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By Root 190 0

without cause” who disobeys because he has no commitment to life except the one to say “no.” This kind of rebellious disobedience is as blind and impotent as its opposite, the conformist obedience which is incapable of saying “no.” I am speaking of the man who can say “no” because he can affirm, who can disobey precisely because he can obey his conscience and the principles which he has chosen; I am speaking of the revolutionary, not the rebel.

In most social systems obedience is the supreme virtue, disobedience the supreme sin. In fact, in our culture when most people feel “guilty,” they are actually feeling afraid because they have been disobedient. They are not really troubled by a moral issue, as they think they are, but by the fact of having disobeyed a command. This is not surprising; after all, Christian teaching has interpreted Adam’s disobedience as a deed which corrupted him and his seed so fundamentally that only the special act of God’s grace could save man from this corruption. This idea was, of course, in accord with the social function of the Church which supported the power of the rulers by teaching the sinfulness of disobedience. Only those men who took seriously the biblical teachings of humility, brotherliness, and justice rebelled against secular authority, with the result that the Church, more often than not, branded them as rebels and sinners against God. Mainstream Protestantism did not alter this. On the contrary, while the Catholic Church kept alive the awareness of the difference between secular and spiritual authority, Protestantism allied itself with secular power. Luther was only giving the first and drastic expression to this trend when he wrote about the revolutionary German peasants of the sixteenth century, “Therefore let us everyone who can, smite, slay and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful or devilish than a rebel.”

In spite of the vanishing of religious terror, authoritarian political systems continued to make obedience the human cornerstone of their existence. The great revolutions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries fought against royal authority, but soon man reverted to making a virtue of obedience to the king’s successors, whatever name they took. Where is authority today? In the totalitarian countries it is overt authority of the state, supported by the strengthening of respect for authority in the family and in the school. The Western democracies, on the other hand, feel proud at having overcome nineteenth-century authoritarianism. But have they—or has only the character of the authority changed?

This century is the century of the hierarchically organized bureaucracies in government, business, and labor unions. These bureaucracies administer things and men as one; they follow certain principles, especially the economic principle of the balance sheet, quantification, maximal efficiency, and profit, and they function essentially as would an electronic computer that has been programmed with these principles. The individual becomes a number, transforms himself into a thing. But just because there is no overt authority, because he is not “forced” to obey, the individual is under the illusion that he acts voluntarily, that he follows only “rational” authority. Who can disobey the “reasonable”? Who can disobey the computer-bureaucracy? Who can disobey when he is not even aware of obeying? In the family and in education the same thing happens. The corruption of the theories of progressive education have led to a method where the child is not told what to do, not given orders, nor punished for failure to execute them. The child just “expresses himself.” But, from the first day of his life onward, he is filled with an unholy respect for conformity, with the fear of being “different,” with the fright of being away from the rest of the herd. The “organization man” thus reared in the family and in the school and having his education completed in the big organization has opinions, but no convictions; he amuses himself, but is unhappy;