OPPOSITIONAL DEFIANCE DISORDER: Part 5

RESPONSES TO OPPRESSION:  some of them good ideas and some of them contemptible or laughable.  Brainstorming rules:  anything goes.

1.  Join someone else’s fight, like someone blameless or much more powerful.

2.  Go so subversive that you don’t even know when you’re doing “oppositional unconscious defiance”.  On second thought maybe that’s the problem.

3.  Write.  Doesn’t matter what.

4.  Learn any form of art, including dance or martial arts or gymnastics.  Dazzle ‘em.

5.  Find a role model, maybe a shocking one.

6.  Invest in what the oppressor hates and fears:  sex, poverty, dirt, low status, “femaleness” or “maleness”, drunkenness, drugs, babies. 

7.  Become a psychologist and invent experiments about oppositional defiance disorder.

8.  Go live on a mountain top.  Rise above it all.

9.  Achieve enough to get respect from authorities, though maybe not the authorities respected by one’s oppressor.

10.  Find someone to truly love you for who you are.  (I hope you love them as well.)

11.  Develop a disease or trauma that will demand careful attention because you are a victim and therefore entitled to righteous indignation.

12.  Plunge into paralyzing depression to protect those around you from your rage.  

GENERATIONAL DYNAMICS IN ODD

1.  The oppressed mother whose son witnesses her helplessness in the face of abuse but cannot save her.  Two varieties.  

One: when the mother makes a little husband out of the son, showers him with love, supports him in his endeavors, and makes him into a superstar full of oppositional defiance of the father.  (Avoid the aspect of sex or you’ll get pulled into Freudian templates.)

Two: when no amount of effort is enough to get admiration and support from the mother, who is so in love (addicted? enabling?) to the alpha male in charge that she makes it clear the son is not enough.  She chooses the adult male.  (Where’s the Greek play for this?  When the King’s wife kills the son?  Is it Hamlet?)  Then the boy defies and opposes her rather than the father.

2.  Again two varieties:

One:  The dominant alpha male who wanted a son but who will not allow the boy enough room to grow into someone as strong as his father, and then blames the son for being weak or inadequate.  

Two:  Or the same man who has only a daughter and must either load her up with his expectations or use her as bait to attract a son-in-law, passing her over.  Both varieties of them can oppose their father.

NON-GENERATIONAL DYNAMICS

1.  Peers who bully.  Defy them by surviving.

2.  Joining peers who are beneath contempt, whom the society as a whole rejects.  Defend the group, defy the larger society.

3.  Peers in competition with each other to an unhealthy degree.  (What degree is that?)  Defy and oppose competition.  

4.  Sell-outs and tattletales.  Don’t even bother to notice.  They WANT defiance.

5.  Genuine “blood brothers” who provide resources, stand together, act as scouts.  Discover solidarity.  Dissolve defiant opposition.

6.  “Lord of the Flies.”  ‘Nuf said.

THE USES OF OPPOSITIONAL DEFIANCE

1.  To keep hope alive.

2.  To test how much one is valued or loved.  If they persist in the face of opposition, they must care.  But if one is in control of the level of opposition and keeps ratcheting it up, and the tested one finally fails -- then it’s still their fault.

3.  To avoid blame, esp. in the case of persons who secretly have accepted the blame.  Or in the case of people who have been blamed and punished so severely that they nearly died.  Blame arouses in them an uncontrollable terror which they will try to hide.

4.  There are many situations in which a group is pitted against an individual unjustly.  Oppositional defiance can be then an explicitly moral stance to take.

WHAT IS THE OPPOSITE OF OPPOSITIONAL DEFIANCE?  I don’t mean what will make a person stop being defiant, I mean what will let a person continue to be defiant in a useful and skillful way?

1.  Empathy.

2.  Objectivity.

3.  A larger frame of reference: an awareness of a greater good, an awareness of the long trajectory of time in which today’s issues are turned upside down tomorrow.

4.  A voice: the ability to say things clearly and passionately so people will get it.

5.  Examples from real life.

6.  Backup and a place to rest.

7.  Experience, memories of success.  EVIDENCE of success.

WHAT ABOUT THE PHYSICAL SUBSTRATE?

1.  We know that some hormones (testosterone, adrenaline) and some tumors or trauma (in the forebrain) will make people aggressive, argumentative, violent.  There seems to be genetic substrate for this. 

2.  We know that some animals are killers and there is no reason to think humans are different.

3.  It’s possible that oppositional defiance is the default position in all humans, but suppressed by later evolution and mutations or epigenomes or even proper gut bacteria or toxoplasmosis parasites (it works on rats).  If one of those mechanisms fails, the result might be unwanted aggression or paranoia.  Behaving in a more positive way may not be the result of progress towards the natural but evolutionarily improved attitudes of people.  Evil may be the result of loss of restraints, social or physical, the default.

4.  A person who barely survived the Dutch WWII starvation said to me that no one really knows what their breaking point is until they are living it.  She ended up collaborating for bread.  Then she had to accept shame or be defiant.  She chose the latter.

5.  Human beings’ bodies have never included so many strange and manmade chemicals at any point in history.  Manmade molecules and the use of psycho-affective drugs, legal or illegal, have entirely unknown cumulative effects without even considering interactions or means of ingestion.  We do know that some of them will throw people into unreasonable, unstoppable rage.  That’s NOT the same thing as oppositional defiance.

Resolving oppositional defiance is different in every situation.  It is a response, maybe an enlightened and brave one, but still a response, therefore unique.

STORIES, WITNESSES, TESTIMONY

Sometimes technology is a game-changer and this is true of the dimension of observing, either through imagination or through video depiction or through eye-witnesses.  Now, with smart phones in the hands of so many, satellite surveillance from far away, drones invading by surprise, GPS locators and ankle-monitors -- things are not just seen but also recorded.  So far I haven’t read in the papers an account of a kid who managed to nail an abusive parent with a “teddy bear camera,” but it’s probably already happened.  Gizmos make what was inconceivable completely incontrovertible.

Whether in terms of oppositional defiance in the name of justice for a stigmatized group or as oppositional defiance in an individual context where the defiant person is trying to understand whether they’re just being reflexive in resisting and questioning or trying to convince the other person that they SHOULD be opposed, it helps if you’ve got evidence.  (I’m not saying “truth.”  There are usually several truths.)

If all else fails, resort to laughter.