Tag Archives: Religion

Essays, Foreign Affairs, Military, Politics, Religion

ZENDEGI-E NORMAL

After the theocracy’s fall, the search for a normal life becomes Iran’s quietest revolution.

By Michael Cummins, Editor | October 16, 2025

This speculative essay, based on Karim Sadjadpour’s Foreign Affairs essay “The Autumn of the Ayatollahs,” transforms geopolitical forecast into human story. In the imagined autumn of the theocracy, when the last sermons fade into static, the search for zendegi normal—a normal life—becomes Iran’s most radical act.

“They said the revolution would bring light. I learned to live in the dark.”

The city now keeps time by outages. Twelve days of war, then the silence that follows artillery—a silence so dense it hums. Through that hum the old voice returns, drifting across Tehran’s cracked frequencies, a papery baritone shaped by oxygen tanks and memory. Victory, he rasps. Someone in the alley laughs—quietly, the way people laugh at superstition.

On a balcony, a scarf lifts and settles on a rusted railing. Its owner, Farah, twenty-three, hides her phone under a clay pot to muffle the state’s listening apps. Across the street, a mural once blazed Death to America. Now the paint flakes into harmless confetti. Beneath it, someone has stenciled two smaller words: zendegi normal.

She whispers them aloud, tasting the risk. Life, ordinary and dangerous, returning in fragments.

Her father, gone for a decade to Evin Prison, was a radio engineer. He used to say truth lived in the static between signals. Farah believed him. Now she edits protest footage in the dark—faces half-lit by streetlamps, each one a seed of defiance. “The regime is weakening day by day,” the exiled activist on BBC Persian had said. Farah memorized the phrase the way others memorize prayers.

Her mother, Pari, hears the whispering and sighs. “Hope is contraband,” she says, stirring lentils by candlelight. “They seize it at checkpoints.”

Pari had survived every iteration of promise. “They say ‘Death to America,’” she liked to remind her students in 1983, “but never ‘Long Live Iran.’” The slogans were always about enemies, never about home. She still irons her scarf when the power flickers back, as if straight lines could summon stability. When darkness returns, she tells stories the censors forgot to erase: a poet who hid verses in recipes, a philosopher who said tyranny and piety wear the same cloak.

Now, when Farah speaks of change—“The Ayatollah is dying; everything will shift”—Pari only smiles, thinly. “Everything changes,” she says, “so that everything can remain the same.”

Farah’s generation remembers only the waiting. They are fluent in VPNs, sarcasm, and workaround hope. Every blackout feels like rehearsal for something larger.

Across town, in a military café that smells of burnt sugar and strategy, General Nouri stirs his fourth espresso and writes three words on a napkin: The debt is settled. Dust lies thick on the portraits of the Supreme Leader. Nouri, once a devout Revolutionary Guard, has outlived his faith and most of his rivals.

He decides that tanks run on diesel, not divinity. “Revelation,” he mutters, “is bad logistics.” His aides propose slogans—National Dignity, Renewal, Stability—but he wants something purer: control without conviction. “For a nation that sees plots everywhere,” he tells them, “the only trust is force.”

When he finally appears on television, the uniform is gone, replaced by a tailored gray suit. He speaks not of God but of bread, fuel, electricity. The applause sounds cautious, like people applauding themselves for surviving long enough to listen.

Nouri does not wait for the clerics to sanction him; he simply bypasses them. His first decree dissolves the Assembly of Experts, calling the aging jurists “ineffective ballast.” It is theater—a slap at the theocracy’s façade. The next decree, an anticorruption campaign, is really a seizure of rival IRGC cartels’ assets, centralizing wealth under his inner circle. This is the new cynicism: a strongman substituting grievance-driven nationalism for revolutionary dogma. He creates the National Oversight Bureau—a polite successor to the intelligence services—charged not with uncovering American plots but with logging every official’s loyalty. The old Pahlavi pathology returns: the ruler who trusts no one, not even his own shadow. A new app appears on every phone—ostensibly for energy alerts—recording users’ locations and contacts. Order, he demonstrates, is simply organized suspicion.

Meanwhile Reza, the technocrat, learns that pragmatism can be treason. He studied in Paris and returned to design an energy grid that never materialized. Now the ministries call him useful and hand him the Normalization Plan.

