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The capacity to comply with abusive authority is humanity’s fatal flaw. Fortunately, within the human family there are anti-authoritarians—people comfortable questioning the legitimacy of authority and challenging and resisting its illegitimate forms. However, as Resisting Illegitimate Authority reveals, authoritarians attempt to marginalize anti-authoritarians, who are scorned, shunned, financially punished, psychopathologized, criminalized, and even assassinated.
Profiling a diverse group of U.S. anti-authoritarians—including Thomas Paine, Ralph Nader, Malcolm X, and Lenny Bruce—in order to glean useful lessons from their lives, Resisting Illegitmate Authority is the first self-help manual for anti-authoritarians. Discussing anti-authoritarian approaches to depression, relationships, and parenting, it provides political, spiritual, philosophical, and psychological tools to help those suffering violence and marginalization in a society whose most ardent cheerleaders for “freedom” are often its most obedient and docile citizens.
Resisting Illegitimate Authority is about bigotry, but not bigotry directed at race, religion, gender, or sexual preference. It is about bigotry directed at rebellious personalities and temperaments.
“For a reader, there is no greater reward than to come upon a startlingly original book, one that prompts you to think anew about important aspects of the American character, past and present. Such is Bruce Levine’s Resisting Illegitimate Authority. This is a book, written in wonderfully clear prose, that will stay with you, and one that you will eagerly recommend to others. The portraits of famous Americans, ranging from Thomas Paine to George Carlin, as seen through an “anti-authoritarian” lens, are particularly memorable and compelling.”
—Robert Whitaker, author of Anatomy of an Epidemic
“Bound by the shackles of convention, many of us have become fearful of the outsider, the dissident and the anti-authoritarian—anyone who refuses to be ruled and regulated.... Bruce E. Levine has written an electric book charting the mechanics—political, economic and psychological—of our self-confinement. Yet, Levine’s writing simmers with a kind of optimistic rage meant to prod and provoke us out of our paralytic compliance with faceless authority. Resisting Illegitimate Authority has arrived just at the moment when we need it’s daring call for a new kind of human liberation the most.”
—Jeffrey St. Clair, editor of CounterPunch and author of Bernie and the Sandernistas
Bruce E. Levine is a regular contributor to CounterPunch, Truthout, Z Magazine, AlterNet, Salon, and the Huffington Post. He is a practicing clinical psychologist often at odds with the mainstream of his profession, and he is on the editorial advisory board of the journal Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry and on the scientific advisory board of the National Center for Youth Law. A longtime activist in the mental health treatment reform movement, he is a member of the International Society for Ethical Psychology & Psychiatry. His books include Get Up, Stand Up; Surviving America's Depression Epidemic; and Commonsense Rebellion.
INTRODUCTION
PART ONE: AUTHORITARIANS AND ANTI-AUTHORITARIANS
1. Authorities—and My Path to Resisting Illegitimate Authority
2. The Compliant, the Noncompliant, and the Anti-Authoritarian
Defining Terms
The Percentage of Americans Who Resist Illegitimate Authority
The Authoritarian and Anti-Authoritarian “Personality” and Left-Right Politics
PART TWO: THE ASSAULT ON U.S. ANTI-AUTHORITARIANS
3. Great Contributions Do Not Prevent Marginalization
Thomas Paine, Ralph Nader, and Malcolm X
4. Criminalization of Anti-Authoritarians
Emma Goldman, Eugene Debs, and Edward Snowden
5.Genocide of an Anti-Authoritarian People: Native Americans
6. Psychiatric Assault and Marginalization: Not Just Frances Farmer
7. Schooling’s Assault on Young Anti-Authoritarians
PART THREE: TRAGEDY OR TRIUMPH
8. Lessons from Anti-Authoritarians Who Have Hurt Themselves, Others, or the Cause
Self-Destructive Anti-Authoritarians: Phil Ochs, Lenny Bruce, and Ida Lupino
Violent Anti-Authoritarians: Alexander Berkman, Leon Czolgosz, and Ted Kaczynski
9. Political, Spiritual, Philosophical, and Psychological Lenses for Anti-Authoritarians
Anarchism
Buddhism
The God of Spinoza and Einstein
The Enneagram
10. Lessons from Anti-Authoritarians Who’ve Helped Themselves, Others, and the Cause
Counterculture Beacons: Henry David Thoreau and Scott Nearing
Two Strike Hitters: Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Helen Keller
Modern Models: Jane Jacobs, Noam Chomsky, and George Carlin
11. We Don’t Need No Badges
Depression
Relationships
Mutual Aid
Parenting
CONCLUSION
REFERENCES
INDEX