For 30 years, until his death in 2016 (aged 89), Bob Ebeling lived with a crippling kind of regret.
If he had stood his ground, it is likely the Challenger space shuttle would not have taken off, exploded, and killed all seven people on board.
The booster-rocket engineer with Morton Thiokol, a contractor for NASA, was among those who tried to stop the mission on the night before its launch, in 1986. He and a group of engineers were concerned that the rubber seals around the rocket booster might not hold in the 2-degree-Celsius temperatures in Florida that week, which were then the coldest conditions in space-shuttle history.
Eventually, under mounting pressure, they withdrew their objections, allowing the launch to proceed. Stiffened by the cold, the rubber O-ring seals did fail; allowing burning rocket fuel to leak out of the boosters, causing the explosion.
As a stricken Ebeling watched the disaster unfold on live TV, he said, “I could have done more. I should have done more,” he later told NPR.
Through history, the world has demanded, of some humans, a rare degree of defiance. Many of those placed at such a crossroads go down in history: as prophets, geniuses, cautionary tales.
But in its quiet way, defiance demands something of us all. In moments that may not be cinematic; may not involve a bold declaration, or the refusal of an order. That may involve simply not laughing at a joke that shouldn’t have been told; or pointing out that someone is mistaken, biased or wrong.
It is in these fleeting moments of discomfort that the truest form of defiance takes shape, says Dr Sunita Sah, a physician, organisational psychologist, and professor of management and organisations at Cornell University. True defiance is deliberate and deeply personal, and it is vital in our world, Sah notes, in her book, Defy: The Power of No in a World that Demands Yes (2025).
It has been vital in every version of our world. It is the defiant who have sought out new horizons, pushed the frontiers of knowledge, made the world less unjust.
Given how great the need is, why are such icons so few?
In her book, Sah examines how the brain’s reward system discourages defiant choices. As with so many things, this starts in our earliest years.
Compliant behaviour in children almost always meets with approval. As a result, such choices become associated with the hit of dopamine that comes from that approval. Acts of defiance receive no such reward. “Which means that when the time comes to say ‘no’ or to resist, we have to overcome decades of social conditioning, in addition to the specific constraints we face at the time,” Sah says.
Added to this is the fact that most acts of defiance will meet with censure, worsen one’s circumstances — and have no discernible impact on the situation or the world.
So: “Would you like to recite for the neighbours the poem you learnt in school?”
You wouldn’t; but saying so will upset the group and do you no good. So: “Yes.”
Years later: “Can you leave xyz out of the email thread? We don’t want them at the meeting.”
You’d like to say: “Let’s not; the idea we’re presenting is theirs.” But one knows where that will lead. So: “Yes.”
Eventually: “Would you press this button to electrocute a stranger, over and over, for a study we’re running?”
To the surprise of researchers and the world, in the famous Milgram experiment of the 1960s, over 700 participants did. But we’d been through two world wars by then, not to mention colonial-era famines and numerous genocides, so the idea of grievous harm inflicted on another because someone said so really shouldn’t have come as a shock.
TINY MUTINIES
The weeding out of defiance has a profound impact on society. In addition to the cumulative effects on freedom, dissent, kindness, democracy, it can cost lives in a range of everyday ways.
In a 2005 survey, Sah found that nine of 10 healthcare workers felt too uncomfortable to speak up even when they saw a colleague or physician making an error. How does this happen?
Compliance — doing as the tribe did, fostering a sense of belonging — was so integral to the social and psychological fabric that helped us survive, that going against that instinct shares a number of symptoms with anxiety: rapid heartbeat, sweaty palms, a knot in the stomach.
POWER TOOLS
We need to be teaching people to recognise the tension as strength, Sah says.
When it comes to actions, start small. “I don’t feel right about this” or “Are you sure this is necessary?” can help vocalise the feeling without being confrontational.
Sah suggests using a “defiance compass” to explore three cyclical questions: Who am I? (to understand core values); what type of situation is this? (to assess safety and impact); and what does a person like me do in a situation like this? (to take responsibility and assess one’s ability). Asking these questions shifts defiance from a gut reaction to a conscious practice.
Every situation that calls for defiance may not be a make-or-break one, but even the little ones matter, adds life coach Chetna Chakravarthy. “We need situations of discomfort in order to learn, and remind ourselves of, who we are, and to grow with those values.”
Defiance, though, must be practice, not personality, says Sah. It can veer dangerously off-course if it becomes a means of posturing and being seen.
The foundation, in that sense, is key.
Used correctly, defiance has driven evolution, civilisation, science. It’s unlikely, for instance, that the early humans who took fire into the cave were working off consensus. We know Newton wasn’t, or Galileo, Marie Curie or the Wright Brothers. We know the many prophets weren’t, who have preached love over profit and dogma, in doctrines we still follow today.
Our ability to say “no”, “why should I” or “why not” is what defines the power of one.
It was a defiant Claudette Colvin, 15 years old, who first refused to give up her seat to a White person on a bus in Alabama, in 1955. Nine months later, Rosa Parks would do the same, and a movement would begin.
Football star Colin Kaepernick would defiantly drop to one knee, as the US national anthem played ahead of a game in 2016, and the Black Lives Matter movement, which began in 2013, suddenly could not be ignored.
“Thinking about whether or not it’s worth it: if even one life was saved, one life was advanced, it’ll be worth it every day of the week,” Kaepernick told ABC last year. (He has not been signed by a football team since 2016, and has since led a career in activism.)
India offers what is arguably the world’s greatest proof of the power of defiance (paired with sharp strategy): Mahatma Gandhi’s satyagraha forced an empire to admit defeat in the face of tens of thousands of unarmed but unmoving Indians who would simply keep marching, sitting, disrupting, until they had their country back.
“Myths about defiance tell us it’s not for everyone. But the truth is, we can all access it and use it for good,” says Sah.
“In the end, it is a way to negotiate and make room for one’s beliefs,” adds Chakravarthy. The eternal question, of course, is: What do you believe in, and how hard are you willing to fight for it? In other words: Who are you really, when the comfort of consensus is gone?