“Stabilize the economy,” his superior says, “but make it look indigenous.” Reza smiles the way one smiles when irony is all that remains. At night he writes memos about tariffs but sketches a different dream in the margins: a library without checkpoints, a square with shade trees, a place where arguments happen in daylight.

At home the refrigerator groans like an old argument. His daughter asks if the new leader will let them watch Turkish dramas again. “Maybe,” he says. “If the Internet behaves.”

But the Normalization Plan is fiction. He is trying to build a modern economy in a swamp of sanctioned entities. When he opens ports to international shipping, the IRGC blocks them—its generals treat the docks as personal treasuries. They prefer smuggling profits to taxable trade. Reza’s spreadsheets show that lifting sanctions would inject billions into the formal economy; Nouri’s internal reports show that the generals would lose millions in black-market rents. Iran, he realizes, is not China; it is a rentier state addicted to scarcity. Every reformist since 1979 has been suffocated by those who prosper from isolation. His new energy-grid design—efficient, global—stalls when a single colonel controlling illicit oil exports refuses to sign the permit. Pragmatism, in this system, is a liability.

When the generator fails, darkness cuts mid-sentence. The air tastes metallic. “They promised to protect us,” Pari says, fumbling for candles. “Now we protect ourselves from their promises.”

“Fattahi says we can rebuild,” Farah answers. “A secular Iran, a democratic one.”
“Child, they buried those words with your father.”
“Then I’ll dig them out.”

Pari softens. “You think rebellion is new. I once wrote freedom on a classroom chalkboard. They called it graffiti.”

Farah notices, for the first time, the quiet defiance stitched into daily life. Pari still irons her scarf, a habit of survival, but Farah ties hers loosely, a small deliberate chaos. At the bakery, she sees other acts of color—an emerald coat, a pop song leaking from a car, a man selling forbidden books in daylight. A decade ago, girls lined up in schoolyards for hijab inspections; now a cluster of teenagers stands laughing, hair visible, shoulders touching in shared, unspoken defiance. The contradiction the feminist lawyer once described—“the situation of women shows all the contradictions of the revolution”—is playing out in the streets, private shame becoming public confidence.

Outside, the muezzin’s call overlaps with a chant that could be mourning or celebration. In Tehran, it is often both.

Power, Nouri decides, requires choreography. He replaces Friday prayers with “National Addresses.” The first begins with a confession: Faith divided us. Order will unite us. For a month, it works. Trucks deliver bread under camera lights; gratitude becomes policy. But soon the whispering returns: the old Ayatollah lives in hiding, dictating verses. Nouri knows the rumor is false—he planted it himself. Suspicion, he believes, is the purest form of control. Yet even he feels its poison. Each morning he finds the same note in the intelligence reports: The debt is settled. Is it loyalty—or indictment?

Spring creeps back through cracks in concrete. Vines climb the radio towers. In a basement, Farah’s father’s transmitter still hums, knobs smoothed by fear. “Tonight,” she whispers into the mic, “we speak of normal life.”

She reads messages from listeners: a woman in Mashhad thanking the blackout for showing her the stars; a taxi driver in Shiraz who has stopped chanting anything at all; a child asking if tomorrow the water will run. As the signal fades, Farah repeats the question like a prayer. Somewhere, a neighbor mistakes her voice for revelation and kneels toward the sound. The scarf on her balcony stirs in the dark.

The old voice never returns. Rumor fills the vacuum. Pari hangs laundry on the balcony; the scarf flutters beside her, now simply weather. Below, children chalk zendegi normal across the pavement and draw birds around the words—wings in white dust. A soldier passes, glances, and does nothing. She remembers writing freedom on that school chalkboard, the silence that followed, the summons to the principal’s office. Now no one erases the word. She turns up the radio just enough to catch Farah’s voice, low and steady: “Tonight, we speak of normal life.” In the distance, generators pulse like mechanical hearts.

Nouri, now called Marshal, prefers silence to titles. He spends mornings signing exemptions, evenings counting enemies. Each new name feels like ballast. He visits the shrine city he once scorned, hoping faith might offer cover. “You have replaced revelation with maintenance,” a cleric tells him.
“Yes,” Nouri replies, “and the lights stay on.”

That night the grid collapses across five provinces. From his balcony he watches darkness reclaim the skyline. Then, through the static, a woman’s voice—the same one—rises from a pirated frequency, speaking softly of ordinary life. He sets down his glass, almost reaches for the dial, then stops. The scarf lifts somewhere he cannot see.

