Notes from chapter 3: Anatomy of a Refusal
This chapter is about how to remain in place without losing yourself.
She writes about some performance art - "The Trainee". The artist was "working" at Deloitte and would very visibly not work. People working there just couldn't understand why she would do this. It's a resistance to order. She also writes about Diogenes - the greek philosopher who would very publicly defy common place traditions.
Walden Two - a novel by B.F. Skinner - says that we can all be trained to be the perfect cogs in the works. In this book there's one guy who creates a "perfect" city. He preloads it with entertainment and work people will find satisfying (behavioral engineering). And all the people there are indeed satisfied. Except one guy, Bartleby, who says "I'd prefer not to". He pushes back. (ed: I don't remember Odell mentioning it, but Bartleby is eventually sent to prison and dies! Sort of a cautionary tale.)
Odell says to assert your will against custom.
There's a great quote from Thoreau here:
I went to the woods because I wish to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and spartan-like as to put to route all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner and reduce it to it's lowest terms. And if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it and publish its meanness to the world. And if it were sublime, then to know it by experience and be able to give a true account if it in my next excursion.
So Thoreau is saying he didn't want to blindly follow what society's rules.
She also quotes Thoreau's
break the law if it causes injustice to someone else, be a counter friction to stop the machine, truth is dependent on perspective, you have to ascend to higher ground to get the full view, the ascent is hard
saying to, again, go against society if you see the bigger picture and know it must be done. (ed: This needs to be taken with a grain of salt. See positive and negative freedoms.) In any case, Thoreau went to jail and refused to pay a fine. But in Thoreau's case, someone else paid the fine for him, so he was freed.
Others aren't so lucky. She points out that civil disobedience only works in a society that allows a level of latitude, of margin. In our society, unions (used to) have laws protecting them, allowing workers to strike. Administration provides support to professors and researchers to explore. It used to be that college students were protected, but (referring to
Stanford duck syndrome) students now no longer have the freedom to protest or experiment due to the burden of student loans, needing to find a job (harder with an arrest record), and competition. Even the common worker is constantly pitted against the spot market, leading to a life of economic fear. (ed: I certainly felt this!)
Without the protection, we get "repetitive injury of the spirt".
She says we shouldn't be man-machines, just blindly executing the law. To be alive is to execute moral judgement. But to see the correct moral judgement, we need to be attentive. Inattentive people can't align.
She writes that quitting Facebook is fighting the battle on the wrong plain. You can quit, but you don't have to social capital to stop Facebook and your quitting often gets misinterpreted as a political decision or holier than thou internet asceticism. She argues for non-commercial social media.
And that people who do have a margin in society should try to widen the margin for others.
