Table Of ContentResisting Illegitimate Authority
A Thinking Person’s Guide to Being an Anti-
Authoritarian—Strategies, Tools, and
Models
Bruce E. Levine
Introduction
Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart): “If you’re the police, where are your badges?”
Gold Hat (Alfonso Bedoya): “Badges? We ain’t got no badges! We don’t need no badges! I
don’t have to show you any stinkin’ badges!”
—JOHN HUSTON’S 1948 FILM
THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE WHEN I WAS A TEENAGER, MY FRIENDS AND I ENJOYED
REPEATING GOLD HAT’S LINE. IT DID NOT MATTER THAT GOLD HAT WAS A “BAD GUY” ATTEMPTING
TO STEAL FROM THE “GOOD GUYS.” WHILE SCHOOL HAD TAUGHT US COMPLIANCE WITH ALL THOSE
POSSESSING BADGES OF AUTHORITY AND TO SLAVISHLY WORK TO ACQUIRE SUCH BADGES, GOLD
HAT’S VIEW WAS LIBERATING.
Authoritarian is routinely defined as “relating to, or favoring blind submission
to authority.” In contrast, anti-authoritarians reject—for themselves and for
others—an unquestioning obedience to authority, and they believe in challenging
and resisting illegitimate authority.
Anti-authoritarians are a threat to authoritarians who demand unquestioning
obedience. Thus, authoritarians attempt to marginalize anti-authoritarians. Anti-
authoritarians in the United States have been scorned, shunned, financially
punished, psychopathologized, criminalized, and assassinated. While U.S.
society now honors a few deceased anti-authoritarians, these same figures were
often marginalized, silenced, and dishonored in their own lifetime. Today, anti-
authoritarians continue to be under great pressure to comply with the status quo,
making their survival difficult.
All noncompliance creates tension, but not all noncompliant people are anti-
authoritarians. I will distinguish anti-authoritarians as distinct from other
noncompliant individuals—and explain why Gold Hat is no anti-authoritarian.
While all anti-authoritarians do not identify with a political philosophy, all
anti-authoritarians do represent a political threat to their authoritarian
surroundings, be that a government, school, or family. Anti-authoritarians create
tension not simply for authoritarians with power but also for authoritarian
followers, who fear that the absence of a strong authority will result in chaos. In
contrast, anti-authoritarians believe that what is most dangerous and harmful is
an illegitimate authority, and they resonate with scientist and novelist C. P.
Snow’s observation: “When you think of the long and gloomy history of man,
you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of
obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.”
Resisting Illegitimate Authority is about bigotry but not about bigotry directed
at race, religion, gender, or sexual preference—all of which certainly remains in
the United States today. This book is about another kind of bigotry, one directed
at certain personalities and temperaments—a bigotry that often goes unnoticed.
One temperament that U.S. society has grown less tolerant of is introversion.
Susan Cain’s bestselling book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that
Can’t Stop Talking (2012) argues that we undervalue introverts in our culture,
doing them and society a disservice. When asked why she wrote the book, Cain
answered: “For the same reason that Betty Friedan published The Feminine
Mystique in 1963. Introverts are to extroverts what women were to men at that
time—second-class citizens with gigantic amounts of untapped talent. Our
schools, workplaces, and religious institutions are designed for extroverts, and
many introverts believe that there is something wrong with them and that they
should try to ‘pass’ as extroverts.”
There is even more intolerance for anti-authoritarians—a highly diverse group
whose members include people from all genders, races, ethnicities, sexual
preferences, and personalities. In 2012, I wrote an article “Why Anti-
Authoritarians Are Diagnosed as Mentally Ill” (titled on some websites as
“Would We Have Drugged Up Einstein?”), and I continue to receive emails
from people feeling validated by it, stating that they believe their anti-
authoritarianism—or their child’s—has resulted in mental illness diagnoses.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the horrors inflicted by Nazi Germany were still on
the minds of many Americans, and the 1950 book The Authoritarian
Personality, which psychopathologized authoritarian personalities, became
popular. In the early 1960s, psychologist Stanley Milgram’s studies revealed a
frightening obedience among Americans to illegitimate authority, and this
became a cause for concern. I will detail these and other examinations of
authoritarianism and anti-authoritarianism, as well as controversies surrounding
the “authoritarian personality” and the “anti-authoritarian personality.”
By the 1980s, U.S. society had changed. In 1980, Americans elected former
actor Ronald Reagan to the presidency. Reagan had previously acquired an
authoritarian strongman reputation by putting down student revolts as governor
of California. By the mid-1980s, the Democrats, wanting to appear as tough as
the Republicans, strongly supported “anti-crime” legislation that has contributed
to the United States having the highest incarceration rate in the world, caused in
large part by hypocritical drug laws.
