WHy we defy!
The Defiance Manifesto
The concept of defiance dates as far back as the written record. It is a very human trait.
The English word comes to us from the Old French word “defier” - a word that meant the “renunciation of an allegiance or friendship.” The word came from our need to express the end of an agreement, and the start of something new.
The modern definition of “defiance” means “daring resistance to authority”; “bold disobedience”; “a willingness to fight”; and “open disregard.”
Now, of course, children can defy their parents, students can defy their teachers, and pets can defy their owners. In this manifesto, we’re describing *social* defiance of a higher order - defiance against the powers that be, against a government, against the authorities, against the elite.
One can argue that defiance has been and continues to be the critical progressive force for change in human history. There’s the present, and there’s the future, and defiance is what paves the way.
Defiance, at its core, is radical. It does not wish to preserve the status quo. Per the Old French definition, it means to break the arrangement of today. This type of defiance is not just a knee-jerk or one-time reaction, but a sustained philosophy aimed at creating a better world.
That’s why defiance isn’t just about revolution.
Too many revolutionaries seize power from a corrupt regime only to implement their own, sometimes worse, dictatorship. Fidel Castro, Mao Zedong, and Robert Mugabe are examples of “revolutionaries” who promised the world, brought down one dictator, only to set up their own tyranny.
No, defiance is something else - something progressive, something ultimately “good”. There is no perfect example of defiance, but to animate our thoughts, we can consider a few examples:
Cleisthenes, the ancient Greek creator of the idea of democracy: rule by the people
Copernicus and Galileo, who challenged the religious establishment to argue that the Earth was not the centre of the universe
Johannes Gutenberg, who invented the printing press and sparked the global mass democratisation of news and information
Martin Luther, who questioned the authoritarian leadership of the Catholic Church
Ada Lovelace, who defied social convention and the limits of technology to become the world’s first computer programmer
Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft, who inspired women around the world to break barriers with their world class writing and fiction
Samuel Morse, whose team created the telegram, enabling humans to shatter communications limitations and message each other across vast distances
Marie Curie, who defied patriarchy in science and medicine to found entirely new disciplines in a quest to help fight cancer
Simon Bolivar, who rose up against the Spanish empire in Latin America in the name of constitutionalism
Susan B. Anthony and Emmeline Pankhurst, who fought for the equality of all humans and helped win American and British women the right to vote
Anne Frank, who defied the Nazis by chronicling life under their occupation
Alan Turing, the iconic codebreaker and father of modern computing
Gandhi and Rosa Parks, who used civil disobedience to help break systems of imperialism and racism
Nelson Mandela, who ended apartheid in South Africa and brought democracy to his country after decades in political prison
Václav Havel, the hero of the Velvet Revolution, who peacefully defied Communism in Czechoslovakia and brought a more open society to a new democratic country
Tim Berners Lee, a leader of the scientific community who gave us the World Wide Web
Shirin Ebadi, the Nobel Prize-winning Iranian lawyer who stood up to the Ayatollahs
Ai Weiwei, who uses art to critique the world’s largest dictatorship in China
Malala Yousafzai, who risked her life and challenged religious fundamentalists in the pursuit of education
Satoshi Nakamoto, who created a new technology to end government control of money and financial censorship
These individuals span history and geography, but they all have defiance in common. They used a “daring resistance to authority,” a “bold disobedience,” “a willingness to fight,” and even “open disregard” to stand up to a flawed system and push for something new.
Tyranny, ignorance, colonialism, racism, censorship, patriarchy, technological barriers, and even death and disease - these evils were no match for the individuals listed above, who all fought with creativity and bravery for freedom in their own way.
Each one gave millions of other humans a tool or a way of thinking that could push the arc of history in a different and better direction.
But remember: the establishment hates defiance. They will fight you if you defy, because defiance is a threat to their monopoly on the best slice of life. Defiance is risky and will more often than not cost you your career, your friends, your family, and possibly your life.
And let’s not forget - defiance without a commitment for a better future is not defiance at all, but mere revolution. And too many revolutions end with something worse than what came before. Let’s not replace one corrupt ruler or institution with another - let’s break the wheel.
True defiance is the way forward.
We defy because it is, perhaps, the only way forward to a new and better world.
Alex Gladstein
Chief Strategy Officer of The Human Rights Foundation
