I have a confession. I grew up in Brighton - England's least religious city - with atheist parents who were, by any reasonable measure, the counterculture. My mother's version of the "drugs talk" was not the stern, finger-wagging prohibition you're imagining. It was: "Please get me some if you find any."
I never did drugs. Not once. And I rebelled against my parents by going to church.
Now, before you conclude that this was some masterful piece of reverse psychology - some cunning parental gameplay designed to produce exactly this outcome - let me be clear. It wasn't. My parents would almost certainly have preferred I followed their own youthful path. They weren't running a covert operation. They were just being themselves. And I, apparently, was being the opposite.
It took me years to understand why. And the answer, once I saw it, looked an awful lot like an evolution curve.
The landscape of rebellion
Let's map this. We talk about rebellion as though it's a fixed behaviour. Teenagers rebel. It's what they do. But that's rubbish. Or rather, it's so vague as to be useless. It's the equivalent of telling an organisation to "be innovative" without specifying what's evolving (the thing that's changing), what stage it's at (how mature it is), or what the competitive landscape looks like (where you stand relative to everyone else). It's prattle.
If you actually map the landscape of rebellion, you see something rather more interesting. Rebellion is not a thing. It's a direction. It's a movement away from whatever occupies the dominant position in your immediate environment. And the dominant position is not fixed - it evolves.
Here's what happened in my family, mapped out. My parents' countercultural values - atheism, drug tolerance, rejection of conventional morality - were, in the 1960s and 1970s, genuinely in genesis (that is, novel, uncertain, and unexplored). Adopting them was an act of exploration. It was pioneering, in the proper sense. They were doing something genuinely new, at some personal cost, without knowing whether it would work or what society would make of it.
But by the time I came along, those same values had evolved. In our household, atheism wasn't a radical position - it was the wallpaper. Drug tolerance wasn't transgressive - it was Tuesday. These values had moved from genesis through custom-built (the counterculture as a self-conscious movement) to something approaching product, maybe even commodity (ubiquitous, unquestioned, just the way things are), within the microclimate of our family. They were the establishment. My establishment.
And here's the doctrine - the universal principle that applies regardless of context: you cannot rebel towards the commodity position. Rebellion, by definition, moves away from what is standardised and expected. If your parents are the establishment - even a wildly unconventional establishment - then conforming to their values is not rebellion. It's what the psychologists rather grandly call identity foreclosure - adopting the landscape you inherited without ever mapping it yourself.
Going to church in Brighton was my genesis. It was novel, uncertain, and slightly ridiculous. In a city where over 55% of people report no religion, and in a household where atheism was the unquestioned default, walking into a church was genuinely countercultural. I was a Pioneer (the person who explores the unknown, not the person who optimises the known), fumbling about in territory my family hadn't mapped. Whether it was the right territory is a different question. The point is that it was unmapped.
And I remember what it felt like, walking through those doors for the first time. The smell of old wood and candle wax and something faintly damp that I've never been able to identify. The congregation turning to look - not hostile, just curious, the way you look at someone who's clearly come to the wrong room. Not knowing when to stand, when to sit, when to kneel, mouthing the words to hymns I'd never heard. The vicar smiling at me afterwards with the careful warmth of someone who suspects you might not come back. It was awkward and strange and entirely unlike anything in my household, which was rather the point. This wasn't a theological conversion. It was exploration - genesis in the most literal sense. I was in unmapped territory and I had no idea what I was doing there, only that nobody I knew had been there before me.
The climate: what forces were at play?
There's a pattern here that goes well beyond my family. When any value system evolves from genesis to commodity, it creates the conditions for its own opposition. This is not controversial - it's basic climate analysis (identifying the external forces that are pushing things to change, whether you want them to or not).
Thomas Frank wrote about this brilliantly in The Conquest of Cool. The counterculture of the 1960s was co-opted, commodified, and sold back to society so efficiently that it became the mainstream culture it had originally opposed. Rebellion got a brand identity and a range of merchandise. By the time it was playing on the radio in every shopping centre, it wasn't rebellion any more. It was wallpaper.
The same pattern appears at state scale. In the Soviet Union, decades of enforced atheism produced underground religious movements among the young intelligentsia. When atheism is the establishment, religion becomes the counterculture. The direction of rebellion flipped because the landscape flipped. This is not mysterious. It is what evolution does.
And look at Prohibition in America. Outlaw alcohol and you get speakeasies that outnumber the saloons they replaced. The forbidden-fruit mechanism is so well-documented that it barely needs stating. What needs stating is that my mother, intuitively or accidentally, removed that mechanism entirely. By making drugs boring - by treating them as something you might casually ask your teenager to pick up - she drained them of every drop of transgressive appeal. There was no forbidden fruit because there was no prohibition.
