Considerations

Albert Camus, in his book The Rebel (2013), talks of metaphysical rebellion as one giant not-getting-with-the-programme. The metaphysical rebel has cause to protest not just against the constraints of an educative programme, say, but to direct their insubordination against the human condition in general, thereby bringing this insubordinate condition into prominence. Camus frames this in terms of a master/slave dyad and claims (along with Hegel) that the slave defines the master. It would seem that by protesting against the master (in my case, the order of the order-execution cognate) the executive establishes the existence of the order against which s/he protests. In effect, that order’s power is dependent on the executive’s own subordinating execution of it; their own carrying out of that order. This was Hegel’s point; ¹ whilst the master perceives as natural everything from his own point of view, so too, amazingly, does the slave, who does his or her best in trying to see the world from the master’s point of view, for the sake of execution, and in fear of who knows what sort of retribution on failure to execute. The order only makes sense (to both parties) if it is carried out. But now that my cognate is couched in the master/slave dyad, not surprisingly, this asymmetry comes crashing down when the slave wakes up and becomes conscious of their collusion in the master’s power. Hence, as Camus affirms, the slave, or nascent rebel, affirms their own insubordinate power by recognising their sub-ordination, their sub-rank beneath that of the master: or in my case, the executive affirms his/her own power by protesting against the fiendishly homonymic order, with the help of the executive educator, now in the guise of co-conspirator and liberator.