Breaking every rule your parents gave you still lets them write the rules.
Most of us picture freedom on a line. At one end stands the conformist, who does what is expected; at the other stands the rebel, who refuses. The further you move from convention, the freer you are, and anyone not fighting the system is a sheep. On that picture, the only question about a person is which side of the line they are on and how far.
Anthony De Mello tells a story that does not fit on the line:
Someone tapped Jesus on the shoulder and asked, “Which side are you rooting for, my good man?” “Me?” replied Jesus, all excited, “I’m not rooting for either side. I’m just enjoying the game.” The questioner turned to his neighbour and sneered, “Hmm, an atheist.” — Anthony De Mello, The Song of the Bird
The questioner can understand allegiance, and he can understand its opposite. What he cannot understand is someone who is fully engaged with the game and not rooting for anyone, so he files that person under unbelief. David Chapman’s framework of three stances toward social order, drawn from Tibetan Buddhism, is an attempt to describe what the questioner cannot see. The respectable person conforms. The rebel defies. The free person sees social order clearly, as a resource, a game, a sometimes-useful fiction, and engages with it on their own terms without being captured by it. The claim worth testing is that most people mistake the second stance for the third, and that the mistake comes from the line itself.
Respectability and rebellion
The respectable person sees structure as a scaffold for noble qualities, and is partly right: order does have value. Its appeal is that it is safe. The cost is that they must deny the arbitrariness of the order they uphold. They cannot afford to notice that a different town, century, or family would have handed them different rules with the same air of necessity, because their identity is load-bearing on the structure. Remove it and they collapse. Respectability’s suffering is complicity: it hands moral responsibility to convention and goes along with oppression because the oppression is part of the order.
The rebel recognizes what the respectable person cannot: the social order is arbitrary and restrictive. The insight is real, and it is where most people get stuck, because it arrives packaged with a stance that looks like freedom. Rebellion’s appeal is that it is sexy. Its error is structural: they define themselves in opposition, knowing what they are against but not what they are for. In Nietzsche’s terms this is slave morality in its romantic form: resentment aestheticized into art and attitude, but still resentment, and still reactive.
Go back to the questioner in De Mello’s story. The rebel would answer him by rooting loudly for the other team, which is exactly the kind of answer the questioner understands. The rebel is a finite player who has switched sides. He still needs the game: he needs the authority to push against, needs the system to be oppressive, needs an audience to recognize his defiance. Without the thing they oppose, they have no identity at all. That is why revolutions so often produce new tyrannies: when the opposition falls, the self has nothing left to organize around except a new enemy.
Freedom: the order taken as a game
The free person, in Chapman’s description, values social order as a resource but satirizes it as an impediment. They see social imperatives clearly enough to choose which ones to honor, which is different from having stopped caring. The stance feels light.
Now the De Mello story makes sense. Jesus is at the game, excited, paying attention. He is not detached. He is simply not rooting, and to someone who cannot conceive of engagement without allegiance, that is indistinguishable from atheism. Tibetan Buddhism calls this quality kadag, primordial purity: a lightness that comes from seeing things as they are rather than as you need them to be. The best English gloss is engaged clarity, the capacity to take social life seriously as a game without confusing the game for reality.
Each immature stance contains a real intelligence that freedom keeps. Respectability is right that order has value; rebellion is right that order is arbitrary. Freedom is not the deletion of the first two. It is their intelligent aspects released from their compulsions. Respectability’s intelligence survives as stewardship, rebellion’s as courage and a willingness to break stale forms.
Freedom is also harder than either alternative, because it hands you no script to follow or invert. And it has its own failure mode, which Chapman does not hide: the free person can underweight urgent social imperatives and look unserious to people still inside the game. Sometimes a side genuinely needs to be taken. The antidote is a working question rather than a pose: “What is actually needed here, and what role can I play without becoming it?”
Off the line
Most people never choose between the first two stances; they oscillate. They are respectable at work and rebellious on weekends, conformist with family and defiant with friends. The oscillation feels like range, but it is a pendulum, and each swing is still governed by the same axis. Swinging harder toward defiance gets you no closer to freedom, because freedom was never at the far end of the swing.
That is what the opening picture got wrong. It placed freedom at the rebel’s end of the line, when both respectability and rebellion are captured by the social order, one by allegiance and the other by opposition. Freedom is not a position on the spectrum between conformity and defiance. It is the capacity to step off the spectrum entirely: to see the game, enjoy the game, and not mistake the game for who you are.
The questioner in De Mello’s story is the line speaking. He needs every spectator to be a fan or an enemy, and when he meets someone who is neither, he reaches for the nearest insult the line provides. The free person can hear the sneer, find it a little funny, and go back to watching the game.
References:
- David Chapman, on the three stances toward social order (Tibetan Buddhist framework)