Years ago, while driving at about 70 miles an hour with some buddies up the southern State parkway on Long Island going to Coney island to have ” a real good time,” we pulled up next to a car filled with other young guys obviously out to have a good time, drinking and smoking. It occurred to me that I wanted a cigarette ( I smoked when I was young and cool ) and the way to get it was to lean way out of the convertible car we are driving in at 70 mph….like to lean four or five feet outside the window…with just my knees inside the car ….and motion to one of their guys in their back seat to offer me a cigarette.
Being teenagers, we entitled ourselves to be impulsive, unthinking, and one slip of an elbow away from horrific. He proceeded to stretch h i s body three or four feet out the window of his car while I did the same in my car and with 70 miles an hour timing and steering the cars 2-3 feet away in our lanes …..he gave me a cigarette and as I recall, a light…. not the actual light …some matches.
That behavior might be considered unthinking, impulsive and close to horrific….and was very much in my life. As teenage guys ‘out for a hoot,’ we considered that it was just part of a day’s work…. we went to Coney island tooting our horns in celebration.
Like we got away with something. Lucky us.
Being impulsive, unthinking, and potentially horrific was all in a day’s work for our prideful adolescent manhood.
We ‘guys’ had already begun to absorb a culture that prized bravado impulse even recklessness… What one might call today: defiance.
It is very easy in the United States of America to confuse independence with defiance.
They’re not the same thing.
Consider: Defiance = Independence + f*** you.
This phenomenon of defiance is no small once-in-a-while thing with WE Americans.
Many of us are racing down the road, fast and loud, flirting over and over again with danger…..confusing independence with defiance, perhaps because our American Independence was gained through our defiance with our Revolutionary War. Maybe independence …..of thought, of action….. and defiance are simply not the same thing; maybe they are quite distinct.
Whatever defiance is or isn’t, it ain’t just “out there” in the world, separate and apart from us, from who we are, how we think and how we act. At one time or another, defiance can be a necessary and useful attitude or approach such as with indifferent or slow bureaucracies or with people around us who always seem to be saying “no” or “you can’t do that!” In the face of all kinds of daily obstacles, defiance can seem as American as apple pie.
Looking at defiance as merely “out there,” as somebody else’s ‘problem,’ may actually trap us in it.
So what ?
There is a notion, a theory, a view that I have found has held me in good stead, guided me reliably, and called me to account for being bigger as a man and as a person.
And that is: nothing, absolutely nothing, shows up in the space of my life that is not in some way reflective of who I am, and who I am being, thinking and acting. The world feeds back to me what I put out to that world. Even at the level of thought, what goes around, comes around.
Meaning what? That what happens in my life reflects back to me, plays back to me, mirrors back to me, who I am being in some way, in some measure, in every situation that I’m in or even around. Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher, called this phenomenon of life being reflected back to us “being a clearing for”. i.e., there are ways that I am being habitually that seem to invite certain kinds of reactions from others. Simplistically, if I am being nasty with someone, that usually invites a less-than-warm response from them back to me. I am “a clearing for” what I put out into the world and what the world reflects back to me. Goes around, comes around. Though it can look like I have nothing to do with what’s happening “out there” in the world, apparently separate and apart from me, maybe nothing happens “out there” in the world that does not reflect back to me some part of me.
And it is clear that when I’m willing to examine what goes on “out there,” ” in the world out there,” as expressing, reflecting back to me some part of me, some aspect of who I am, that I discover myself and what I actually, honestly think and do, and what I am actually committed to or could be committed to vs. merely what I immediately, automatically and unthinkingly react to. By considering how the world always reflects back to me some aspect that is me, I remain connected to and responsible with that world as me, as mine. .
Example: when I see someone do something that I consider nasty or vicious or what I call evil, I get to now look in m y o w n l i f e and see where in my own life that behavior might be, might exist, be acted out or tolerated……..
….a thought, word or deed…. and I then consider that what I see in the world exists / lives also somewhere in my life, not just “out there” separate and apart from me, or beneath me, from where I am, as if what is nasty or mean has nothing to do with my life or to teach me about my life….. I then naturally become responsible for the world as my world.
If I see or learn about a person or group “out there” who does something that is unthinking, impulsive or even horrific, I find it useful to look in the space of my own life as to where I may have been unthinking, impulsive and if not actually horrific, potentially horrific. I am IN the world, not removed and separate, apart, from the world. It is mine.
I ask myself: Where in my own life am I putting up with, tolerating, or doing, (and thereby feeding) behaviors “out there” that I say I do not support or that are damaging ? Let’s look at a behavior we might call “defiance.” Where is it useful, where is it not useful or even essential ?