Weeks later, Reza finds a memory stick in his mail slot—no note, only the symbol of a scarf folded into a bird. Inside: the civic network he once designed, perfected by unseen hands. In its code comments one line repeats—The debt is settled. He knows activation could mean death. He does it anyway.

Within hours, phones across Iran connect to a network that belongs to no one. People share recipes, poetry, bread prices—nothing overtly political, only life reasserting itself. Reza watches the loading bar crawl forward, each pixel a quiet defiance. He thinks of his grandfather, who told him every wire carries a prayer. In the next room, his daughter sleeps, her tablet tucked beneath her pillow. The servers hum. He imagines the sound traveling outward—through routers, walls, cities—until it reaches someone who had stopped believing in connection. For the first time in years, the signal clears.

Farah leans toward the microphone. “Tonight,” she says, “we speak of water, bread, and breath.” Messages flood in: a baker in Yazd who plays her signal during morning prep; a soldier’s mother who whispers her words to her son before he leaves for duty; a cleric’s niece who says the broadcast reminds her of lullabies. Farah closes her eyes. The scarf rises once more. She signs off with the whisper that has become ritual: Every revolution ends in a whisper—the sound of someone turning off the radio. Then she waits, not for applause, but for the hum.

By late October, Tehran smells of dust and pomegranates. Street vendors return, cautious but smiling. The murals are being repainted—not erased but joined—Death to America fading beside smaller, humbler words: Work. Light. Air. No one claims victory; they have learned better. The revolution, it turns out, did not collapse—it exhaled. The Ayatollah became rumor, the general a footnote, and the word that endured was the simplest one: zendegi. Life. Fragile, ordinary, persistent—like a radio signal crossing mountains.

The scarf lifts once more. The signal clears. And somewhere, faint but unmistakable, the hum returns.

“From every ruin, a song will rise.” — Forugh Farrokhzad

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Essays, Literature, Philosophy, Poetry, Religion

RELIGION, REIMAGINED

In the third-floor study of his home, in wartime Hartford, Wallace Stevens drafted his modernist poem and philosophical meditation “Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction“, as a secular creed—abstract, changing, and meant to give pleasure—to stand where a worn-out faith once stood.

Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea
Of this invention, this invented world,
The inconceivable idea of the sun.

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 6, 2025

He never learned to drive. For decades, Wallace Stevens walked the two miles from his home on Westerly Terrace to the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company on Asylum Avenue. The walk itself became a kind of poem: a solitary procession through the stoic, brick-lined streets of a New England city, the rhythm of meter embedding itself in the movement of his body. The crunch of gravel underfoot, the feel of cold air on his face—these were the metronome that set the cadence for his thoughts. He would arrive at the office with lines already formed, phrases taking shape in the quiet hum of his stride.

But what kind of poetry emerges from a man who spends his days pricing catastrophe? During office hours, Stevens turned to policies and claims, reducing calamity to columns of numbers. He knew the language of indemnity, the actuarial calm that measured and priced chaos. Yet outside, the world was burning in ways no policy could contain. The radio spoke of Warsaw reduced to rubble, of Coventry turned to ash. What was a deductible against Dresden? What was a premium against Auschwitz? The ledger comforted, but it lied.

And when the day ended, where did he go to reconcile the irreconcilable? At night, Stevens climbed the narrow staircase to the top floor of his house, entering a space that felt half withdrawn from Hartford itself, as though it belonged more to sky than to street. Down below, trolley bells rang, dogs barked, radios crackled with war bulletins. Up here, only the radiator ticked. The air smelled of paper, tobacco, and ink. On his desk lay a folder carried home that afternoon: typed pages, the ribbon-black letters crisp and uniform. His secretary had produced them that morning, slotting them into a manila folder marked Notes. They sat now in the lamplight, more mysterious than any insurance claim, more charged than any policy.

What could a poem do in 1942? Certainly not repair the world. Yet Stevens felt imagination had to answer catastrophe with something larger than despair. Eliot had turned to Anglican certainty in Four Quartets, weaving fragments into a tapestry of faith. Admirable, yes. But Stevens could not follow him. He could not put belief in a myth while knowing it to be a myth. What remained? Only candor. Only imagination itself.

