In my previous article, I wrote about how being serious and thinking logically together with following rules and traditions provided you with peace/security of mind at the cost of limiting your imagination and creativity, but it also made me realize most innovative playful revolutionary thinkers…were considered rebels of their time because they thought or acted differently than the rules or tradition demanded, from Elvis Presley and his “immoral” way of dancing to Edgar Allan Poe and his “grotesque” writing style, the majority of people who have standed out in their field throughout history have done so by doing just that, gaining others attention by behaving differently than they were expected to or than the people they were surrounded by, and who are the most notorious rebels in our culture? Teenagers.
If you ask most creative people about his/her childhood, they will tell you how much trouble they usually got into, it’s a time when you have no say in what you must do…you are forced to study things you don’t really care much for or agree with for that matter if you had religious parents and everyone seems to know what is best for you.I was and still am a very stubborn individual who many find hard to deal with, I will do the opposite of what everyone else is doing just to contradict for my own personal amusement even if I know it’s going to end bad for me, I put my mum through hell in my youth (from running away for a couple of days when I was four to testing my teachers limits or getting under their skins) and sometimes think my rebelliousness played a part in driving her literally insane but I’ve never seen it as a bad thing, because when my teachers started comparing me to my classmates and saying: “Why can’t you be more like Simon who is so obedient…”, it got to my nerves, they actually said the obedient part like it was a quality to be proud of, I just couldn’t understand it, I had to tell them; “Do I look like a dog to you!!!…would you like me to wag my tail perhaps?…which shows you more intelligence, the kid who doubtful…because doubt shows intelligence till it is proved so has his own opinions (even if they are wrong) and doesn’t just accept what you say as being true because your a grown up or the dim-witted one that can’t think for himself so accepts everything and does as he is told???”.
Entering my teens I started observing my peers and unlike before, now everyone was being rebellious as well which frustrated my rebellious side cause if everyone else was doing it…it kind of took away the whole purpose of the act…so instead I became a calm, quiet teen that did as he was told and tried to be nice to everyone, but I came to some conclusions of why my fellow youngsters decided to give in to their “rebel” side and become an inconvenience to our intellectual rewarding society for Bosses to Teachers and specially Parents;
Blind Faith Vs Educated Doubt
Apart from the obvious fact that teenagers start forming their personalities once they reach a certain age and anything done to try and control them creates anger in their testosterone growing bodies, theres three basic other factors involved and one of the principal one is Education.
In the past, having a proper education was something optional and only available to the wealthy who could afford it, now the youth of the world are well-educated…and to the educated mind the old ideas, traditions and establishments seem ridiculous, they might of been created in the past by they have no future.
With education came science, which was taught to the youth, with each generation science started progressing and making discoveries that contradicted everything they had been taught by the older generations, which lead to the problem that education was creating a generation that was pre-trained to be doubtful till something was proven, unlike the old cultures and civilizations that were pre-trained on blind faith.
This gap of faith and doubt created the frustration and problems of each generation making it impossible to see eye to eye, the youth not only looked for a faith that could be scientific, it seeked one that was unafraid of being doubted, one that would allow you to start with doubt and end with faith.The paradox comes when the authority figures such as teachers and parents who taught us to be doubtful through knowledge, expect us to begin with blind faith in believing everything they said instead and this is where the perception of “rebel” came from.
Apart from my rebellious personality, I genetically am very paranoid and have many trust issues so I always wondered, is having doubt in everything something positive or not?,
I think it is…, because faith that begins with doubt is much deeper, it is unafraid of being doubted.This is the problem I have with religions and many other things, if something is afraid of being doubted and asks you to blindly trust in it…you start wonder, if it has nothing to hide, why isn’t it brave enough to allow you to doubt it??
Doubt isn’t against faith, it works towards it!, it’s a tool you can use, if you use it rightly…and once you come upon that faith, it will be well grounded and won’t just be a blind belief.
“I’m A Citizen Of The World”
I use to travel so much when I was little that when someone asked me where I was from, thats what I would answer; “I’m a citizen of the world”, but we all are and that’s the second cause of rebellion.
First came education which brought science, and now science brought technology.Due to the printed magazines and newspapers, radio, cinematography, television, airplanes and now with the biggest global uniting interactive force of them all, computers and the internet, the world is slowly becoming one…local traditions have to fade away, the world needs one culture, one civilization and what we have right now are many semi cultures and civilizations where some are following the traditional and the others are jumping on the train of the “one culture” concept, therefore creating total universal chaos and confusion which is seen as rebelliousness.
The sad thing is the world is losing its individuality, you have white guys dressing with baggy clothing and speaking like black people, you have Indian women who don’t wear their traditional beautifully colored and designed Sari’s anymore but short shorts and a tank top.Before it was impossible to rebel against your culture because you weren’t aware that there was anything else available, but now after being exposed to the media and the possibility to travel, people are becoming aware there are multiple alternatives and the world has become and open world.
The solution to this would be to create a single world culture, only one culture where everyone is free to wear or do whatever they want without having to be judged and tagged as rebellious.But before that can happen…all local cultures would have to disappear, and I think that won’t be possible for a quite some time unless the whole world finds a mutual enemy, the same type of effect that occurs in a country when it goes to war…the suicide rate lowers as now everyone is united in a common preservation cause, but for the whole world to unite and become friends it would take a war against Alien invaders to protect our planet.
So in conclusion, it’s not really that the youth are rebellious but only appear that way, in fact the real reason of the rebellion is the resistance of the old traditions, rules and establishments to accept the new type of world that is forming, it’s still trying to hold on to the known and secure which creates a friction of identities and lack of order…think of it as a world who suffers from bi polar disORDER.
Time-Conscious Restlessness
The third and final cause of rebellion is time-consciousness and similar to the second cause it also involves education, in fact, the whole act of rebellion has some type of connection to education because without an educated set of rules to follow, how could you rebel against being allowed to do/say or think whatever you want?
As education progressed and the doubtful mind was created, it started to doubt the religion it had followed for so long with blind faith, and that created a sense of restlessness and anxiety.
Why? Because most religions promise one same thing…the solution to the one thing humans are afraid of the most, eternal life after death…may it be through a heaven, hell or even reincarnation, but now we started wondering…”What if life isn’t eternal and there’s a limit? Only one shot at life and the present might be all that we have!”.
We have witnessed the effects of world wars and have seen the creation of the atomic bomb for the first time in history…one bomb that can destroy half the worlds population with the push of a button, we also have technology that can make our daily lives easier or alternatively kill us; cars, motorbikes, trains, elevators or airplanes and thanks to the media we now are aware of all the horrible things that are happening in the world right now; poverty, serial killers, illnesses, terrorists ect…
Apart from having blind faith in the idea of life after death, our ancestors didn’t have as many threats or at least weren’t aware of most of them and that gave more peace of mind, thats why the traditions in the passed changed extremely slowly compared to the velocity in which everything is changing right now, for hundreds of years woman were considered inferior and only useful for reproduction and housework, mens duty was to work and provide for the family and their daily routines were composed of the most monotonous events you could think of…recollecting wood for the fire was probably the highlight of their day, and only in the last 160 years or so all that begun to change and we became aware thanks to doubt and all our imminent threats, that making the most of our present moment is our best chance of enjoying life because there is no guaranteed future.
Rebellion is a side effect of education and education is needed for world progression, to me these causes of the new age rebel minds are positive signs, they are signs that through this way the world is slowly working to create a new type of united civilization where a new type of mind can be born.
What Do You Think?
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