Rational Irreverence

I’ve always had a tendency to test boundaries. When I just old enough to stand up and grab things, I apparently thought it would be a good idea to see what happened by pouring baby powder in front of a running fan. I observed this little scientific experiment from the confines of my crib, so this tendency began very early on for me.

Every toddler will play this game with their parents, just testing the limits of what they can get away with. By around age 5, the kids start to grasp a concept that there are some rules out there that exist for everyone’s benefit, and that it’s best to follow these rules, as a rule itself.

I certainly grasped this concept during my elementary school years, and while there was some misbehaving in general, there wasn’t the level of hormonal imbalance and general unease that made middle school more like a dystopian hellscape then elementary school could ever hope to be.

The pressure-cooker of middle school caused a lot of trauma, but pressure can also produce some good results. That’s what happened to me, anyway.

For one thing, the rules in middle school seemed… well, lame. Whenever I or a classmate would point out something that was wrong with the way the school administration was operating, other kids tended to agree. It didn’t really matter if it was a skater or a prep, or someone who felt stuck in the middle like me: if you were punching up, so to speak, you were someone to listen to.

This little undercurrent of resistance wasn’t there when I was in elementary school, or if it was there, I simply didn’t notice it. Maybe puberty incited more resistance.

Nowadays, I understand that rules matter a great deal to the way a system functions. I’ve been on the rule-making side more times than I care to count, having been a small business owner for like 25 years now and making the rules up as I went along. As a very quick side-note, this is how pretty much all rules come into existence.

Trust me when I say that I understand how important etiquette can be. However, rules can run amok sometimes. They can take on a life of their own, having unintended consequences that the folks making those rules simply didn’t consider… or else they didn’t view those consequences as particularly consequential—to them, anyway.

We were there to point these things out each and every time. This was a bit like testing the limitations of my crib, especially since we kids felt confined by these rules, just as a toddler was stuck in a crib.

There were restrictions about the things we were allowed to wear—rules that seemed completely arbitrary to us at the time, but which probably had some good intentions behind their origins. All we kids felt was the restriction, though.

I think the real lesson we took away from this more restrictive rule set was that we should figure out what we could get away with, and then do as much of that as we possibly could. It was fun to walk right up to that technical line of what we could get away with, especially when we felt some kind of moral imperative (read as: we thought a rule was stupid).

This sort of tendency to constantly challenge the prevailing order is one of two ways laws are changed here in the United States. Folks will do something that walks right up to that line of legality, like Rosa Parks insisting on riding at the front of the bus, or two people of the same sex getting married. Then, the court system changes a rule directly, provided it decides it’s unconstitutional.

The other way laws are changed is by legislation, when a majority in both chambers votes to change a law, and the President signs off on that new law. If it’s an amendment to the Constitution, you need a 2/3 majority in both chambers, and 3/4 of the states have to ratify the amendment.

This tendency to test boundaries we all have as toddlers is the same tendency that constantly challenges and improves the legal code in the US, and it’s the same process that changes things everywhere in the world. At the same time, there’s a systematic way to make this change happen: through the courts or through legislation.

I’ve come to think of this tendency as rational irreverence. The idea is to stay within a framework and not to break the entire system, but instead to invoke meaningful change from within. I didn’t really grasp the power of incremental, meaningful change over time until I was old enough to have lived for meaningful amounts of time.

Gandhi used rational irreverence when he used the court system and public opinion to make it more costly for the British Empire to remain in India. Monty Python used it when they poked fun directly at the BBC, the network airing them. Weird Al used it to make fun of all kinds of cultural trends.

Changing the world without burning it down might be a good description of how the term sounds to my ears nowadays. Rational irreverence means being selectively respectful and not being automatically impressed by institutions of power, but it doesn’t mean throwing out the baby with the bathwater and overthrowing a democratically elected government so that you can run things a little differently.

There are undoubtedly times when revolutionary change is called for. Sometimes you have to destroy the entire system and start over, like going bankrupt and starting a new business. Most of the time, though, it makes sense to probe the limitations and push for incremental but important change. Rational irreverence is one good tool we can use to get this done.