Arriving in Germany in the summer of 1990, James C. Scott is surprised to find that Germans seem entirely unwilling to jaywalk across a narrow road, even when no cars are evident for miles. On the occasions when he or someone else dares to do so, they are met by clucks of disapproval by pedestrians waiting patiently for the light to change. Determined not to let this get to him, he jaywalks anyway:
As a way of justifying my conduct to myself, I began to rehearse a little discourse that I imagined delivering in perfect German. It went something like this. “You know, you and especially your grandparents could have used more of a spirit of lawbreaking. One day you will be called on to break a big law in the name of justice and rationality. Everything will depend on it. You have to be ready. How are you going to prepare for that day when it really matters? You have to stay ‘in shape’ so that when the big day comes you will be ready. What you need is ‘anarchist calisthenics.’ Every day or so break some trivial law that makes no sense, even if it’s only jaywalking. Use your own head to judge whether a law is just or reasonable. That way, you’ll keep trim; and when the big day comes, you’ll be ready.”
Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism, page 4
Scott goes on to note that lawbreaking has a storied history: it played a large role in the defeat of the Confederacy, as Confederate soldiers deserted their posts to return to their farms. It crippled Napoleon’s war efforts when whole towns organized to evade the draft, hiding potential conscripts from officers in search of them. And in England, it slowed the enclosure of the commons for centuries:
Quiet, anonymous, and often complicitous, lawbreaking and disobedience may well be the historically preferred mode of political action for peasant and subaltern classes, for whom open defiance is too dangerous. For two centuries from roughly 1650 to 1850, poaching (of wood, game, fish, kindling, fodder) from Crown or private lands was the most popular crime in England. By “popular” I mean both the most frequent and most heartily approved of by the commoners. Since the rural population had never accepted the claim of the Crown or the nobility to “the free gifts of nature” in forests, streams, and open lands (heath, moor, open pasture), they violated those property rights en masse repeatedly, enough to make the elite claim to property rights in many areas a dead letter. And yet, this conflict over property rights was conducted surreptitiously from below with virtually no public declaration of war. It is as if villagers had managed, de facto, defiantly to exercise their presumed right to such lands without ever making a formal claim. It was often remarked that the local complicity was such that gamekeepers could rarely find any villager who would serve as state’s witness.
Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism, page 11
That is, not only is this mode of resistance safer than direct action against the empire, it’s also more effective. It requires no coordination and has no leader who can be deposed. All it takes is a quiet, calm, and collective no.
We’re trained in obedience and rule-following from a very young age. We need equivalent practice in breaking rules, in recognizing when a rule or law is unjust and needs to be broken, and in acting in accord with that recognition. We need this all the time, but damn if we don’t need it especially now. One day, possibly soon, we will be called on to break a big law in the name of justice and rationality. Be ready.