Why Egalitarian Societies Never Needed Rebels?

For most of my adult life, I thought of myself as a rebel. I said the word to myself the way some people say a job title, with a little pride attached to it. I invoked God, poetry, feminism, government, money, boundaries, tradition, one after another, in conversations where I knew exactly what reaction I'd get. If I'm honest about the earliest version of that habit, I have to admit it wasn't purely philosophical. Some of it was attention. I liked being the person in the room who said the thing nobody else would say.

Somewhere in the years since, something shifted, and it took me a long time to even notice it had happened. The same instincts that used to feel like a performance stopped needing an audience. I stopped my education without finishing the degree everyone expected me to finish. I traveled when I was told to settle. I resigned when I was told to hold onto a job. I didn't marry when I was told to marry. I asked questions about God long after I was told the questions had already been answered. I went into herpetology, backed Bitcoin and crypto before either word was fashionable, learned permaculture, chose to homeschool the children in my life, loved a person the way you'd love something you never once doubted, and am raising my daughter on stories and my own book, along with a syllabus. I did almost all of it with the same underlying posture. And somewhere along the way, that posture stopped being a stance I was performing and became something closer to breathing, or driving a car, automatic, unconscious, no longer asking anyone's permission or attention to justify itself.

Why We Never Needed This Trait

Here's the question that's actually been sitting underneath all of it. If you look far enough back, at the egalitarian societies humans lived in before hierarchy, before surplus, before the first person decided some land or some person could be owned, I don't think rebelliousness existed as a trait at all. Why would it. Rebellion is a response to a norm, and if life is moving in the chorus nature already set, food shared, work shared, no one person's will placed above the group's, there's nothing to rebel against. The trait only becomes necessary once someone builds a rule that bends the group away from that chorus, marriage as ownership instead of choice, land as property instead of commons, money as a scoreboard instead of a tool, government as a hierarchy instead of a circle. Rebellion isn't a flaw in human nature. I've come to think it's evidence that a norm has already drifted somewhere nature never asked it to go.

That reframes the whole question for me. I spent years thinking of rebelliousness as my personality. I think now it was never a personality at all. It was a correction, and corrections aren't supposed to be permanent character traits, they're supposed to be temporary forces that stop being necessary once the thing they were correcting has been set right, or once you've built a life quiet enough that you're no longer standing inside the distortion.

Manto and Premchand

Saadat Hasan Manto never let Indian and Pakistani society look away from what it preferred not to see, prostitution, Partition's violence, the specific cruelty ordinary people are capable of when a border gets drawn through their lives overnight. He was tried for obscenity six separate times, three times under British India, three more after Partition in Pakistan, for stories that simply refused to sanitize what he'd witnessed. He never invented the ugliness he wrote about. He just declined to look away from it the way everyone around him had agreed to.

Munshi Premchand's first short story collection, Soz-e-Watan, was banned and burned by British authorities in 1908, before he'd even taken the pen name most of us know him by. He'd been publishing as Nawab Rai, and the collection was seditious enough, five stories carrying open nationalist feeling, that the colonial government confiscated every copy it could find and destroyed them. He changed his name and kept writing anyway, spending the rest of his career giving voice to farmers, widows, and the rural poor that Indian literature had mostly ignored until he insisted otherwise. Neither he nor Manto set out to be rebels. They set out to describe what was actually there, and the norm of their time couldn't tolerate the description.

Osho, Dostoevsky, and Krishnamurti on What We Built

Osho spent decades arguing that many of the world's most sacred institutions were closer to prisons than to freedom. Marriage was one of his most consistent targets, love doesn't need a contract to remain real, and the moment you legislate a feeling, you've usually killed the feeling and kept only the legislation. But he went much further than marriage. He argued that inherited guilt, the entire architecture of sin most organized religion runs on, was a control mechanism first and a moral truth a distant second, that a person taught to feel guilty about their own body and desire from childhood becomes remarkably easy to govern for the rest of their life. He was equally unsparing about education, calling out a system that rewards memorized answers over genuine curiosity, and about the ambition-and-comparison economy most adults never question. I don't agree with everything he built around these arguments, some of it curdled into its own kind of dogma by the end. But the core provocation still holds up in each case, that an institution built to guarantee virtue, learning, or love by force usually produces the opposite of what it promises.

Dostoevsky ran the same experiment in fiction rather than in lecture halls. His unnamed narrator in Notes from Underground exists almost entirely to rebel against the nineteenth century's confident new belief that humans are fundamentally rational creatures who will always act in their own best interest once given enough education and enough freedom. The Underground Man insists, spitefully and at length, that people will act against their own interest on purpose, just to prove they aren't a piano key being played by somebody else's theory of human nature. And in The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov stages his own quieter rebellion against a universe that permits a child to suffer for reasons no theology has ever adequately explained, and says, in effect, that he'd rather return his ticket to that universe than accept the explanation on offer.

