When Dissent Becomes Conformity

Modern Western societies have a peculiar relationship with dissent.

We admire the person who questions. Schools teach critical thinking. Universities celebrate independent minds. Companies want employees who “challenge assumptions.” Liberal societies understand themselves as communities of autonomous individuals rather than obedient subjects.

The idea reaches back to the Enlightenment. Kant gave it its famous formulation: Sapere aude — have the courage to use your own understanding.

The word courage matters. Thinking for yourself becomes interesting precisely when doing so is uncomfortable. It is easy to tell someone to question authority in the abstract. It is considerably harder when the authority in question is your government, your employer, your profession, your university, your friends, or simply everybody whose respect you would rather keep.

There is a German word for courage that comes without such a price: Gratismut. Literally, something like “courage for free.” It describes the bravery of taking a supposedly courageous position when taking it costs you nothing. You challenge an authority everybody around you already dislikes or defend an opinion for which your own group will applaud you.

There may be nothing wrong with the position itself. The interesting question is why expressing it should count as courage.

There are, I think, two different problems here. The first concerns what becomes thinkable. The second concerns what becomes courageous.

Consider an ordinary workplace.

Management announces that it wants people who challenge established assumptions. An employee questions an old procedure and is praised for being innovative. Then he questions an assumption behind a new organisational reform and is told that he is resistant to change.

At first he may notice the contradiction. Eventually he probably does not need to. He has learned what the organisation means by constructive criticism. Certain questions belong to it; others do not.

Nothing has necessarily been censored. Nobody needs to threaten him. The institution has helped establish the categories through which behaviour is understood. One criticism is innovative, another obstructive. One question is constructive, another unprofessional.

This matters because the employee is not standing outside the organisation deciding which of his independently formed opinions he can safely express. The organisation participates in forming the environment in which those opinions arise. Some questions suggest themselves naturally. Others begin to look eccentric before they have even been seriously considered.

Something similar happens on a much larger scale.

Modern society consists of overlapping systems and institutions, each operating according to its own logic. Governments require implementable policies. Bureaucracies need administrable rules. Employers manage risk. Professional organisations establish standards. Universities distinguish serious scholarship from unserious scholarship. Media organisations develop conventions about credible information.

Luhmann is useful here because none of this requires a central designer. Systems observe and respond to other systems. Government guidance affects institutional policy; institutional policy affects legal assessments; legal assessments affect employers; professional standards influence journalism; journalism influences politics and public expectations. Each response becomes part of the environment to which somebody else responds.

The resulting order can be very real without anybody having planned it.

More importantly, these systems do not merely constrain choices after people have made them. They help constitute the environment in which choices become imaginable. They supply distinctions between responsible and irresponsible, expert and crank, serious and unserious.

A thought can therefore remain completely legal while barely presenting itself as a thought worth having.

This is the first problem with our celebration of independent thought: we may be free to choose among possibilities whose boundaries we did not choose.

I became particularly conscious of this during COVID.

What surprised me was not that many people followed government recommendations or accepted the prevailing scientific consensus. There were reasonable arguments for doing so. Independent thinking does not require disagreement with authority. Someone can examine a question independently and conclude that authority is right.

What affected me personally was that some of the people I had admired precisely because they had taught me to question authority seemed remarkably uninterested in questioning it when the issue became consequential.

These were not conventionally minded people from whom I had never expected rebellion. They were teachers and intellectual influences who had presented independence of mind almost as a moral obligation.

For years the message had been: Think for yourself.

What interested me was what happened when the range of respectable thought suddenly seemed to narrow.

But now return to the employee.

Something curious can happen once he has learned which questions count as legitimate. He can become very good at asking them. He may become known as the person who challenges assumptions. Management may praise his independence. His colleagues may admire his willingness to question established ways of doing things.

He can become a successful dissenter.

But he is dissenting inside a field whose boundaries the organisation has already helped establish.

Herbert Marcuse saw something related in One-Dimensional Man. Advanced societies do not necessarily have to eliminate opposition. They can absorb it. Radical criticism can become an academic discipline. Rebellion can become an identity. “Disruption” can become a corporate virtue. Institutions can even point to their dissenters as evidence of their openness.

This creates the possibility of institutionally approved rebellion.

The content of an opinion can sound radical while expressing it is socially conformist. A university professor may spend a career attacking traditional authority while receiving approval from virtually everyone whose judgment affects his career. A corporate employee may describe himself as a disruptor while challenging precisely those conventions management has already decided should be disrupted.

The rebel has not necessarily ceased to believe what he says. Nor does institutional approval make his argument wrong. It simply changes the meaning of calling his position courageous.

This is where the two mechanisms meet. A system can help establish the boundaries of reasonable dissent and then reward dissent within those boundaries. The first shapes the horizon of thought; the second shapes the social position of the thinker.

This is where Gratismut becomes particularly useful. A position can look rebellious when viewed against society as a whole while being entirely safe within the speaker's actual environment.

In some milieus, attacking government, corporations, religion or traditional institutions may be the lowest-risk position available. In another milieu, attacking those same things may carry serious consequences. Conversely, defending institutional continuity or an unfashionable authority may be utterly conventional in one room and surprisingly costly in another.

Courage has no fixed political content.

It is relational. You cannot determine the courage of a position simply by reading the position. You also need to know the social environment in which it was expressed.

Our treatment of historical dissenters makes both mechanisms particularly visible. Once history has decided that a dissenter was right, institutions absorb him. Schools teach him, universities celebrate him, politicians quote him. Yesterday's dangerous opinion becomes today's curriculum.

We can then identify ourselves with the rebel without sharing his risk. We rebel against yesterday's authority with today's authority standing behind us.

But something else has happened as well. Once the rebel enters the curriculum, he becomes part of the vocabulary through which the next generation learns to recognise rebellion. The institution has not merely made yesterday's dissent safe; it has helped establish what dissent looks like today. A once-dangerous challenge can become a model of respectable nonconformity.

That is Gratismut in almost perfect form, and it shows how the two mechanisms reinforce each other: systems help establish the boundaries of respectable thought, while social environments reward displays of independence within those boundaries.

A culture can sincerely celebrate dissent while becoming increasingly specific about what acceptable dissent looks like.

This makes Sapere aude more demanding than simply telling people to think for themselves.

It asks us to distinguish between two questions: Am I willing to defend a thought that carries a price? And was that thought genuinely available to me before I began defending it?

The answer cannot be automatic contrarianism. Believing the opposite of whatever authority says merely replaces one dependency with another. Independent thinking does not guarantee truth, and dissenters can be spectacularly wrong.

The point is simpler and more uncomfortable.

A rebellion can be socially obedient. An independent mind can operate inside categories it never chose. And the same opinion can be courageous in one room and Gratismut in the next.

The real question is not whether an opinion looks rebellious, but what it means to hold it where you stand.