What If I Just Stopped Complying?

I wasn’t sure if it was something Colin had said. Because that was when the question first started circling in my brain.

“We’ll head down to Land’s End, cross the Bay of Biscay, go right over the top of Spain, cut through the centre of Portugal, then we’ll capture Gibraltar,” he announced or something along those lines. I was half-listening as I had a podcast and a crossword and the two-for-one on prosecco to deal with as well. Maybe it was the way he said it, manly, in command, confident, secure in his flight path. It was quite the language of battle. He was somewhat conquering a continent on the way to Africa.

“What if I just stopped complying?” I leaned over and said to my husband.

And for three days in Marrakech, I pondered what this non-compliance might look like.

And I reckoned it would probably look like not putting up with Mike.

When we set off to the meeting point on a Tuesday morning carrying our take-away hotel breakfasts, I’d been worried about the transportation, would there be seatbelts, would our vehicle have the capacity to make it safely through the Atlas Mountains, would we be run off the road, would we go too close to the edge and topple into a valley. But when we pulled in to collect our fellow passengers at a five-star resort beloved by the Kardashians, I realised my focus needed to shift. My main concern now was surviving seven hours with this man from Alaska who relished the sound of his own voice and modelled his tan on Donald Trump.

“Do more people come here now because of Crosby, Stills & Nash^[1]?” he asked the tour guide. “I think it’s more because Morocco did well in the last World Cup,” Mohammed replied. “Is there trout in there?” Mike said pointing at a dried-up riverbed. “Do you have lions out here?” he asked as he surveyed a fairly barren landscape dotted with the occasional donkey. “We’re having lunch with Crocodile Dundee,” I whispered to my husband as we ate our tagine in the home of a traditional Berber family. Mike was making the most of an audience. “When I was in that Russian camp and they ran out of food…”, “When I landed my plane in the desert…”, “When I was attacked by wild boar…”. “I don’t think the ladies found that funny,” he said when he’d delivered his punchline about cannibals eating somebody’s wife. “Is he an explorer?” I asked his daughter. “He likes hunting,” she said. “When we got on the bus, Logan said, ‘Papa is going to embarrass me all day long’,” she added. And I felt for this eight-year-old who had more social awareness than his grandfather, whose childhood would be suffused with this continual suffering. And I thought if I’d truly stopped complying, I’d tell Mike that. I’d refuse to politely tolerate him and his jokes.

It couldn’t have been Colin though who had prompted my obsession with non-compliance. He was merely a first officer. And so, I retraced my steps. I reviewed the transcript of the podcast I’d been half-listening to. The male hosts had decided to do a deep dive into patriarchy. They didn’t want to mansplain it, so they’d invited a woman on to explain it properly^[2].

“A simple explanation of patriarchy is a male centring and male ordering of the world,” she said. “Men are at the centre and everything else rotates around them”.

She’d done a lot of work in social justice. “And every time I would get to the root causes of injustices around the world, it would end up being patriarchy,” she said. “The vast majority of victims and casualties of war are women and children”. That was just one example, she said, but pick any issue and just keep picking at it and it would likely come back to this one root cause, a male-centred power over women. It was a disordering. If we want the world to be a better place, she said, we have to empower women. And the Church hadn’t really helped with any of this with their God-made-man-first thing and distortion of the creation narrative and the authority-over and their terrible toxic theologies and their complementarianism which was “just a word for patriarchy that sounds better” and she told a story about one church where the pastor had said, “we have a woman that we’re using as an example. She’s amazing. She’s a great leader. She’s a great communicator actually but she chooses not to use her gifts in this church because of our stance. And we just think, what a humble example”. And she said to him, “what a horrific example”. “What you’re doing is you’re taking someone with no power, giving her less power and saying that’s humility. That’s the opposite of humility. I have a name for that. It’s called oppression”.

“Jesus refused to comply with systems that oppressed women,” she said. Some men had asked her what they could do to help. “It’s really nice for you to cheer on women,” she said. “But we’re going to need a little bit more”.

“What if we just stopped complying with systems that oppress, systems that exclude, systems that segregate?” she concluded.

And I thought again about what it would look like if I just stopped complying. I decided I could start small. I would pick out my clothes from the wash basket and manage only them through the laundry process. Instead of enduring my mother’s twenty-five-minute monologue on her knee, I would interrupt and ask, “would you like to know how I am?” I would no longer feign outward enthusiasm and instead expose my inner underwhelmedness. I would never suppress a yawn. Once I’d gained in confidence, I would stand up and leave once the sermon got boring. I would not hold back on my opinions on the state of my denomination. I would describe myself as the ideal candidate for everything. I would no longer adhere to unspoken rules. I wouldn’t wait to be respected. I would express my middle-aged rage. “I think oestrogen takes the edge off the reality of being a woman in the 21^st century, and it plummets and you’re like, what the ****? What is this? What have I been putting up with for so long?” said Bryony Gordon.

It would probably be carnage, this non-conforming.

It would probably also be impossible. Because in many ways, the systems had already got me and if I was really to do it, I was going to have to exit an awful lot of them.

“There is a natural impulse to conform that few overcome,”^[3] says Anne Applebaum, an American journalist who has written extensively on the history of communism. Whilst undertaking research into dictatorships, she had asked an East German dissident what percentage of people went along and simply conformed.

“She said, everybody went along with it. She said, sooner or later, if you wanted to keep your job and you wanted your kids to go to university and you wanted your wife to get her health care, you had to go along with it. I mean, once the system is constructed in a way that there are no options, 99% of people will conform”.

And for people inside corrupt institutions who want to bring change to the world, there lies the greatest difficulty, says Applebaum.

“Usually, conformism is like you don’t need to threaten people with the gulag, you know, or a concentration camp … you just say either you conform to this, or you lose your job, or you lose your benefits or something. And for most people, that’s too much”.

It’s a moral choice, she said, non-conforming. “Do you stay to try to make change from the inside? Do you remain inside to make sure people aren’t harmed and become tarnished in the process? Do you dissent and then lose influence? Do you quit in a principled way? Or do you eventually just conform completely?”

And I reckoned if I stopped complying, it would make very little difference. Even if I exited them, the systems would continue without me.

“We need more men to actually be so irritated by the systems of patriarchy that they’re willing to disrupt them and then pay the cost that comes with that,” said the woman on the podcast.

Sadly, it wasn’t my non-compliance that was needed to make the world a better place. It was Mike’s and Logan’s and Colin’s and Mohammed’s. It was the pastor’s and the male hosts’ and my husband’s.

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^[1] Let’s go back to 1969 with Marrakesh Express

^[2] The Mid-Faith Crisis Podcast – Episode 319: An interview with Danielle Strickland

^[3] Quotes from I Have Been Here Before