In my mental health profession during the 1980s, it was noncompliance rather
than compliance that became increasingly pathologized. The American
Psychiatric Association (APA), politically in step with U.S. society, revised its
diagnostic manual, the DSM-III (1980), to include “oppositional defiant
disorder” (ODD) for noncompliant kids who do not engage in criminal
behaviors. The APA classifies ODD as one kind of “disruptive behavior
disorder.” Disruptive behavior disorders are now the most common classification
of children medicated with antipsychotics, among the highest grossing classes of
drugs in the United States today. The U.S. antipsychotic drug explosion is
largely the result of their use on non-psychotic vulnerable populations—
especially foster children, the elderly in nursing homes, and inmates in prisons
and jails—as a relatively inexpensive way to subdue and manage these groups.
Between 1978 and 1985, I was in graduate school and in training to become a
clinical psychologist, and my embarrassment with the mental health profession
increased throughout my schooling and internships. I struggled as to whether I
should quit or continue so as to get my PhD “badge.” Ironically, this “stinkin’
badge,” which lacks legitimate authority for me, has provided me with
credibility for the mainstream media that for the most part bases its assessment
of authorities solely on their badges.
There are certainly societies less free and more oppressive than the United
States. However, what makes life difficult for U.S. anti-authoritarians is that
Americans are indoctrinated to believe that their society celebrates anti-
authoritarianism. And so they are less prepared for the reality of anti-
authoritarian life than others who have not been so indoctrinated.
Anti-authoritarians exist in all walks of life and come in all kinds of
temperaments—some extroverted, some introverted, some funny, some serious,
and so on. To illustrate this diversity, I will profile several famous anti-
authoritarians with a lens focused at illuminating their essential anti-
authoritarianism and an emphasis on what can be gleaned from their lives.
Obviously, I cannot include every famous anti-authoritarian public figure. I will
instead talk about those who I have been drawn to because their lives have
provided me with lessons about anti-authoritarian survival, tragedy, and triumph.
Readers will sense that I have affection for many of these famous anti-
authoritarians who I profile, and that I am sympathetic to all of them, even the
ones who have hurt themselves, others, and the cause of creating a more just and
free society. Sometimes luck is the only difference between anti-authoritarians
having a constructive or destructive life.
Resisting Illegitimate Authority is about valuing anti-authoritarians. My life
work has been “depathologizing” noncompliance and rebellion; helping anti-
authoritarians survive within authoritarian schools, workplaces, and other
environments; assisting those who love anti-authoritarians to better understand
them; and helping anti-authoritarians gain hope that while a wise struggle
against illegitimate authorities may or may not be victorious, it can lead to a
community of fellow anti-authoritarians.
Earlier in Stanley Milgram’s life, he was personally affected by the Holocaust
and Nazi atrocities, as family members who had survived concentration camps
stayed temporarily in his home when he was a child. So when his research on
Americans revealed an unexpectedly high rate of obedience to authority
commanding subjects to commit cruel actions, this very much troubled Milgram.
Moreover, prior to his publishing Obedience to Authority (1974), Milgram was
shaken by the My Lai massacre and other U.S. atrocities that were committed by
American soldiers in the Vietnam War.
Milgram wrote: “The results as seen and felt in the laboratory, are to this
author disturbing. They raise the possibility that human nature or—more
specifically—the kind of character produced in American democratic society,
cannot be counted on to insulate its citizens from brutality and inhumane
treatment at the direction of malevolent authority.” For Milgram, “the capacity
for man to abandon his humanity” so as to comply with authority is what he
called humanity’s “fatal flaw,” which he concluded, “in the long run gives our
species only a modest chance of survival.”
A small ray of hope is that within the human family there are anti-
authoritarians—people comfortable questioning the legitimacy of authority and
challenging and resisting where it is seen to be illegitimate.
Part One: Authoritarians and Anti-
Authoritarians
1: Authorities—and My Path To Resisting
Illegitimate Authority
When I was six years old, I had appendicitis. The pediatrician said that I had a
stomachache that would go away. He was wrong. I ended up in the hospital for
two weeks due to a ruptured appendix. I remember my family being very angry
with this doctor for his misdiagnosis.
Soon after that, like many other children and teenagers, I can recall evaluating
whether an authority was a legitimate one to be taken seriously or an illegitimate
one to be resisted, and I have never stopped this evaluation process.
One way young children test the legitimacy of adult authorities is by being a
smart ass—or disruptive in some manner—to see how the adult reacts. Will the
adult reciprocally behave like another kid? Or will the adult behave like an adult
should behave, which is not to use their power to take revenge? I certainly tested
that out.
Entering third grade, from the first day of class, I carefully observed my
teacher, Mrs. Rike. When one of my classmates would talk without her
permission, she would command: “Write one hundred times, I will not talk.” Or
if her directions were not followed, she would order: “Write one hundred times,
I will follow directions.” A couple of months into the school year, I hatched a
plan for her, one that involved writing.
The evening before my big day in Mrs. Rike’s classroom, I had privately
written “I will not talk” one hundred times, and then did it again, so I had two
such lists, both which I brought to school the next day. I could hardly wait for
my opportunity. That morning in class, I began talking without permission. Mrs.
Rike told me to be quiet, but I kept right on talking, and she appeared
flabbergasted. While I had often forgotten to raise my hand to get permission to
speak, I never had actually blatantly disobeyed her.
