becomes really grating when that person starts to assume the heroic mantle of the rebel leader, and that’s when he starts being laughable.

Of course, it could be that half-baked ideas eventually evolve into works of genius, but more often, they end up as nothing.

And there are other rebels, who have ideas which work well on paper but when it comes to the implementation, they are let down either by faulty execution, or the idea wasn’t very good at all. In the end, though, if ideas don’t work, there’s usually a part of the theory that the originator of the idea didn’t want to consider. And that person would usually be quite stubborn about brushing away that part of the theory, because that would mean he had to throw away his ideas.

Because ultimately you have to look at the big picture. Rebels are celebrated in our culture for various reasons. One of them is that the act of destruction is more spectacular and dramatic than constructive acts. You get more publicity, more airspace. Another one is that when people around you are pissed off with a certain regime for certain reasons, you can be a focal point for their collective voice by speaking out against the injustices of the incumbent system. That is easy. You are the popular voice, and you cannot be wrong. But talk is cheap, and what would happen when you are actually the one elected into office, you’re the one who’s in charge? Can you reform the system? Can you make the changes you promised, without making the system substantially worse as a result?

I’ve seen my being rebellious for at least as many wrong reasons as well as right ones. I think that you cannot be a rebel your whole life. You cannot be a rebel without a cause, it doesn’t make sense in the long run. Even Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols was circumspect enough to admit, “I don’t know what I want but I know how to get it.” It shows that he acknowledges the limits of rebellion. In the end, it’s just a means to an end, and you have to figure out what you’re really getting into, what you’re really doing all that for.