"Some activists lament how few anti-authoritarians there appear to be in the United States. One reason could be that many natural anti-authoritarians are now psychopathologized and medicated before they achieve political consciousness of society’s most oppressive authorities.

…

Americans have been increasingly socialized to equate inattention, anger, anxiety, and immobilizing despair with a medical condition, and to seek medical treatment rather than political remedies. What better way to maintain the status quo than to view inattention, anger, anxiety, and depression as biochemical problems of those who are mentally ill rather than normal reactions to an increasingly authoritarian society."

…authoritarians financially marginalize those who buck the system, they criminalize anti-authoritarianism, they psychopathologize anti-authoritarians, and they market drugs for their “cure.”"

"I tried to make my presentation explicitly (and perhaps exaggeratedly) personal. I wanted to work at a company that liked me exactly how I am, and I don't consider myself a very good employee. I have a very specific relationship with my work, my coworkers, and my bosses. I get upset easily, I have an anti-authoritarian streak, my interests wax and wane unpredictably, I swear a lot. Yet, they still wanted me, and it's not totally clear to me why.

This was in September of 2011, so I've been biting my nails for months in anticipation of this week (my first at the job). It's exactly what I was hoping for. I had long wanted to work for Rebekah, as she's built a phenomenal space for design, organizationally speaking. I get to make product decisions, design the interactions, and code it all. Not many companies have a place for someone who wants to do all three of those, while also having established momentum and scale. Quora does, so here I happily reside."

"Despair is a black leather jacket in which everyone looks good, while hope is a frilly pink dress few dare to wear. Rebecca Solnit thinks this virtue needs to be redefined.

Here she takes to our pulpit to deliver a sermon that looks at the remarkable social changes of the past half century, the stories the mainstream media neglects and the big surprises that keep on landing.

She explores why disaster makes us behave better and why it's braver to hope than to hide behind despair's confidence and cynicism's safety.

History is not an army. It's more like a crab scuttling sideways. And we need to be brave enough to hope change is possible in order to have a chance of making it happen."