“In order to disobey, one must have the courage to be alone, to err, and to sin. But courage is not enough…Only if a person…has emerged as a fully developed individual and has thus acquired the capacity to think and feel for himself, only then can he have the capacity to say ‘no’ to power, to disobey.”
The virtue of disobedience – really? Shouldn’t this read vice rather than virtue? Didn’t you grow up as I did thinking that the failure to obey was a vice and that obedience was a virtue? If psychoanalyst, philosopher, and author Erich Fromm ever believed that disobedience was a vice, he obviously had a change of mind and heart; the above quote makes it clear that he considers disobedience a sign that a person has reached a level of maturity that most do not.
Fromm considers a person disobedient not when she/he refuses to comply with an order, but when one is willing to be an outlier, to chart her or his own course in life independent of authority and convention, to be considered wrong rebellious, insubordinate, or disloyal. Fromm states that when we develop the capacity to think and feel for ourselves, we become able to stand up to powerful voices like those of family, religion, the corporation, and the larger society that may expect us to follow their lead even when doing so is at odds with the voice of our True Self. The ability to speak truth to power is indeed a virtue, a word from the Latin virtus meaning strength.
The word obedience also derives from the Latin, obedire means to listen. We are obedient in the most radical sense of the word when we listen to the voiceless voice within, and when we honor its dictates. This inner-wisdom may at times align us with outer expectations, but when it does not, when it urges us to walk a different path, that is when we find out whether we are strong enough to disobey.
Attuned to Soul 