Young guy in a vest, holding a clipboard, came to the door.

His timing wasn’t good – we were busy. “Thanks, sorry, can’t today,” I said through the crack in the door.

“One minute, max,” he said.

“Sorry, man, no.”

It wasn’t clear what he was canvassing for, and I didn’t have time to find out.

But he wasn’t leaving. My No hadn’t registered. He’d actually stepped forward. He was half inside the house. Only his hind end stuck out into the cold.

“Listen, man. No! Look at me: No!”

He looked me in the face. Blinking like a carp.

I felt my fist wanting to go somewhere I’d regret. I redirected it into my pocket and found a ten—here, bugger off.

The guy didn’t take it.

“Sorry, can’t do a one-time payment,” he said. “We’re asking for a commitment of a small monthly amount.”

“What? Nooooo!”

By this time my teenage daughter had joined me at the door. Maybe to video this in case things got dire real fast here.

“Here’s a way around it,” the guy said. “I’ll take your credit card info and after the first payment you can just cancel.”

I pivoted and spun into the kitchen to cool. My daughter engaged with him then. She used her Gen Z bona fides to get the straight dope.

“I think my dad’s getting his wallet,” she said. “But I’m just curious: How many Nos would it have taken for you to leave?”

He leaned in and lowered his voice. “One more,” he said. “At the fourth no, no means no.”

His secret was out. The company script was clear on this. The fourth refusal would have set me free.

There was, I now believe, a universal lesson in this small dumb exchange that may be key to stopping the shitshow breaking across the world.

“THE EXPERIMENT REQUIRES THAT YOU CONTINUE.”

In Stanley Milgram’s famous “obedience to authority” studies – the ones where test subjects thought they were administering powerful shocks to a volunteer in the next room for their goofs on a memory test – the subjects grew increasingly uncomfortable with inflicting pain on this poor stranger. And yet their misgivings were dismissed. When they balked, the experimenter pressed them to continue.

After the first refusal the subjects heard: “Please continue.”

Second refusal: “The experiment requires that you continue.”

Third refusal: “It is absolutely essential that you continue.”

The fourth refusal shut down the experiment. But most subjects didn’t have the stones to say No a fourth time. Sixty-five percent went all the way to the maximum charge of a life-threatening 450 volts. Even Milgram – who hatched the experiment in the wake of WWII to explore compliance to Nazi atrocities among “regular Germans” never expected numbers like that.

Defiance. What does that word mean to you? The dictionary says: “to challenge the power of somebody else boldly and openly.” Not the trait of a team player. Makes you a loose cannon – and who wants to be that? And so we live in a compliance culture. We don’t defy authority because it mostly doesn’t even occur to us to.

People are basically timid sheep in the face of authority, says the Cornell organizational psychologist Sunita Sah, an expert on defiance. We kowtow even when not doing that could save lives. (Nine out of ten healthcare workers, most of them nurses, didn’t feel comfortable speaking up when they saw a superior making an error.) We zip a lip around the people in charge, not just when they’re fucking up, but even when they’re doing things that bulldoze our principles.

The old definition is bullshit, by Sah’s lights. Defiance is not a vice but a virtue. “To defy is simply to act in accordance with your values when there’s pressure to do otherwise.” It’s more than a virtue: defiance is “the obligation of every citizen when confronted with wrongdoing.”

If ever in our lifetimes there were wrongdoing that required mass defiance, it’s now. Now, in the face of escalating authoritarian creep (by an authoritarian creep!) that at this point can only be called a coup.

Blind obedience is not a habit of grown-ups. It’s something everyone in a functioning democracy must mature out of. In a family, obedience is the law ... but eventually we come to learn it’s the highest calling to become an adult. In a culture, obedience is the law ... but eventually we come to understand it isn’t the highest calling to become an effective citizen. There comes a time to say, Hell no, bro.

But it takes courage! Because obedience to authority is the safest path to security. Crushing social pressure to conform means we stifle the little voice of conscience inside us.

Indeed, so effective is the gaslighting in an authoritarian regime that we may talk ourselves out of acknowledging that there’s anything to be defiant about, even as the contours of control morph under our noses: now they’ve taken the C-suites; now they’ve taken the courts; now they’ve taken the media. Eventually if dawns on you that, my god, they’re trying to overturn democracy itself. But by now it may be too late. Your refusals haven’t registered as refusals at all. Because you haven’t done anything.

YOUR LADDER OF DEFIANCE

The psychological machinery of defiance grinds quietly away in every skull, according to Sah, in a sequence that goes something like this:

Stage one: tension arises from this uncomfortable ask.

Stage two: acknowledging the tension. Big red flag here. You don’t feel right about this at all.

Stage three: expressing your misgivings out loud.

Stage four: repeating your growing urge to say no.

Stage five: actually refusing.

Stage one and two are the business of the body. Your body can’t really be gaslit. It knows when big pieces are being moved under cover of darkness. That’s what it’s trying to tell you with the rising sense of dread.

