Intelligent Disobedience summary

Obedience to laws, orders and regulations is a cornerstone of our society. We are expected to stop at red lights, pay taxes and keep the music down at 2 a.m., and normally we adhere to these rules.

However, as the last blink showed, there are situations in which obedience is dangerous, or even immoral.

So far, we’ve established that people not only have the right but also the obligation to disagree with and refuse bad orders. But how do you know which orders are ill-thought but harmless and which are genuinely harmful?

If you want to know whether applying Intelligent Disobedience is justified, ask yourself:

Have you ever worked at a job where the manager took any attempt at constructive criticism as a personal attack? This type of leader, as well as being a nightmare to work with, dissuades Intelligent Disobedience. Teams with no opportunity to disagree intelligently are very unhealthy.

Intelligent Disobedience helps the team as a whole perform to the best of their ability. Consider the nurse who refused the doctor’s orders to give a potentially harmful drug to a patient. If he hadn’t refused or at least questioned the order, there is a chance that the patient would have died, and it is the doctor who would have been held responsible for medical malpractice.

Now that you know why you should apply Intelligent Disobedience, it’s important to be familiar with the different strategies available to you.

But before you start, you should build up your situational awareness so that you know when to be intelligently disobedient. The more you know about your situation and your surroundings, the better you can assess whether the order you have been given is worthy of being followed – or not.

Learning to obey authority and social norms is a crucial part of children’s education. However, children should also be aware that there are some situations in which the rules shouldn’t be followed.

Unfortunately, the institutions where children spend a lot of their time (like church and school) require strict obedience and deference to authority figures. But if children only learn to obey, then the consequences can be drastic.