Directive: Challenge Authority

A common theme I've run into with English classes here in college is this idea of challenging authority, disrupting the status quo, subverting the established social order, questioning power and in short: thinking for myself. Postmodernism (poststructuralism, deconstruction, whatever you choose to call the greater majority of contemporary academia and critical theory) is all about shining the light on binary systems and showing how nothing is real. Nothing as we know it, from gender to life and death to sexuality to religion is based in a concrete, objective reality. The very idea of reality is false if we can augment and change it through thought, through will, through technology.

There are some who would say I'm oversimplifying, that this critique misses the nuances of the movement and that none of these things are the same and that using postmodernism as this kind of umbrella term to attack is wrong. I see it as this kind of amorphous octopoidal construction that serves its own purpose as a reaction to its own socio-cultural and historical influences

Paradox: If I challenge authority, I must challenge the original directive (to challenge authority), but in doing so I would be obeying and failing to challenge, risking complacency and blind following.

Feedback Loop.

We then cannot rephrase the directive with the potential implied meaning: Challenge all authority but mine. To take this Directive into the appropriate context, challenge authority is not so much a preconventional notion of "fuck the man, you can't tell me what to do" so much as a postconventional challenge to think critically and reason why something might not be worth doing. Ideally, it has moved beyond that kind of narcissism, that I, me, self that is incapable of thinking about the communal we or even further about the global we.

I'm in part being influenced by my reading of Ken Wilbur's A Theory of Everything, a thoughtful gift from my friend Emerson, and I think it would be irresponsible of me to ignore this contribution to my thoughts. I'm attempting to approach this reading critically, not blindly accepting everything Wilbur says, but I think it's important for my development of these thoughts to use the tools made available to me to critically analyze what I already know and see how it interacts and reacts with these new thoughts.

My biggest understanding so far is the integration of hierarchies. In order to understand how systems work, to understand how to affect them, you cannot ignore hierarchies and hierarchal thinking. Hierarchies may be false, they may be constructs of society that malign and marginalize identities and groups, but on some level they have to exist. They serve a necessary function in the social and psychological evolution of an individual and culture.

In my English class today, someone brought up the socio-evolutionary argument for why binary thinking exists, which is to say that from an evolutionary standpoint, which translates to mean from a biological sense, we are built to think in binary ways. The sooner you can make a snap judgement of friend or foe, the more likely you are to survive. The argument then was made that the power of literature and therefore education is to defamiliarize us to this instinct. Our current cultural climate and industrialized society allows us to train ourselves to overcome this instinctual process. Away from the false core of a self to a we and as we progress further from a humanist (which is egoist on a species level) to a global or what Wilbur would call a holistic level.

So on the holistic level, a hierarchy is part of a greater system of society and culture. A lot of styles of thought focus on this, but I think the difference is in the approach. The holistic approach is about integration, the nested realities that coexist.

New directive: Question authority critically.