Like our behavior that night on the Southern State parkway. Useful? Essential? Or simply, automatic, un-thinking, and reckless ?
While defiance seems to be key to the American character, the F*** You in it can cloud us from confronting its costs, of getting straight with ourselves on what behaviors may not work at all. Cloud is the right word. If we look from the perspective of neuroscience, we can see that what activates our F*** You is our fast-firing reptile brain, our amygdalas, which fire in 10 milliseconds (!) when we feel threatened…… which is any situation where we feel, see or hear a perceived threat to our physical bodies OR way more often, to our egos, our identities, our points of view, our engrained habits and preferences, etc. Anything … any idea, memory, opinion, relationship, thing, object … whatever we consider ourselves to be, to do or to have, that to which we feel deeply identified, or wedded, or attached….constitutes what we call our identity or our ego. Whenever our identities are perceived to be threatened, then our amygdalas throw us into SURVIVAL ALERT: FIGHT, FLIGHT, FREEZE !!
Given the world very often does not agree with us, and often seems to threaten, undermine or attack our preciously and strongly held beliefs, our personal truths, conclusions and generalizations, our amygdala fires quite often each and every day. Our frontal cortex, where our critical, reflective and creative thinking happens, takes 10 times as long to fire as the amygdala (110 milliseconds). And the firing of our amygdalas literally activates a neurochemical cloud that suppresses the cortex from functionating effectively. The amygdala does N O T want you to stop and think. Why? Because our amygdalas, our prehistoric reptile brains that we still carry around in our brains, in 2023, were designed to yell: WAKE THE F*** UP….MOVE NOW…YOU ARE UNDER ATTACK, ABOUT TO BE EATEN. In other words, the amygdala wants action not reflective thought. That said, if I do not learn to practice recognizing and interrupting this AMYGDALA HIJACK, in everyday life, I will find myself stressed out and in fight mode, each day, many times a day. It does not have to be this way.
Donald Trump makes his life out of pressing buttons, specifically, the buttons that trigger amygdala hijacks. An amygdala hijack is a highly emotional state that puts all of us into a state of alert and threat. It keeps people in an aroused state of righteous alarm, stress and threat and was played out perfectly with denying and undermining the election ( an illegal act) as in the January 6 insurrection. He played the crowd like an orchestra conductor and what he fomented came perfectly to pass, leaving many of his ‘played’ followers later…upon reflection………regretting their jail sentences. To actually think that an armed insurrection and direct attack on the Capital, and our leaders, directly and unequivocally fomented by his taunting as our one time President, where armed crowds killed police and people and threatened the very lives of legitimate leaders like Pence and Pelosi, is astounding. He played the buttons, the amygdalas, the reptile brains, of his vigilantes, and like clockwork, they reacted without thinking. The costs are now obvious to all people who can think, reflectively, not merely reactively.
Perhaps, just perhaps, Donald Trump embodies, relishes, and practices defiance as his success strategy, his winning formula, for life; perhaps many of us do. Perhaps though, with this man, he does not call upon defiance once in a while when one must do so; rather, he lives and breathes defiance at all times……….24/7…… (and at a l l c o s t s, including his re-election).
I am intimate with defiance. I lived defiance for the better part of ten years in the 1970s. After a successful career as a young man up through college…. being some mix of a scholar, athlete, and leader …. it got clear to me that while the Vietnam war was being fought by honorable and courageous men, it was being led and managed by men who were not up to the job. Those men who led it were, I assert, off-target and seemingly incapable of correction no matter how early, how often, and how loud the feedback.
Any leader or system that ignores feedback is headed towards failure. The killer cost of being defiant is that it blocks, destroys, listening for feedback from others, and thereby loses key data and perspectives to continually correct performance as all great performers do.
One might ask Russia (particularly when it was the fully Communist Soviet Union) about feedback loops and the incredible slowness of its centrally planned economy to adjust to, correct to, true up to, fast-breaking human events, including innovations in agriculture and consumer goods that markets pull for. It led to the Soviet Union to becoming the first empire to ever voluntarily dismantle itself.
Ken Blanchard, the author of The One Minute Manager series, once said: “feedback is the breakfast of champions.”
Said from the darker underside of that idea, without feedback, there is death. Feedback literally keeps us alive; it allows us to grow.
A leader who is disinterested in or impervious to or against feedback… And such may be the case with the President of defiance, Donald Trump…may, in fact, get in the deep doo doo of his own making. Might it be the case that habitual reliance on defiance can and will only lead downward… simply because such habitual reliance has no space for critical and timely correction, for truing up, for discovering anything he ” doesn’t already know”?