I nicked this insight from the psychological reactance literature, but it maps rather neatly. Reactance - the urge to do the opposite of what you're told - requires a perceived threat to your freedom. "Don't do drugs" is a threat. "Please get me some if you find any" is ... not. My mother collapsed the reactance engine, not through strategy but through being herself. The landscape she created simply didn't have the component that most drug-rebellion stories depend on.
The both-sides problem
Now, here's where I need to be honest, because there are at least two ways to read this story, and both are partially right and partially wrong.
Reading one: "The mother was a genius." This is the narrative we want. Radical honesty as parenting strategy. Remove the prohibition, remove the rebellion, produce a drug-free child. It's a lovely story. It might also be narrative fallacy - a retrospective causal story imposed on what might simply be temperament, genetics, or luck. Research suggests that roughly half of personality is heritable. Maybe I didn't do drugs because I'm constitutionally risk-averse, and my mother's approach had nothing to do with it. The landscape might explain less than I'd like to think.
Reading two: "Going to church is conformity, not rebellion." In a country where Christianity remains the largest single religious affiliation, walking into a church is joining the biggest room, not leaving it. This is the argument Heath and Potter make in The Rebel Sell - that most "rebellion" is actually conformity to a different group. My thermostat didn't swing to some genuinely novel position. It swung to the nearest available alternative, which happened to be the one everybody else's grandparents occupied.
Both readings hit. Here's what makes them both incomplete.
Reading one confuses doctrine with gameplay. The doctrine - that removing prohibition drains the transgressive appeal - is well-supported. But whether that doctrine produced this specific outcome in this specific child is gameplay (a context-specific question with a context-specific answer), and gameplay is irreducibly contextual. My mother didn't run a controlled experiment. She had a sample size of one. Maybe the doctrine is sound and the attribution is wrong. Both things can be true simultaneously.
Reading two confuses the landscape. At the national level, churchgoing is common. At the micro-level - in Brighton, in my household - it was genuinely unusual. Which landscape matters? Both. But the one that shapes adolescent rebellion is not the national census. It's the kitchen table. My immediate landscape was atheist. Church was genesis in that landscape, regardless of what it was in the broader territory.
The doctrine of the thermostat
So what's the universal principle here? What's the doctrine that applies regardless of the specific context of my family, my city, or my mother's cheerfully transgressive approach to parenting?
It's this: rebellion is a thermostat, not a compass. It doesn't point somewhere fixed. It moves away from whatever temperature the room is currently set to. If the room is hot, the thermostat pushes cold. If the room is cold, it pushes hot. The direction depends entirely on the current landscape.
This is why context-free parenting advice is rubbish. "Be strict and your children will rebel." Maybe. Or maybe being strict makes the strict position the commodity, and your children will rebel towards something permissive. "Be permissive and your children will walk all over you." Maybe. Or maybe your children, finding permissiveness to be the commodity, will rebel towards something structured. Church, for instance.
The advice changes depending on the landscape. Which is rather the point of everything I've ever said about strategy.
Where's your map?
I'm aware I've just mapped my own adolescence using a strategic framework designed for business, and that this is either charmingly eccentric or completely bonkers. Possibly both. I was a bumbling teenager long before I was a bumbling CEO, and I'm not sure I've improved much in the intervening years.
But here's the question I can't shake. How many of us have actually mapped the landscape we grew up in? Not the stories we tell about it - those are strategy documents, wish lists dressed in nostalgia. But the actual landscape. What were the dominant values? What had evolved to commodity? What was genuinely in genesis? Where was the inertia - the resistance to change that keeps things stuck?
If you want to try it, start with the thermostat. Take the values your household treated as non-negotiable - the things so assumed they were never discussed. Those are your commodities. Now ask: where did you, or your children, push back? Not where you THINK the rebellion is. Where is it actually? The thing that generates the most friction in a family is almost never the thing the parents are watching. It's the thing they've stopped seeing because it's wallpaper. Map the wallpaper and you'll find the rebellion vector.
This transfers beyond families, by the way. If your organisation treats "move fast and break things" as unquestioned orthodoxy - the cultural commodity nobody ever examines - don't be surprised when your best engineers start gravitating towards process, governance, and formal architecture reviews. They're not being reactionary. They're being thermostats.
Because once you map it, the rebellion makes sense. Not as an act of defiance, but as a natural movement within an evolving landscape. The child of counterculture parents doesn't rebel because church is better than atheism, or because drugs are wrong, or because conventional morality is superior. The child rebels because counterculture has evolved from genesis to commodity within the only landscape that matters - home - and the thermostat pushes the other way.
My mother didn't run a reverse-psychology operation. She just lived her values so thoroughly that they became the establishment. And I, lacking any prohibition to react against, went looking for the most unmapped territory I could find.
In Brighton, in the 1990s, that territory had a church spire.
(Views in this article are my own.)