He opened the folder. The Preface came first, a modest eight lines. He whispered them into the quiet, testing their balance. They were not a commandment but a confession. The “you” of those lines was no person but the project itself: the supreme fiction, imagination’s own power to refresh. “And for what, except for you, do I feel love?” The words startled him even now, black against white, plain as a typed invoice yet trembling with a kind of vulnerable devotion. They challenged every idol: money, power, even the “extremest book of the wisest man,” perhaps Plato, perhaps the Bible, dryly possessed and hidden away in the self. No, he thought, a truly lived truth could not be static. It was a “living changingness,” an “uncertain light” that could nonetheless offer “vivid transparence,” a kind of peace. Here, typed cleanly in a bureaucratic font, was his prayer for a godless age.

But how does one begin such a prayer? He turned the page and entered the first law. Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea. The command still startled him. The ephebe: always a novice, always beginning again. Yes, to begin meant stripping away what was inherited—cathedrals thick with guilt, Phoebus in his chariot, Protestant hymns murmured in childhood pews. They no longer held. The old scaffolds collapsed into dust. The voice told him: see the sun again with ignorant eyes. Not Phoebus, not god, not myth—only the sun, bare and difficult.

And what happens when even the sun loses its name? The section closed with the line that haunted him: Phoebus is dead, ephebe. But Phoebus was / A name for something that never could be named. He felt the candor of it. Nietzsche’s cry without Nietzsche’s frenzy. Not a madman in a square, but a quiet verdict written at a desk. The god dead, but the sun still burning. What died was not the light, but the comfort of a name.

Could metaphor survive the death of myth? Another page: It is the celestial ennui of apartments… The phrase made him smile. Ennui of apartments, the weariness of modern rooms, pressing us back toward origins. Yet the origins themselves could be poisonous. So poisonous are the ravishments of truth, so fatal to / The truth itself, the first idea becomes / The hermit in a poet’s metaphors. Truth seduced, then withdrew. Desire was never sated; it renewed itself endlessly, only to vanish again. Schopenhauer lurked here, his vision of the world gnawed by will. Yet where Schopenhauer had seen only despair, Stevens found material for candor. Truth had to retreat into metaphor, glimpsed and lost. Desire itself was not shame but rhythm, the cycle by which imagination endured.

And if truth could be rhythm, could nonsense be revelation? He read the third section slowly: The poem refreshes life so that we share, / For a moment, the first idea… There it was—the poem’s task. Not to console, not to preach, but to refresh. To make perception vivid again. Even nonsense could do it. At night an Arabian in my room, with his damned hoobla-hoobla-hoobla-how… He laughed aloud in the quiet. Nonsense syllables as a kind of truer candor, doves chanting, seas howling hoo. Life’s nonsense pierced us with strange relation. What if absurdity was not opposed to truth but its heartbeat? What if laughter was the sharpest candor of all?

But what if even our myths were secondhand? The fourth section sobered him: The first idea was not our own. Yes. Adam in Eden, Eve with her mirror of air—they had not created anything. They had only encountered what was already there. There was a muddy centre before we breathed. There was a myth before the myth began. He stared at those lines. How blunt they looked, typed like any memorandum, yet carrying the weight of cosmology. Existence preceded language. Clouds had been clouds long before anyone called them gods. We were mimics, not originators, adding our metaphors onto a world that was always other. The clouds were pedagogues, teachers by their very indifference. The air was not a mirror but a board on which we scribbled meanings. How hard it was to admit: the first idea was not ours, never ours.

And if we are not originators, what kind of hero can we be? He turned to the fifth section: The lion roars at the enraging desert… Heroic animals filled the page. Lion, elephant, bear—creatures asserting themselves against emptiness. But then came the turn, the line that caught him like a mirror: But you, ephebe, look from your attic window… Yes, the attic window was his own. Not desert roars but a man clutching his pillow, writhing with dumb violence, cowed by rooftops. The modern hero was not lion or elephant but the solitary human in his narrow room. Yet perhaps this was truer heroism: to lash lions, to teach bears, to turn raw force into candor. Heroism now belonged to ordinaries, to those who endured the attic’s silence.

