Rebel Yell I

Trey Smith

In Herrlee C. Creel's book, Chinese Thought, from Confucius to Mao Tse-Tung, I have found the chapter devoted to philosophical Taoism interesting. While I don't agree completely with his overall analysis, he has offered much meat to chew on.

One interesting point he makes is that Taoist philosophy represents a rebellion over the then-widely accept philosophy of Confucianism. Mind you, he is not suggesting that Taoism merely was one of several competing philosophies in the milieu of 4th Century BC China; its very roots sprung from the "fixed code of action" that Confucianism represented.

In all candor, maybe that's what drew me to philosophical Taoism in the first place! If it is true that it indeed is a rebellious philosophy, then it would make sense that a rebel like me would embrace it.

There are a lot of things I should admit about myself and one of these is that I am a rebel. I've always fought against authority, even when it would have been better to keep my fricking mouth shut! Back in my working days, I often found myself at loggerheads with superiors at work and I've been "let go" more than once for what some might consider insubordination.

My rebellious nature -- and that of my brother's as well -- traces back to dear old mom. From an early age, we were taught not to blindly accept what anyone told us, but to think for ourselves.

I can remember discussions around the dinner table when I probably was no more than 8 or 9 years old. My parents would be discussing or debating current events and I was often asked for my opinion. If I merely parroted back what one of my parents thought, my mother would get on my case big time. "You need to think this through on your own terms," she would tell me, "and then draw your own conclusions."

By the time I hit junior high school age, I bet I was more well-read than most of my peers. While my compatriots were focused on sports, fashion and who liked who, I wanted to talk about the goings on in the Nixon administration! So, not only was I out-of-step with my contemporaries due to my quirky personality (autism); I also was focused on far more cerebral matters. In combination, these factors go a long way in explaining why I had such few friends and was viewed by most of my peers as an exceedingly odd duck.

While, in many ways, I'm glad my mother instilled in me the importance of thinking for myself, I've often wondered if she really had thought through her strategy. You see, the very lesson she stressed for both my brother and I when we were young became the linchpin of conflict as we grew older.

My late mother was one of those individuals who could never admit to being wrong about a-n-y-t-h-i-n-g. If things didn't turn out as she had planned, it was ALWAYS someone else's fault or there had been some factor that someone purposefully hid from her. Given all the pertinent information, my mother always believed her analysis was spot on.

As Sean and I grew into young men, we often didn't come to the same conclusions that mother did. Her reactions to these differing analyses of events and situations initially caught us both off guard. We expected her to commend us for thinking through the information on our own and, while she might disagree with our conclusions, she would support us, nonetheless.

But that's not how it generally played out at all. In my mother's distorted worldview, she was always right and, if we came to different conclusions, she would browbeat us for the very thing she had worked so hard to instill in us -- independent thinking.

In retrospect, I now understand that my mother's real aim was to teach her boys to think like her! She wanted little robots who would bow and pay homage to mommy dearest. But in teaching us to think independently, she had opened a Pandora's Box and, once she privately realized the error in her strategy, it was too late to shut the lid.