"When I fight Authority..."

The question isn't so much whether I have any respect for authority, but rather to what degree does authority deserve respect.

Sometimes I write things and then forget all about them, and then I either lose them entirely or put them where I happen to run across them at a later date. I found this on my computer this evening, and decided to clean it up a bit and post it. It may be a bit rambling, but I obviously spent most of an evening writing it and I don't feel like simply discarding it. So here it is.

I have recently been accused of a degree of irreverence in my attitude toward authority. I plead guilty.

This accusation has prompted me to examine the concept of authority. First, I should note that the word “authority” refers both to both the people who wield power and the power they wield. In this essay I’m talking about both. I’m talking about the people who have (or think they have) authority as well as the supposed power such people may wield (or think they wield); though more the former, since we live in a world where such power is meaningless without a person to wield it. (If you fear that the machines will one day rise and take this power away from us then stop reading right now and go and watch a Terminator movie marathon.)

Also, I need to distinguish between “authority” (the sort of thing your boss has over you, or your teacher, or a cop, or a judge) and “Authority” (the sort held by an indifferent, impersonal, ill-defined Government that, it theory, derives its powers from the governed but which in actuality claims and enforces powers for itself that no one ever asked us about).

I have heard it argued that the acceptance of authority, to one degree or another, is a necessary evil. Myself, I have never seen it as such, and I don’t find it particularly necessary or necessarily evil. But the fact is that we live in a society that requires each of us to accept some degree of authority over our persons, either in the person of a police officer or in the moral strength of religious leaders or in the content of a constitution or in the grip of the shadowy and poorly restrained State. None of these are necessarily bad or evil, in fact mostly they are far from evil, but they all have a potential to be evil.

The danger in all this acceptance of authority, a danger that always looms over us, is that surrendering authority over ourselves to others so often leads us to deny responsibility for our own actions, or worse to accept the will of Authority as our own. (And I am now speaking of Authority as an entity in and of itself; note the capital-A.)

But to get back to the charge against me: Yes, I have an irreverent attitude toward authority, and I mean either authority or Authority. It can be respected when it merits respect, deferred to when it merits deference, obeyed when it merits obedience, but I cannot see that it ever merits reverence and I have never revered it.

You may argue with my attitude, or with my definitions: You may, for example, think that the authority of a cop or a judge should be spelled with a capital-A, or that the authority of the clergy deserves reverence. Me, I don’t see the law as an agent of distant and impersonal Authority and I have reverence for no religious beliefs, especially not my own, so the agents of religion get no reverence from me. I am speaking about my opinions, and if you want someone else’s opinions go and read a different blog.

Yes, I am irreverent, and I make no apologies for that. Actually, I’m rather proud of it.

The Blues Viking

The thoughts expressed here are mine and if you don't like them you can get your own damn blog.