And what does the eye see when it learns to unsee? He lingered over the sixth section: Not to be realized because not to be seen… The weather itself became abstraction. Franz Hals brushed in clouds, winds moving in strokes. It must be visible or invisible, / Invisible or visible or both: / A seeing and unseeing in the eye. He felt the paradox, the resonance of Zen: to see was also to unsee, to let go in order to glimpse. Truth flashed, vanished, reappeared. Forsythia yellow, northern blue—beauty glimmered, then was gone. Yes, he thought, Okakura Kakuzō was right: truth glimpsed was truer than truth claimed.

But could architecture hold what abstraction revealed? Truth happened not in argument but in rhythm, in breath, in the gait of a body moving. Perhaps there are moments of awakening… Yes, truth came not as achievement but as gift. A balance stumbled into, two people falling into love, a cock announcing absurd perfection. Philosophy as choreography. Doctrine as breath. The eighth section brought architecture: Can we compose a castle-fortress-home, / Even with the help of Viollet-le-Duc…? He thought of Gothic cathedrals restored to an imagined perfection, never as they had been, always as they might have been. That was his work too—not theology restored, but poetic structure remade. The first idea is an imagined thing. Even MacCullough, reading by the sea, might at last hear the waves say what language had always stammered. Logos was only language. And yet language could awaken, could suddenly ease into saying what it had labored to speak.

But what if language, once awakened, began to preach? In the ninth section he heard a warning: The romantic intoning, the declaimed clairvoyance… Apotheosis was a danger. Romantic grandeur could seduce but not sustain. He is and may be but oh! he is, he is… He smiled at the heat in that line even as he resisted its drift toward sanctity. The figure must remain human, a foundling of the infected past, bright and ordinary, precious for the touch that wakes him and the hum of thoughts evaded in the mind. Better to keep him close to candor than to crown him with vision. Give him no names. Dismiss him from your images. Let him be felt in the heart, not embalmed in the eye.

And what, at last, could stand in place of the gods? The tenth section steadied him: The major abstraction is the idea of man / and major man is its exponent. Not a divine figure, not a hero in bronze, but the ordinary walker at the edge of town, trousers sagging, coat worn thin. He could almost see him in Hartford’s dim streets. Cloudless the morning. It is he. The man / In that old coat, those sagging pantaloons… It was of him, he read again, “to make, to confect / The final elegance, not to console / Nor sanctify, but plainly to propound.” No incense, no altar—only candor. The poem would not save; it would say. And in saying plainly, it would give back a kind of dignity to the commonal, to the difficult visage of the everyday.

The attic grew darker. The lamp made a circle of light over the typed sheets. The radiator hissed steadily. From this high room, Stevens whispered the creed that would govern the work to come: It must be abstract. It must change. It must give pleasure. Three laws, enough for a new religion. Not revelation but ethic. Not theology but candor.

He stacked the pages neatly, slid them back into their folder. Tomorrow his secretary would type more, never guessing she was transcribing scripture for an age without gods. The notebook felt less like a book than a reliquary—a vessel for the sacred ordinary. He had reviewed the first law, It Must Be Abstract. Tomorrow—or another night—he would face the second: It Must Change. The world would move; the poem must move with it.

He closed the folder. The command still echoed, inexhaustible: Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea. And so he would. Again.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Essays, Ethics, Literature, Society, Theology

The Ethics of Defiance in Theology and Society

By Intellicurean, July 30, 2025

Before Satan became the personification of evil, he was something far more unsettling: a dissenter with conviction. In the hands of Joost van den Vondel and John Milton, rebellion is not born from malice, but from moral protest—a rebellion that echoes through every courtroom, newsroom, and protest line today.

Seventeenth-century Europe, still reeling from the Protestant Reformation, was a world in flux. Authority—both sacred and secular—was under siege. Amid this upheaval, a new literary preoccupation emerged: rebellion not as blasphemy or chaos, but as a solemn confrontation with power. At the heart of this reimagining stood the devil—not as a grotesque villain, but as a tragic figure struggling between duty and conscience.

“As old certainties fractured, a new literary fascination emerged with rebellion, not merely as sin, but as moral drama.”

In Vondel’s Lucifer (1654) and Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), Satan is no longer merely the adversary of God; he becomes a symbol of conscience in collision with authority. These works do not justify evil—they dramatize the terrifying complexity of moral defiance. Their protagonists, shaped by dignity and doubt, speak to an enduring question: when must we obey, and when must we resist?