Krishnamurti's rebellion might be the starkest of the three, because he rebelled against a role that had already been built entirely around him. Raised from childhood by the Theosophical Society to become the vehicle for a coming World Teacher, he stood in front of thousands of his own devoted followers in 1929 and dissolved the entire order built to worship him, saying that truth is a pathless land, and that no institution, including the one currently kneeling in front of him, could ever walk another person to it. He didn't rebel against a norm imposed by strangers. He rebelled against the norm built, with total sincerity and total devotion, in his own name.

Cinema That Refused to Look Away

Anurag Kashyap has spent a career making the Indian censor board's job difficult, and I mean that as a compliment. Paanch sat unreleased for years after the censor board objected to it. Black Friday, his film about the 1993 Bombay bombings, was held up in court for roughly two years before it could reach a theater, because the case it was depicting was still active. He never set out to shock anyone. He set out to show what was actually happening in the parts of the country cinema usually skipped over.

The Wachowski siblings did something structurally similar with Sense8, a show built entirely around eight strangers on different continents who become psychically bound to one another regardless of nationality, gender, or sexuality. The show was blocked in China before it ever aired there. Lana Wachowski, who transitioned publicly partway through her career, was making the most literal argument available to her, that the walls between people are a norm, not a law of nature.

Catherine Breillat has spent decades making French cinema confront female desire without the usual apology built into how the camera is allowed to look at women, Romance and Fat Girl both drew serious censorship battles, Fat Girl was initially banned outright in Ontario. And Krzysztof Kieślowski built the Dekalog, ten films reinterpreting the Ten Commandments inside ordinary apartment blocks in late communist Warsaw, under a state that had already spent years shelving and censoring his earlier documentary work. None of these filmmakers were chasing controversy as a strategy. They were refusing to let the camera flinch, and the backlash, every time, was the tell that they'd pointed it somewhere true.

The Music That Refused to Lower Its Voice

Bob Marley turned reggae into a direct political weapon and survived an assassination attempt in 1976, two days before a peace concert he refused to cancel out of fear. Tupac Shakur built an entire body of work out of refusing to pretend the violence and neglect in the neighborhoods he came from were somehow acceptable background noise, and he was shot dead at twenty five, a killing that stayed formally unsolved for almost three decades. Eminem spent the early part of his career absorbing wave after wave of public outrage for refusing to clean up either his language or his account of where he'd come from. None of them were rebelling as an aesthetic choice. They were describing a reality the mainstream had agreed to stop describing.

What Actually Worries Me

Here's where I have to be honest about something that unsettles me. Every year now I watch a familiar migration happen, planeloads of young people heading to Goa, to Rishikesh, to whichever town has most recently been declared the place where contemplation lives, looking for something they've been told they're missing. I don't doubt the hunger is real. What worries me is how rarely it comes with any architecture underneath it, any actual philosophical scaffolding for what they're chasing. They're searching outside for something that was never actually located outside to begin with. Krishnamurti spent sixty years trying to say exactly this, that the pathless land isn't a location you travel to, it's a way of seeing you either build or don't.

Real rebellion, the kind that actually corrects a norm's drift away from nature instead of just performing the aesthetic of correction, needs several things most of what I see right now is missing. It needs an actual working knowledge of what nature's own norms even were before human institutions overwrote them. It needs a real sense of your own body, not as a project to optimize or a wound to numb, but as the instrument that's been quietly keeping score of everything you've suppressed to fit the norm in the first place. It needs literary wisdom, the specific, hard-earned kind that comes from sitting with an idea long enough to understand why it was said, not just knowing that it was said. And it needs an understanding of how interconnected this all actually is, the way a forest's trees are joined underground through mycorrhizal fungal networks, sharing nutrients and warnings across species in a web scientists have started calling the wood wide web, a literal, physical model of the same cooperative chorus I think humans lived inside before we built the first fence. A person who goes looking for that connection in a two week trip to Rishikesh, without ever having done the quieter, slower work first, isn't rebelling against anything. They're just relocating the same unsettled nervous system to a prettier backdrop and calling the change of scenery an awakening.

Where I've Landed

I don't think I'm a rebel anymore, and I mean that as the highest compliment I can pay myself. I think what I used to call rebellion was just the sound of a life slowly correcting itself back toward something nature never asked me to abandon in the first place, and once the correction finished, the noise went with it. I still make almost all the same choices I made when I thought of myself as fighting something. I just don't experience them as a fight anymore. They're simply how I live now, the way breathing is simply how I live, unconscious, unforced, no longer performed for anyone in the room. You know you've arrived somewhere real the day it stops feeling like rebellion at all, and starts feeling, quietly, like nature.