“Rebellion, though apparently negative, since it creates nothing, is profoundly positive in that it reveals the part of man which must always be defended” (Albert Camus, The Rebel)
Our lives are a moving through the ebbs and flows of rebellion. As a child, we learn to rebel against the institution that is parental authority, we dabble in pushing boundaries of what is allowed and what isn’t. But parents stymie the process of us being rebels, for if successful, it leads to their lost of power and authority. Naive, despondent children try to make their mark by rebelling, driven by unalloyed enthusiasm to test whether what they’ve been told is actually good or bad. While young rebellions might have created nothing, it might have taught us to either admit defeat or earn us a proud honour of winning against authority.
Within academia and the acquisition of more knowledge, it is also an act of rebellion. We read, we critique. We write, we defend. We think, we argue. Can rebellion be our measurement our compass to justice? As Camus wrote, the rebel is on the point of accepting or rejecting the sacred, and eras of oppression of tyranny and dictatorships both from political and religious movements, we see the man’s rebellion in rejecting of what was pronounced as sacred — from rejecting the notion of the sacred monarchy at the impetus of the French Revolution, to accepting the sacredness of Indigenous lands when we protest with the Wet’suwet’en peoples against gas pipelines ripping through their unceded land. To now, when we reject a horrific, unjust, utter disregard of the Black, Indigenous, racialized lives more consistently exposed in North America, where as Razack notes, racial hierarchies come into existence through patriarchy and capitalism — two systems that I argue has been another sacred foundation we have been indoctrinated by.
Brene Brown released a post a few weeks ago that the system is not broken, the system is built this way and working as it was designed. While who designed such a system has been attributed to the usual suspects (read: White, privileged), I think that might not be the only piece. When the privileged few take their own beliefs and values as sacred, and make others follow in their paths — and for many, many years, it was the unequivocal standard to follow. That’s the danger. When authority that is accumulated based on destroying lives and benefitting off others create a system, for too long have we been expected to follow this authority as if it’s sacred. Our lives, our education, our work — have been grounded and built upon this system.
Rebellion.
Not through violence. But maybe it can start with questioning society’s value on sacred.
I have no posts to share, no additional readings or resources to add to the lists to educate and ourselves. I have my own learnings to do. In the peaks and valleys of our charted course in life, I have seen the rebel as a nuisance, disturbing the peace of everyday life. But to ignite a rebellion is now and is forever more as we move in solidarity for parts of humanity that must always be defended. Where we must find solidarity in defending lives that have been oppressed from the virulent spectacle of hatred and violence. Rebel with words, rebel with scholarship and research, rebel with our wallets, rebel with knowledge, rebel with understanding.
