Blog: When Fighting the System Makes It Stronger: The Paradox of Defiance in Literature and Life
This is the paradox of defiance. And once you see it, you may start to see it everywhere.
Two African Stories, One Uncomfortable Truth
Take Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not to Blame, a Yoruba retelling of the Greek myth of Oedipus. A man named Odewale is fated at birth to kill his father and marry his mother. In the Yoruba context, this isn't just a "bad prediction"; it is a decree from the ancestors, a cosmic blueprint.
His parents, terrified, try to have him killed as an infant. He survives, is raised elsewhere, and eventually, through pride, anger, and a series of tragic misunderstandings, fulfils the very prophecy that was supposed to be avoided.
Here’s the thing: The act of resistance was the mechanism of fulfilment. If Odewale's parents had never tried to prevent the prophecy, it likely wouldn't have come true. This is what Rotimi means when he says "the gods are not to blame." The prophecy didn't happen to Odewale; it happened because of the fear and denial of the people around him.
Now compare that to Buchi Emecheta’s The Bride Price. Here, a young woman named Aku-nna falls in love with Chike, a man from a formerly enslaved lineage—a union her community considers taboo. She marries him in open defiance of tradition, then dies in childbirth. The community looks on and nods: See? We told you so.
But Emecheta is careful. Aku-nna dies not because the gods punished her, but because she was young and physically frail, a biological reality, not a mystical one. The tradition didn't kill her, but the tradition gets to claim credit. Her death "proves" the taboo, and the system grows stronger from her loss.
Robert Merton and the "Pygmalion" Trap
The sociologist Robert K. Merton gave us the language for this in 1948 with the self-fulfilling prophecy: a false belief that triggers behaviour which makes that original belief come true. He summarised it perfectly: "If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences."
Merton wasn't just theorising; he was showing how social logic can generate its own evidence. We see this most clearly in what psychologists call the Pygmalion Effect. In famous classroom studies, when teachers were falsely told certain students were "growth spurters," those students actually saw their IQ scores jump by 10 to 15 points by the end of the year. The teachers’ belief—though based on a lie—changed their behaviour, which in turn changed the students' reality.
You can trace this same pattern through almost any system:
- Labour: The belief that a group is "un-unionizable" leads to their exclusion, forcing them to work as strikebreakers, which is then used as "proof" that they don't support unions.
- Finance: People who fear a bank will collapse withdraw their money all at once—and because they acted on the fear, the bank collapses.
- Gender: Society tells women they aren't "wired" for engineering; discouragement follows; fewer women enter the field; and the original false belief is confirmed.
In every case, the belief does the work. Reality simply cooperates.
This isn't just a modern phenomenon; it runs through the mythology of nearly every culture. Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, rebels against the celestial order, and in doing so, provides the very chaos that justifies why that order exists. Arjuna in the Mahabharata finds that even the refusal to act is a choice with consequences.
These aren't simple cautionary tales about pride. They are stories about the trap built into certain systems, where even your resistance can be absorbed and used as justification for the system's existence.
So What Does That Mean for Us?
If resistance can reinforce the system, does that mean we shouldn't resist? No. That would be the wrong lesson entirely.
The more helpful question is: what kind of resistance breaks cycles, and what kind accidentally feeds them? Aku-nna’s death didn’t have to mean what the community said it meant. The interpretation was the power move. If someone else had the authority to tell that story differently—to name it a medical tragedy rather than a divine punishment—the tradition would have lost its "proof."
At the end of his play, Rotimi asks: if not the gods, then who is to blame? His answer is human nature—pride and blindness. Emecheta’s answer is structural: the communities that enforce tradition through fear.
Understanding the paradox of defiance doesn’t make us cynical. It makes us more precise. Change happens not just through the act of defiance, but through who controls the meaning made of that defiance. The next time you feel like you're "failing" a system or a tradition, ask yourself: Is this a consequence of my choice, or is the system just trying to claim credit for my struggle?
Other good reads:
- Second Class Citizen by Buchi Emecheta
- Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
- Written by Ethel Mensah (https://ethel-elikem.github.io/eeamensah.github.io//)