One might notice how entangled Donald seems to get when his first impulses are proven to be off-target …even massively off target….such that they just might be with COVID-19, with responding to black lives matter, with the international community, with the overwhelming science of climate change, with the choosing of his various “teams” that have their own revolving door, most of whom come to criticize Trump’s blind spots, with the thousands of questionable statements which just might be prompted in part by his massive unwillingness to learn and correct ….ever.
Donald Trump must be “right” at all costs. He will ‘play’ (manipulate) anyone in service of that need he has to be both defiant and “right.” While this tendency is universally human, and sharply marked throughout our adversarial political system, “THE DONALD!” takes it to a level not seen since McCarthy.
Defiance is quite something. We all have it in some way. I do for sure.
In the 1970s I walked out on a so-called pedigree background, that had prepared me to be well off and conventionally successful as a lawyer or corporate businessman, into a decade of defiance. I chose to live in a housing project while with the National Teacher Corps ( a housing project that I did not realize was known locally for its gunfire), learned to work with my own hands rather than my ‘intellect’ (which intelligence seemed meaningless at that time) while building a farm in the ” live free or die” state of New Hampshire, worked as one of two men responsible for the mental health and drug treatment of 476 men (who had acted out while in Vietnam) in the Portsmouth, New Hampshire Naval Disciplinary Command, then went to law school and defiantly re-wrote the law for my finals which got me escorted off the campus of U. Maine law school, married way too prematurely, arrogantly and defiantly to a fine woman who I was not at all prepared for, and which marriage we undid in one year. …then wandered the streets of Cambridge, Mass. for several months as a kind of lost poet…defiantly…. while working on the graveyard shift of a mental health hospital……where I also got fired. Defiantly. Defiantly. Defiantly. In other words, my defiance…my ‘f you’ to the world…. was costing me big time as a young man.
Defiance is kind of sexy, dramatic, alluring, seductive and fun. It can seem fun to say “f. you” to the way things are …especially to authority and to the seeming pettiness of almost any rule. Yet when one confuses over time genuine independence of thought and action with defiance there’s trouble in Dodge City.
Defiance = Independence + f. you .
Soooo….in confronting Donald Trump, I have to confront the Donald Trump in myself. Specifically, my love affair with defiance and the pain and cost of that love affair.
I can see that I was, and part of me still is, Donald Trump…walking talking breathing defiance.
I understand his and his followers’ love affair with defiance. I have lived it.
Most of us have been touched by its allure.
I can also understand the pain and cost of having my foot nailed to the floor called “f. you.”
One way out of defiance: Unlike the Donald, I was fortunate enough or something enough to engage myself with people in life who confronted me, effectively, with compassion, who redirected me to embrace, not just resist, life.. I moved from what the genius of my kind, patient, beautiful wife Rosa called me in 1976 ( ” you are all engine and no steering wheel ” ) to become more of a genuine partner to her, my daughter, and to 1000s of people.
I discovered friends as brothers like Dr. Michael Madden, a pioneer in healing defiant men; Angelo Valenti, my business partner of 35 years who tempered me and guided me; Ken Mandelbaum, a gem of a man, partner, leader, and true friend; and Mark Mauriello, who with inexhaustible patience counterpoints every certainty I think I have arrived at.
My own brother Rob and sister Diana never lost sight of me in the bob and weave of defiance. I became willing to be the “sorcerers’ apprentice”. …to apprentice my very life to powerful, very public men like Werner Erhard and Justin Sterling and Tony Robbins whose leadership got me out of defiance as a life stance and fully into empowering…inspiring and equipping others….as a life stand.
In short, my life transformed from an addiction called defiance to a commitment to powerful, sustainable leadership that it is today.
So I know Donald Trump. I was and I…. sometimes…. am Donald Trump. We all are, at times. We get it regarding who a human being can be.
And that said regarding the allure, the trap of defiance…the addictive trap that we all know and where the Donald may live his very life…. I suggest that there is now only one thing to do: time to practice, to practice moving through and past our reactive defaults to our reptile brains, to recognize and interrupt our amygdala hijacks and their cousin, f*** you defiance. Time to become effective with our reactions, to t h i n k reflectively and act wisely.
Let’s get on with it, people. It is time for all of us to move on from whatever love affairs we may have or have had with our own defiance…. to move now, to call for now, a sustainable, inclusive leadership that honors and appreciates diversity, that trues to integrity, to decency, and to effective caring while navigating a world that can be at time dangerous.
Maybe it is simply time to move on now from our love affair with defiance to being fully empowered and effective.
© Tony Smith