Vondel’s Lucifer: Dignity, Doubt, and Divine Disobedience

In Vondel’s hands, Lucifer is not a grotesque demon but a noble figure, deeply shaken by God’s decree that angels must serve humankind. This new order, in Lucifer’s eyes, violates the harmony of divine justice. His poignant declaration, “To be the first prince in some lower court” (Act I, Line 291), is less a lust for domination than a refusal to surrender his sense of dignity.

Vondel crafts Lucifer in the tradition of Greek tragedy. The choral interludes frame Lucifer’s turmoil not as hubris, but as solemn introspection. He is a being torn by conscience, not corrupted by pride. The result is a rebellion driven by perceived injustice rather than innate evil.

The playwright’s own religious journey deepens the text. Raised a Mennonite, Vondel converted to Catholicism in a fiercely Calvinist Amsterdam. Lucifer becomes a veiled critique of predestination and theological rigidity. His angels ask: if obedience is compelled, where is moral agency? If one cannot dissent, can one truly be free?

Authorities saw the danger. The play was banned after two performances. In a city ruled by Reformed orthodoxy, the idea that angels could question God threatened more than doctrine—it threatened social order. And yet, Lucifer endured, carving out a space where rebellion could be dignified, tragic, even righteous.

The tragedy’s impact would echo beyond the stage. Vondel’s portrayal of divine disobedience challenged audiences to reconsider the theological justification for absolute obedience—whether to church, monarch, or moral dogma. In doing so, he planted seeds of spiritual and political skepticism that would continue to grow.

Milton’s Satan: Pride, Conscience, and the Fall from Grace

Milton’s Paradise Lost offers a cosmic canvas, but his Satan is deeply human. Once Heaven’s brightest, he falls not from chaos but conviction. His famed credo—“Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven” (Book I, Line 263)—isn’t evil incarnate. It is a cry of autonomy, however misguided.

Early in the epic, Satan is a revolutionary: eloquent, commanding, even admirable. Milton allows us to feel his magnetism. But this is not the end of the arc—it is the beginning of a descent. As the story unfolds, Satan’s rhetoric calcifies into self-justification. His pride distorts his cause. The rebel becomes the tyrant he once defied.

This descent mirrors Milton’s own disillusionment. A Puritan and supporter of the English Commonwealth, he witnessed Cromwell’s republic devolve into authoritarianism and the Restoration of the monarchy. As Orlando Reade writes in Paradise Lost: Mourned, A Revolution Betrayed (2024), Satan becomes Milton’s warning: even noble rebellion, untethered from humility, can collapse into tyranny.

“He speaks the language of liberty while sowing the seeds of despotism.”

Milton’s Satan reminds us that rebellion, while necessary, is fraught. Without self-awareness, the conscience that fuels it becomes its first casualty. The epic thus dramatizes the peril not only of blind obedience, but of unchecked moral certainty.

What begins as protest transforms into obsession. Satan’s journey reflects not merely theological defiance but psychological unraveling—a descent into solipsism where he can no longer distinguish principle from pride. In this, Milton reveals rebellion as both ethically urgent and personally perilous.

Earthly Echoes: Milgram, Nuremberg, and the Cost of Obedience

Centuries later, the drama of obedience and conscience reemerged in psychological experiments and legal tribunals.

In 1961, psychologist Stanley Milgram explored why ordinary people committed atrocities under Nazi regimes. Participants were asked to deliver what they believed were painful electric shocks to others, under the instruction of an authority figure. Disturbingly, 65% of subjects administered the maximum voltage.

Milgram’s chilling conclusion: cruelty isn’t always driven by hatred. Often, it requires only obedience.

“The most fundamental lesson of the Milgram experiment is that ordinary people… can become agents in a terrible destructive process.” — Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority (1974)

At Nuremberg, after World War II, Nazi defendants echoed the same plea: we were just following orders. But the tribunal rejected this. The Nuremberg Principles declared that moral responsibility is inalienable.

As the Leuven Transitional Justice Blog notes, the court affirmed: “Crimes are committed by individuals and not by abstract entities.” It was a modern echo of Vondel and Milton: blind obedience, even in lawful structures, cannot absolve the conscience.

The legal implications were far-reaching. Nuremberg reshaped international norms by asserting that conscience can override command, that legality must answer to morality. The echoes of this principle still resonate in debates over drone warfare, police brutality, and institutional accountability.

