The urge to rebel isn’t in everyone, I’ve observed.

Some people are born passive, others pacified or simply willing to follow. Others, still, come down that birth canal preconditioned as goddamn princes or princesses, perfectly made for the world, without need to question or rebel. You’ve seen them: graceful, at ease, accepted—they gleam in their calm, don’t they? These naturally potent spirits can afford their benevolence, having enviably clear instincts about themselves and their surroundings. With this self-certainty comes power, and with power, fortunes and very real social classes that divide us as people.

The rest of us, the lowborn, have to earn our salt, to do the work and suffering of discovering how we are to survive in the prison of the flesh. Writhing and scrabbling about, there is no obvious or defined path. Most look outward for the answers, clinging to divine prophecies to quell the dread. Some seek quick obliteration in drugs and sex; some are lost to the ambiguities of art, some complete nihilism. At the heart of it all is a quest toward purpose, fulfillment, and meaning.

I have found myself searching for that meaning, and discovered it in rebellion. It’s the spirit this brand was founded in: rebelling against what trivializes or dismisses the unorthodox and eccentric. I therefore resist staying quiet and keeping my commentary to myself. I publicly mock the feeble “niceness” of my generation, denounce modernist dogma of absolutes and facts, and am deeply suspicious of this hyper-social era that’s mission seems to be overthrowing introversion and converting everyone into evermore babbling, vapid transparencies. I want to expose and smash all these unspoken limitations. It’s precisely why I find stock photography, the culture industry, and the imperialism of televised stereotypes all so revolting and insufferable.

So I rebel in order to carry on a tradition of self-invention, uphold liberty, and demand a larger gamut of what a person can be. Rebellion keeps me alive, and at its best it’s an act of creativity, the rebirthing of spirit, the trying of conviction in an age of the flighty and tenuous. That injunction to refuse to follow common experience, but instead to follow intuition, to invoke wonder and imagination that continually shifts the surfaces, resisting an otherwise rigid world of endless work and waste—now that is my idea of meaning, that is my fulfillment, and that is all the purpose I require.

Tags: FRAKTURE, opinion, rebellion

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 30th, 2011 at 3:31 pm and is filed under opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.