It’s at stage three that the crucial turn happens. Once you’ve communicated your alarm to another person, you’re much more likely to follow through and actually ... defy.

But it’s also the moment where the stakes jump mightily.

After Pearl Harbor, the Americans of Japanese descent cattled in internment camps on the West Coast were given a mandatory “loyalty questionnaire” to fill out. Questions 27 and 28 were the main ones of interest to the Americans:

Question 27: “Will you serve in the military on combat duty wherever ordered?”

Question 28: “Do you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America?”

At this point most of the internees caved and said yes – it seemed the only out from much more misery. But some said no. They’d been defiant all along and they weren’t about to change their mind now. The final refusal was the one they put in writing.¹

That public declaration is the hammer. You’re in deep shit now. But also, for the first time, you are free, for you have let your true self speak.

For their impertinence, this pack of disloyal Japanese Americans – dubbed “The No-No boys” – was shipped to the much more dire Tule Lake, a concentration camp in Northern California, where they remained, defiant to the end, for four more years (until Roosevelt was publicly shamed into releasing them). It’s fair to say the No-No boys were less in “detention” than some other of the men. What’s so liberating about actually defying, says Sah, is that “the tension you’re feeling just evaporates. It feels great to bring your values and your actions back into alignment. It leaves you to have a more honest life.”

By the time you reach your fourth and final No – the topmost rung on your ladder of defiance – another emotion is in play. It’s urgency. Okay, panic. Of the kind that seizes folks in the final stage of that nightmarish “First they came for the Communists...” scenario. One by one the vulnerable groups have quietly been cleared out, because nobody spoke up for them. And now there’s a knock at your door.

Panic is the most primal fuel of all. You’re going, Fuck I have to stop this. It’s not even just about you at this point – it’s about your grandchildren’s future.

The fourth refusal happens when your red line is crossed.

So this is the question we all need to ask ourselves right now:

Where is my red line?

REFUSAL IS A TRAINABLE SKILL

The fourth refusal is the source code of democracy. Each one of us needs the bravery to carry on refusing till we reach it.

Refusal is a trainable skill.

Defiance is a skill set. Practicing it changes your brain. And has a ripple effect on others who observe it. So says Sah.

There are three questions to ask yourself when compliance is demanded but you know in your heart you should defy:

1) Who am I?

2) Is it safe to defy here?

3) What does a person like me do in a situation like this?

Sociologist James Marsh calls this The Defiance Compass.

Sometimes refusal is self-serving. There are stories of rookie cops who refused to comply with orders because they thought it was too dangerous (going into this house without notice and without a warrant ... nope, too many unknowns.) Sometimes refusal is just your survival instincts kicking in.

That’s what we need to tap now across the whole culture. Defying en masse is an existential move.

As the fascist narrative bubbles up again, we must refuse. We must all become one of those minority of Milgram’s subjects who defied the experimenter. We must all become one of the No-No Boys.

“To confront the Trump government without compromise, we must raise what MLK called a ‘coalition of conscience,’ writes Timothy Seseki Kudo – whose father was one of those No-No Boys, and is furious to see the same injustices repeated in the mass deportations of US-born citizens currently underway. His own very public refusal is a call-to-arms: “Elected leaders must oppose the assault on constitutional rights they’ve sworn to uphold and defend. Mayors and governors of sanctuary cities must unite in opposition, file legal challenges and refuse to allow local law enforcement, administrative and logistical resources from being used to carry out this immoral policy. And we must fight state by state in every single election for every single office until we have turned back the tide of cruelty sweeping across America.”

Here’s the thing: Fascists depend on convincing us that there’s no point fighting cuz we’ve already lost. That’s how minority regimes cling to power – by getting the majority to think there’s nothing they can do.

Don’t believe it!

The moment demands the mass recruitment of what the Catholic theologian Matthew Fox calls “spiritual warriors.” “Every citizen who gives a damn about honesty and caring in our government and democracy should be on deck contributing what they can to resist and oppose the dismantling of our government.”

“We have the people!” says the Guardian labor journalist Hamilton Nolan. “The numbers are on our side. Trump and Elon Musk are like two guys with six-shooters trying to hold a thousand people hostage. They only win if everyone thinks they are too strong to rush.”

Resist. Resist like you are defending a piece of land. This is the imperative of all of us now. We must all hang in there with our refusals – one, two, three, four – until No means No. Nothing less will do in the face of the deadly geopolitical game we’re walking into, with its dueling autocracies. This thing will roll over us. It will roll over us unless we stand as one. Come what may.

If only a few people choose to walk into the line of fire, they’re dead. If everyone does, they are, as a group, unstoppable. You may not personally take a bullet. But you have to be willing to.

It doesn’t work any other way.

— Harry Flood

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1 Not all the “No-No boys” were refuseniks; some wrote “No” because they were confused about what they were being asked, or had written a qualifier such as (“Yes,” after my rights are restored.”) Didn’t matter: their fate was the same.

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