Mrs. Rike ordered me to write one hundred times I will not talk. This I had
predicted, and I immediately pulled out my first prepared list from my desk and
handed it to her. My classmates laughed, and I was delighted. Mrs. Rike
responded, “You think you are so smart, Bruce. Well, I will have another one-
hundred I will not talks.” Exactly as I also predicted, and I pulled out my second
list and handed it to her. My classmates howled. Would she stop there or ask for
a third such list which I had not prepared? With a look of disgust on her face,
Mrs. Rike threw up her hands and moved on. My victory gave me an
empowering buzz, the kind of buzz that one gets from outsmarting an authority
figure.
In addition to testing Mrs. Rike’s legitimacy as an authority, I was also
motivated by a desire to be seen as clever by my classmates. Being viewed as
clever, I later discovered, was one of George Orwell’s motivations for writing.
In his essay “Why I Write,” he candidly explained that sheer egoism and the
“desire to seem clever, to be talked about” is one of his “four great motives for
writing.” Orwell’s other three writing motives were: aesthetic enthusiasm,
including the pleasure of words and their right arrangement; historical impulse
for truth and to see things as they actually are; and political purposes, including
a desire to push the world in a certain direction. At eight-years-old, I did not yet
possess these other three motives, but my future writing efforts were encouraged
by getting recognition for cleverness from my classmates.
That empowering triumph of outsmarting a teacher was in 1964. Today in
many schools, a third-grade teacher, rather than retreating, can call for a para—
short for outreach paraprofessionals—who can escort a misbehaving kid out of
the classroom for counseling. These outreach paraprofessionals are supervised
by an outreach counselor, who can bail out a teacher who has been overmatched
by a kid.
Mrs. Rike did not hold a grudge, and so she maintained her authority for me.
Had she taken revenge—which for myself and many other eight-year-olds would
have meant telling my parents that I needed to be taken to the psychologist for
an evaluation—she would have lost my respect and lost her authority for me.
What would have happened to me if today’s rules were in place in 1964?
Perhaps authorities would have looked up my records and discovered what my
second-grade teacher had written about my Social Behavior: “On a number of
occasions lately, Bruce had to be reminded about proper behavior in school and
his lack of self-control. Bruce tends to speak out in class without first waiting to
be called upon.” This report in today’s world may well have been enough for the
school to pressure my parents to have me evaluated by a psychologist. Would I
have been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)?
Oppositional defiant disorder (ODD)? Would I have been medicated?
I feel lucky. Lucky about not being diagnosed and labeled. Lucky about not
being behavior modified or medicated. And lucky about not being deprived of
that great feeling of successfully outsmarting a teacher. And I feel sad that many
kids today are not so lucky.
I grew up in the New York City neighborhood of Arverne in Rockaway,
Queens. It was composed of racially and ethnically mixed working-class and
poor people. My friends and I grew up in blue-collar families. My father worked
in the post office, and my mother was a part-time “colorist” (coloring in black-
and-white photo portraits) and later a part-time bookkeeper. Among my group of
friends, none of our parents had gone to college, and since we were all doing
well enough in school to go to college, that’s pretty much all our parents cared
about. And so, outside of school, we were pretty much free to do whatever we
wanted to do.
The authorities that most dominated our everyday life were teachers, and our
experience of them was not much different than what most teenagers tell me
today—that almost all their teachers are excruciatingly boring, and in the
unusual cases that their teachers are interesting and fun, they seem to get fired.
As a kid, sports was my greatest passion, and I was keenly aware of legitimate
and illegitimate authorities even in this realm. For example, it was clear to me
that some sportswriters were honest with fans about what was wrong with a
hometown team, and others were shills and flunkies who cared more about
gaining approval from team management than being honest with fans. And so by
the time I became a teenager, it was clear to me that the world was divided
between people willing to risk security in order to challenge and resist authority
versus people who sucked up to all authorities so they could get ahead.
I’ve always loved movies and history, and looking back at my youth, I can see
that I was drawn to historical movies from all eras with anti-authoritarian themes
—from Spartacus to Serpico. As a young kid, I recall getting excited by one
particular scene in Inherit the Wind, the fictional account of the Scopes monkey
trial. In that scene, Spencer Tracy playing Henry Drummond (whose character is
based on Clarence Darrow) cross examines Fredric March playing Matthew
Brady (based on William Jennings Bryan). Challenging his literal interpretation
of the Bible, Drummond asks Brady about where Cain found his wife, “If, in the
beginning, there were just Cain and Abel, and Adam and Eve, where did this
extra woman come from? Did you ever stop to think about that?” And when
Brady tries to sidestep the question, Drummond mocks him, “You figure
somebody else pulled another creation over in the next county somewhere?” It
was exhilarating to see an anti-authoritarian challenge an authoritarian, and
deliver a comical intellectual knockout. But it was troubling to see how this
intellectual triumph meant nothing in terms of the trial outcome. Drummond, as
had Darrow, lost the case.
