Obedience & Discipline
This post is unfinished. I’d like to revisit it soon and write my conclusion. Apologies in advance.
I make a clear distinction between obedience and discipline. Obedience is doing what others tell you without hesitation. I do not think obedience is a virtue; in fact, I’d go as far as to say that obedience is a vice.
To be obedient is to outsource your thinking, to accept too much of life as rigid or fixed or given. There are certain things that we agree upon in a social context — like stopping at red lights — because it benefits us all.
For instance, we stop at red lights because we understand that cross-traffic will start to drive and may hit us. But happens when a signal malfunctions? Are we supposed to sit at a red light for 5 minutes?
There becomes a point where we apply our own thinking to the specific situation and break obedience. Well, I hope that’s the case. I also know people who are devout in their obedience: They never stop to ask why.
Discipline, by contrast, is following through on what you want.
It takes discipline to do the things that you want because they are often in conflict with what others around you want for themselves or for you.
There is no shortage of people eager to spend our money or take up our time. But what about those who unconditionally want what’s best for us? Why is, for instance, that we have more acquaintances who talk us out of going to the gym than those who are willing to join us in a workout?
To become anything of importance, you must have discipline. There are years and years of work behind every achievement — every book on sale, every successful product, every work of art, every trophy lifted.
Perhaps I overvalue achievement.
Maybe it’s my personal coping mechanism. That’s a criticism I should consider, but I also believe high discipline and low obedience leads to a much more interesting life.
In summary, I think:
Obedience is succumbing to external pressure. Discipline is pushing forward because of your relentless inner motivation.
Certain sectors of our economy, like transportation, are seeing multiple once-in-a-lifetime shifts happening in concert. For example, we are witnessing a change:
- From human-driven to self-driven
- From gasoline-powered to battery-powered
- From individual-owned to fleet-owned (Uber, Lyft, etc.)
Let’s take another market: education. There are more than 50 million students in K-12 schools in the United States (source). And yet education today looks no different than it did 20, 50, or even 100 years ago.
The U.S. education system was openly modeled on the Prussian education systems, that highly valued obedience. Our education system is a mechanized process, by design.
The system was supposed to take the sons and daughters of farmers as inputs and create factory workers as output. With that understanding, it makes more sense why:
- Students all start school at the same age
- Students all start school at the same time
- Students all study the same subjects
- Students all study for the same duration (e.g., 1 class period or 1 semester)
- Students are all grouped together by age
- Students are all measured by the same criteria
Again, showing up on time and learning how to read is a very good thing. But once that has been mastered, it is time to move on.
The U.S. education system was modeled on the Prussian education system, that valued obedience. These were important values for the sons and daughters of farmers, who needed to adapt to city life and the structure of work in factories. Showing up on time and making sure things ran according to schedule was paramount.
But we’ve moved past this.
What happens if we reimagine education completely with the tools and technology available today? Imagine a shift from:
- Standard vs. personalized
- Paper vs. digital
- Time-bound vs. mastery
- Size of education in US
- Failure of education
- Teaching to the 23rd percentile (source)
- Changing from one time to continued education
