The Act of Reading is an Act of Rebellion

It might one of the most enjoyable ways to kick against the left hemisphere's hegemony

Few things are more degrading than being a child of the modern age.

“Prison wife” comes closest.

It ain’t our fault we were born into this asphalt dystopia of algorithms and plastic. But we can claw our way out. We can break the chains. The trick is knowing what you’re escaping from, lest you just flail like some half-cocked jihadi spraying buckshot in a crowded room of Jews, blind to the real enemy.

The modern age is a middle finger to everything that can’t be measured, quantified, or shrink-wrapped. I call it the Great Rejection—a civilization-wide lobotomy that’s hacked away half our humanity. Ever since Descartes and his ilk turned the world into a math problem, we’ve been barreling down a dead-end road paved with rationalism and empiricism. The left hemisphere’s in the driver’s seat, clutching its blueprints and opinions.

And the right hemisphere, with its appreciation for mystery and beauty, is tied up in the trunk.

If you want out, you’ve got to reject the Great Rejection. You’ve got to kick your way out of that trunk.

Michel Foucault, that degenerate, had a phrase for it: “counter-conduct.” He was talking about something else, of course, but picking through Foucault’s work is like scavenging a dung heap: you grab what glints and shake off the filth. His own life was such a sordid circus that you can’t trust his words without a hazmat suit. Still, counter-conduct’s the ticket. It’s the act of spitting in the eye of the machine.

Take Jack Kerouac, that beatnik saint, roaring across America’s blacktop veins, chasing kicks and thumbing his nose at the grey-flannel suits. Or J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, smirking at the phonies, kicking over every sacred cow he could find. Hell, even Foucault himself practiced counter-conduct, in his own twisted way, diving headfirst into San Francisco’s bathhouse bacchanals until AIDS cashed his check. Extreme, sure. But they all said no to the machine in their own way.

Fortunately, you don’t need to go that far.

There are less, ahem, rigorous forms of rebellion.

Like reading.

I’m talkin’ real reading, not the kind where you’re skimming for bullet points or mining data for your next TED Talk. I’m talking about slow, aimless reading: cracking open a book and letting it hit you like a stray breeze. You read, something snags your soul, you pause, you ponder, you keep going. The content almost doesn’t matter. It’s the act itself that’s a raised fist against the ticking clock of modernity.

But watch out. Even reading can get hijacked by the left brain’s obsession with utility. Men, especially, fall into this trap. We read to learn, to conquer, to check off boxes. The worst of us treat books like trophies, stacking non-fiction tomes like we’re notching broads on the bedpost.

Joseph Epstein, a guy who knows a thing or 2,000 about words, once said that literary fiction’s job is to show how reality slips through the cracks of our tidy little theories. That’s kryptonite to the left brain, which loves its neat categories and despises anything that can’t be filed under “true” or “false.” The left brain hears the novelist Milan Kundera say that novels show readers that “Things are not as simple as you think,” and it throws a tantrum. Complexity? Ambiguity? They’re wrenches in the gears of efficiency, a threat to the bottom line. The left brain wants results, not riddles. It recoils from mystery like a bureaucrat from a poet.

So grab a good novel, something that’s stood the test of time or comes vouched for by someone whose taste you trust. Doesn’t have to be fancy. Just read it. Let it work on you. The act itself is a Molotov cocktail lobbed at the strip-mall soul of the modern age.

And who knows? A few pages in, you might feel a crack in the concrete, a sliver of light sneaking through, a whisper of the old, wild Tao, slipping past the left hemisphere’s guard and reminding you what it means to be human.