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simply equating a tendency to resist authority with immaturity is the equivalent of equating more skilled and wholesale submission to authority for its own sake with maturity. both are ridiculous.
what does break down over time, i found, is the frame you may drag from being a kid that may prompt you to view all authority as arbitrary----because from a kids viewpoint, it is. with that tends to go the assumption--which is in itself just as arbitrary as what you react against--that somehow you are better (what does that even mean?) than the the agents of Authority.
authority begins to break up as a category---into political matters, into types of hierarchy and relations to hierachy---responses to it change, modes of opposition change. if you shift into modes of political opposition, you may find yourself using philosophy as a way of posing basic questions---in which case you are trying to outline systematic critiques---which you would hope logicaly, compelling, fitting data with an interpretive frame and making arguments as to adequacy and implications--if you go this route, then the residual knee-jek resistance to authority that you may hang onto becomes itself a real problem because it blinds you to your own motives and--worse--to ways in which those motives get written into your arguments.
when i was younger, motivations were not problematic in that they seemed tocome with being in the world---now motivations are a problem that i have to try to be aware of and work my way through.
examples: one place where my attitude when was younger was quite close to yours, jinnkai, was on the question of religion. particularly catholicism--later christianity in general---i dont know when a change occurred that enabled me to no longer feel like what i did not believe was nonetheless my problem and begin to take a more distanced view of it--i tend now to see it as just another form of social control shaped by a particular register of signifier which is problematic if it gets mapped onto other areas--particularly politics--which is one of the reasons i find contemporary conservative ideology to be a dangerous thing. being trapped in reversal of the logic you encounter early in life causes you to waste much energy railing against your own emotional history even as you think you are railing against an institution. it is hard to sort this out. it takes time---i wish sometimes i had figured out something less banal to tell folk, particularly my students--about that, but i havent.
on the other hand, with music i went through a longphase during which i simply rejected everything about existing models for making music--then i found what i took to be a countermodel in free jazz, so without realizing it i turned myself into a bad copy of cecil taylor for a long time--gradually, i worked my way out from under that and at some point later found that i no longer cared what anyone told me about how things should or should not happen in music--but also that i could interact with all kinds of stuff that others were doing and had done, take what interested me and use it, not bother with the rest of it. this extended to relations to very highly controlled types of compostion, like serial music, which i like the sound of but am not interested in making according to the rules of the game. i guess that a question of feeling authorized to have and maintain a particular relation to music underpins that. but i have gone my own way with it for 30 years now. past a certian point, questions of authority as they come to bear on things that matter to you may drop away--authority looses its power, simply reduces to quirks of speech in folk who say things about how you should be or what you should do that are irrelevant.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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