Someone once told me that rebellion comes from not being understood.
That is not always the case.
Sometimes there is a substantive disagreement. If you disagree with meanness and cruelty, then you will object to socialization through meanness and cruelty. If you disagree with violence, then you will object to socialization through violence. Sometimes people who rebel are referred to as sociopaths and narcissists and more cruel than the average person. In the above situations, they come from correct considerations and are less cruel than the average person.
In my case, rebellion was due to the inattention that has been paid in America to things such as philosophy and the arts. I did not consider it adequate to pursue such things with those who care about them. I wanted to make these things unavoidable for everyone else. So when I was 15 I went around telling people in my school that they didn’t exist. I didn’t actually believe that. I believed that I needed to introduce philosophy forcefully for people to have appreciation for it.
I changed my attitude when I started hanging around with my kind of people. My first experience of that was when I was living across the street from the Arlington cemetery and was sharing a house with several philosophically-minded young people. Since then I started seeking out my kind of people, and I found quite a few of them. I have lived a fulfilling life. And I’ve had a lot of beautiful experiences.
Some people think that high school is the place to learn how to deal with people. I’ve learned how to deal with people later on in my life. One doesn’t learn very much about how to deal with people when one is surrounded by people with whom one does not want to deal. But when one finds his way to one’s own people, there is a much greater room for personal growth.
Now there is not much to recommend nihilism itself; but it can be a doorway to valuable exploration. It can be a gateway to learning things that have not been part of one’s upbringing and thus to enrich one’s understanding. However good one’s upbringing has been, there will always be things that it fails to consider and fails to provide. And these things are learned by suspending one’s judgment from the way in which one has been reared and exploring what else is out there.
People grow that way. Civilizations also grow that way. Introduction of Hindu, Chinese or Native American knowledge vastly benefits the Western civilization. The person who learns such things is not being a traitor. He is being a contributor. He is introducing to the Western civilization a wisdom that supplements and completes it.
Most people who do such a thing are people who have rebelled. Most of them rebelled for right reasons; and what they do performs a social service. They are bringing into the civilization wisdom that is not a part of it. That makes them contributing citizens. And the civilization benefits from the work that they do.