Against the Gravity

What This Book Is — And Is NotThis is not a book that celebrates contrarianism for its own sake. The person who disagrees with everything is as enslaved to consensus as the person who agrees with everything — merely enslaved in the opposite direction. The figures in these pages were not contrarians. They were people who had arrived — through suffering, through rigour, through spiritual practice, or through some rare and inexplicable grace — at a position of genuine independence. The critical difference between them and the majority was not their conclusions. It was the process by which they reached them.What this book is, finally, is an attempt to take seriously — with all the intellectual weight and historical evidence the question deserves — one of the oldest and most consequential mysteries in the study of the human animal: why did they not comply?Not Socrates, with the hemlock cup already poured. Not Stanislav Petrov, alone at a console at 12:15 in the morning, staring at a screen that told him the world was about to end, deciding not to believe it.Not Vasili Arkhipov, inside a submarine at the bottom of the Atlantic during the Cuban Missile Crisis — depth-charged, half-suffocating, cut off from communication, two senior officers having already voted to launch a nuclear torpedo — who voted no.The world did not end that October. You are reading these words, in part, because of the decision of one Soviet naval officer in a submarine that most people have never heard of, made in conditions designed to make the rational choice seem suicidal, on a night when the entire logic of his training, his institution, and his survival instinct pointed in the opposite direction.That is what is at stake in the pages that follow. Not the question of whether going against the grain is a good personality trait. But the question of whether the human species is capable — under the right conditions, at the right moments, in the right individuals — of overriding the deepest programming in its biology.The answer, which this book will demonstrate across thirty-two lives and three thousand years of documented history, is: occasionally. Rarely. At great cost. And always — without a single exception — with consequences that no amount of conformity could ever have produced.