The Man, capital M.

The greatest mandatory structure for someone my age is school. It is a compulsory activity, meaning “required by or as if by law” according to Merriam-Webster. Meaning, I don’t have a choice. Technically I could stay home, not go, but then there would be consequences. And if I go I technically don’t have to do my work. But if I didn’t there would be consequences too. So, by extension, this assignment is a mandatory structure of my life. If I didn’t do it, and then didn’t do the next one, or the one after that, two things would occur: 1) I would acquire a bad grade, and 2) I would not be challenging my mind and learning new material to broaden my perspectives on life. Personally, the latter is more important to me. But the former is what really matters to society. If I don’t get good grades, my chances of getting into a good college drop, and while not mandatory, college is yet another structure set up to unlock for those lucky enough, abundant resources and prescribed slots in the economy. My education also allows me to have the tools that let me understand this very system which I can then critique. And the more I understand it, the more thoroughly opposed I am to being “mold[ed]… into a slot” (46). My best option is to become educated and learn the best ways to evade the mandatory structures as well as I can. So yes, I do the assignment, even though I do not want to.

My distaste grows for the system as I learn about the complete normalcy of corporate America, the gross disease of constant consumerism, and the mainstream thought that plagues our ability to change. In a world of insane people, everyone can call themselves sane. And those self diagnosed sane people write the rules of society, and “society is what decides who’s sane and who isn’t” (44). In the ward in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest there is a rigidity that is impossible to break from. But McMurphy uses laughter as a jolt to wake those deep in the trenches of their constricted normalcy. His laughter is like my somewhat educated grab for something different than business as usual. It is hope. When he first arrives at the ward, he laughs and “it’s free and loud and it comes out of his wide grinning mouth and spreads in rings bigger and bigger till it’s lapping against the walls all over the ward…I [Bromden] realize all of a sudden it’s the first laugh I’ve heard in years” (10). It is easy to get stuck in a rhythm, and hard to break from it. The nurses and staff at the ward have implemented strict schedules and rules about when the patients can eat, watch television, and play games. This kind of structure is exactly what McMurphy is trying to get the patients to believe they can do without. He is trying to revive them with laughter. During a group meeting, McMurphy loudly whispers a joke to Cheswick and then “leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard that nobody else could say anything for nearly a minute” (145). What he is achieving is disruption, which, for anyone who’s learned about direct action, is a main goal of protests. “If we don’t get it? Shut it down!” goes a popular chant heard at climate strikes and protests. When people walk en masse down a street, or stand with their arms chain-linked through each others’ in front of a building entrance, or a frequently traveled road, they are disrupting business as usual. They are stopping the incessant flow of mindless traffic, and insisting that people take a second to hear a specific message. McMurphy is protesting, and he “was getting a lot of kick out of all the ruckus he was raising” (145).

But, as the sad moral of this story goes, he too gets beat by the system. The Man, capital M. By page 159, he “don’t crack a smile.”