The Vietnam War: Protest as Moral Conscience

The 1960s anti-war movement was not simply a reaction to policy—it was a moral rebellion. As the U.S. escalated involvement in Vietnam, activists invoked not just pacifism, but ethical duty.

Martin Luther King Jr., in his 1967 speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” denounced the war as a betrayal of justice:

“A time comes when silence is betrayal.”

Draft resistance intensified. Muhammad Ali, who refused military service, famously declared:

“I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.”

His resistance cost him his title, nearly his freedom. But it transformed him into a global symbol of conscience. Groups like Vietnam Veterans Against the War made defiance visceral: returning soldiers hurled medals onto Capitol steps. Their message: moral clarity sometimes demands civil disobedience.

The protests revealed a generational rift in moral interpretation: patriotism was no longer obedience to state policy, but fidelity to justice. And in this redefinition, conscience took center stage.

Feminism and the Rebellion Against Patriarchy

While bombs fell abroad, another rebellion reshaped the domestic sphere: feminism. The second wave of the movement exposed the quiet tyranny of patriarchy—not imposed by decree, but by expectation.

In The Feminine Mystique (1963), Betty Friedan named the “problem that has no name”—the malaise of women trapped in suburban domesticity. Feminists challenged laws, institutions, and social norms that demanded obedience without voice.

“The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.” — Gloria Steinem, Revolution from Within (1992)

The 1968 protest at the Miss America pageant symbolized this revolt. Women discarded bras, girdles, and false eyelashes into a “freedom trash can.” It was not just performance, but a declaration: dignity begins with defiance.

Feminism insisted that the personal was political. Like Vondel’s angels or Milton’s Satan, women rebelled against a hierarchy they did not choose. Their cause was not vengeance, but liberation—for all.

Their defiance inspired legal changes—Title IX, Roe v. Wade, the Equal Pay Act—but its deeper legacy was ethical: asserting that justice begins in the private sphere. In this sense, feminism was not merely a social movement; it was a philosophical revolution.

Digital Conscience: Whistleblowers and the Age of Exposure

Today, rebellion occurs not just in literature or streets, but in data streams. Whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and Frances Haugen exposed hidden harms—from surveillance to algorithmic manipulation.

Their revelations cost them jobs, homes, and freedom. But they insisted on a higher allegiance: to truth.

“When governments or corporations violate rights, there is a moral imperative to speak out.” — Paraphrased from Snowden

These figures are not villains. They are modern Lucifers—flawed, exiled, but driven by conscience. They remind us: the battle between obedience and dissent now unfolds in code, policy, and metadata.

The stakes are high. In an era of artificial intelligence and digital surveillance, ethical responsibility has shifted from hierarchical commands to decentralized platforms. The architecture of control is invisible—yet rebellion remains deeply human.

Public Health and the Politics of Autonomy

The COVID-19 pandemic reframed the question anew: what does moral responsibility look like when authority demands compliance for the common good?

Mask mandates, vaccines, and quarantines triggered fierce debates. For some, compliance was compassion. For others, it was capitulation. The virus became a mirror, reflecting our deepest fears about trust, power, and autonomy.

What the pandemic exposed is not simply political fracture, but ethical ambiguity. It reminded us that even when science guides policy, conscience remains a personal crucible. To obey is not always to submit; to question is not always to defy.

The challenge is not rebellion versus obedience—but how to discern the line between solidarity and submission, between reasoned skepticism and reckless defiance.

Conclusion: The Sacred Threshold of Conscience

Lucifer and Paradise Lost are not relics of theological imagination. They are maps of the moral terrain we walk daily.

Lucifer falls not from wickedness, but from protest. Satan descends through pride, not evil. Both embody our longing to resist what feels unjust—and our peril when conscience becomes corrupted.

“Authority demands compliance, but conscience insists on discernment.”

From Milgram to Nuremberg, from Vietnam to feminism, from whistleblowers to lockdowns, the line between duty and defiance defines who we are.

To rebel wisely is harder than to obey blindly. But it is also nobler, more human. In an age of mutating power—divine, digital, political—conscience must not retreat. It must adapt, speak, endure.

The final lesson of Vondel and Milton may be this: that conscience, flawed and fallible though it may be, remains the last and most sacred threshold of freedom. To guard it is not to glorify rebellion for its own sake, but to defend the fragile, luminous space where justice and humanity endure.