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The Philosopher Between the Capitalist and the Communist Chapter 37 : Why Would Anyone Dissent? By Punkerslut
The dissident knows that they are going to lose. So why would anyone choose that path? The revolutionary at least has the chance of success, no matter how small it may be at times, and the follower of the revolutionary has an even greater chance of satisfying some selfish need by participating, always allowed to hide behind that age-old chime, "I was misled by bad people." The established authority has the best chance of success, based simply on the fact there are too many who depend on its continued existence for anyone to raise a flag against it. The commoner, the non-voter, the non-participant, and the uninvolved sometimes shared in these benefits, too, with the mass slaughter of a working-class revolt followed abruptly by periods of low unemployment, or with their own children and families in shallow graves because they had been suspected of either supporting or opposing the Revolution. Everyone stood somewhere with some odds of success, some benefits of winning, and some suffering with losing. But this wasn't the case with the Dissident. Unlike the Revolutionary, the Follower, the Authorities, and the Commoners, the Dissident knew that they were going to lose by revolting. So why do it? This is another underlying theme behind the joke that "Dissidents are just failed Revolutionaries." Dissidents know that they're going to lose by dissenting, so why would anyone dissent? Some have argued that it's just one of the tens or hundreds of personality types available, depending on how specific you want to get with each type. And this one particular personality type is a combination of loyalty, honor, and dignity, combined with the initiative to prove it especially at times when it contradicts authority, tradition, and convention. For the very same reasons, others would classify them under the category of maniac or unresolved personality types. There are others who have said that those with the heart of a Revolutionary and the mind of a Dissident are merely Insurrectionists , an entirely different type of personality altogether, and there are those who have said that those with the heart of a Dissident and the Mind of a Revolutionary are merely Rebels, their own type of personality and classification. It is with minds like these that questions of "putting down the rebellion" or "ending the insurrection" became of extreme importance, in the thinking behind them as much as in the choice of words for them. And there are still others who say that some have half the heart of a Revolutionary and half the heart of a Dissident, along with similar halves of the mind. Truly inwardly divided people, they are sometimes called Individualists, but they are too difficult to count and categorize to really put a name on that type.
You Dissent for the same reason that you start a Revolution: because it is something that you believe in. But while every Revolutionary starts a Revolution, there is no Dissident who starts a Dissension. People don't dissent for the same reasons that they revolt. An individual who dissents does so out of an unhappy result of disappointment and sadness, while an individual who revolts does it out of a ritualistic combination of enthusiasm and anger. Pan and Roz left their home cities of Athens and Babylon for very different reasons than those of Emma and Benjamin. Together, they built an entirely new civilization together, but while their destination was geographically the same, it was not ideologically the same. The Revolutionaries were building the new kingdoms of their Revolution, the Dissidents were escaping the hypocrisy of the old kingdoms of their Obedience. One and the other fused together as one, along with many other tangent and referential components available in the area, to create something completely new and different within the city known as Anarchia. But even if they could do this, the Dissident still remained a very different being from the Revolutionary. So, why does one personality type revolt and the other personality type dissent? Nobody knows.
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