On Negotiating with Authority

Over the years, I have come to suspect that one of adulthood’s lesser understood initiations is learning how to agree and disagree with one’s parents in proper measure. It sounds simple, even banal, but the actual attainment of this equilibrium is anything but. In one’s twenties, such balance rarely arrives through deliberate introspection. More often, we are propelled into it by experience: a sudden betrayal, a financial collapse, a brush with mortality. These eruptions of life have a levelling effect, sweeping aside the insistence of youthful certainties. Voluntary maturation, by contrast, is slow and stubbornly resistant. And nothing guarantees its appearance in one’s thirties or forties either. Maturity is less an achievement than a diminishing appetite: for absolutes, for vindication, and for moral spectacle.

The passage into moral adulthood does not obey developmental timetables. Aristotle called virtue a hexis: a practiced disposition, not a milestone. To reach it requires a sustained labour of self-scrutiny, a willingness to confront one’s own grandiosity, and, perhaps most difficult,  the abandonment of comforting narratives about oneself. The human mind is exceptionally skilled at constructing alibis for oneself and accusations for others. Outgrowing these reflexes is the real work. What we call “growing up” is often less a forward march than a renegotiation of authority—who is allowed to command us, who we permit ourselves to command, and under what conditions either authority dissolves.

Parents are often the first authorities we encounter, and therefore the first upon whom we rehearse the deeper question of how authority itself should be met. In adolescence and the early twenties, rebellion often feels like a moral duty to oneself. We resist the state, the social order, received norms, parental injunctions, even God, if we grew up with one. Developmental psychologists have catalogued this stage with clinical neatness, but literature captures it better: think of Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov railing against the cosmos, or Camus’s Meursault refusing the priest in his cell. The young believe, often sincerely, that their defiance is a form of authenticity. And in many ways it is. The elder generation, stiffened by habits and responsibilities, looks upon this turbulence with a mixture of amusement and irritation, but the stage is indispensable. One must learn to say “no” before one can say anything else with conviction.

But rebellion has its own pathology. If one remains arrested in this stage of development, one’s identity formation is still mostly reaction instead of agency. Rebellion, in this sense, is not yet freedom but a transitional dependence: one still needs an adversary in order to know who one is. Nietzsche warned that those who fight monsters risk becoming the very thing they resist; equally, those who define themselves only by resistance risk becoming mere mirrors. A rule-breaker may be celebrated by peers, may congratulate himself on his little victories, but he has not yet crossed the more demanding threshold of becoming a rule-maker. Among the intellectually inclined, this transition is especially fraught: eloquence can masquerade as truth, and articulate theories can seduce us into believing that an idea is sound simply because we have expressed it well. Youth is measured by potential, and intelligence seems like destiny. But adulthood dispels this illusion quickly: the world is full of clever people who never move beyond latent potential and become custodians of unspent gifts, and of seemingly ordinary people whose actions leave a deeper impact.

A provisional rule of thumb for those in their twenties might be this: assume, at first, that everything you have been taught — about morality, behaviour, duty, selfhood — is wrong. It is a productive kind of skepticism. But like all radical methods, it is prone to overreach. Creation eventually requires one to find common ground with the world. The idealisms of youth, whether utopian or cynical, must be taken into the field, tested against the stubbornness of events, and either kept or abandoned. Every generation rediscovers, with fresh confidence, errors that have already been made intelligible by the generations before it.

How does one know which ideas are worth keeping? One unglamorous but reliable test is to look at how the people one most trusts actually live. In my early twenties, for instance, I held fast to the belief that one must never share one’s burdens, that true independence meant never asking for help, even from family. It sounded noble in my own head, and as private dogmas often do, it had all the hallmarks of youthful vanity: articulate, dramatic, self-flattering. But in practice it failed every test. No one I admired lived by this principle. My parents confided in one another and in their siblings; my relatives exchanged problems as readily as they exchanged recipes or stories. The shared load did not weaken them; it fortified them. Over time, I realised that independence is not the antonym of dependence; interdependence is. Strength, paradoxically, expands when it is distributed. It took years to loosen my grip on my private theory, and longer still to acknowledge that I was stronger within a web of mutual care than outside it. What presents itself as a private moral struggle is usually a compressed version of a universal one, played out within the small theatre of the family. It was then that I learned to agree with my parents. Every life requires some alignment with the world. 

But the opposite extreme is equally dangerous. Some young people never rebel at all. They worship authority, especially parental authority, and mistake obedience for virtue. Their submission is often rewarded by authority figures, often praised as humility, but more often it is simply a reluctance to think. Parents placed on pedestals cannot be truly respected or truly loved; they can only be admired helplessly, or feared. True respect is possible only when they descend from these altars and become visible as what they have always been — flawed, well-intentioned creatures navigating the world with the same uncertainties as everyone else.

Ironically, those who never learn to disagree with their parents are often the least capable of caring for them in old age. To care for the elderly requires firmness, boundaries, decisions that may conflict with their wishes. It requires a gentle authority that only grows out of having wrestled with, and eventually differentiated oneself from, the very people one now protects. A child who has never questioned his parents will be unable to assume responsibility for them when circumstances demand it. 

The task of growing up is not won by rebellion, nor secured by obedience, but involves learning how much of each a situation can bear without collapsing into cruelty or inertia. Crisis has a way of sorting character with brutal efficiency, revealing not what people believe but what they are able to do for others when belief becomes irrelevant. Life, when it turns severe, as it always does, reveals a hard truth: there are two kinds of people you do not want beside you in a crisis, the useless and the selfish. Those who never learned to disagree with their parents often become the former, paralysed by deference and unable to act without permission. Those who never learned to agree with their parents too often become the latter, skilled in defiance but barren of loyalty. Adulthood is forged in the narrower, lonelier passage between these extremes. This territory is where one learns when to stand apart and when to stand with. It is here, in ordinary moments rather than grand dramas of liberation or obedience, that character is finally shaped, imperfectly, and for keeps.

Image Source: Shingeki no Kyojin (2013-2023)