Authority, what is your attitude to authority? Is it cliched? Is it complex?
- Thread starter Lark
- Start date
I wouldn't join the army
If you join the army you hand over your responsibility to think for yourself to a coercive hierarchical pyramid full of guys practicisng violence against people who have never done them any harm
Why would i want to get involved with people like that?
I think you missunderstood the function of the army...its supposed to protect you from other bad guys.
Army makes you more prudent and wiser, and gives a sense of reality in you, especialy for the INFJs.
The people we need protected from are the government and the corporate interests our government has climbed into bed with
My family have always fought when the country is threatened but the threat now is our own 'leaders'; even the external threats are ones that our interferring leaders have created
No it doesn't
It teaches you to follow orders; it uses you as cannon fodder in foreign illegal wars fouight to make corporations rich and then it sends you back into civilian life with a drinking problem, mental trauma and few qualifications of any use in civilian society
But no person is always good or always bad (even though there are people who are pretty darn close on either end).
In a group of people, there will be some who have done more good things and some who have done more bad things. And they all have different reasons for all of the things they do. But when you put them all together and tell them all to do the same thing, they mostly choose to believe they are less than what they are, less than human. They put aside their own reasons in order to follow an authority which is acting upon totally different reasons. They are doing a bad thing without taking responsibility for the direct consequence of their actions. Even if some of them know all of the authority's reasons and agree with them, even if they do recognize that the people they are fighting are human beings with the potential for good and bad, they are choosing to to the bad thing and kill them. It is always a bad thing to kill another person. Even when it is necessary for one's own survival (immediate self-defense) it is a bad thing. So it is a much more bad thing to kill someone for someone else's reasons, even if the other person has also degraded his or herself into killing for the reasons of another.
Even if one group is acting on the orders of a person whose ultimate goal is to kill the other group, the targeted group bears the individual responsibility of convincing their attackers that they are following the reasoning of a person seeking to do bad things. We bear a responsibility to remind each other to think independently. Killing, even in self-defense, may not be necessary where humanization can be reached.
We may have many freedoms in this country and others which have been historically denied to many, but many people today in our country and others forget that the responsibility to uphold these freedoms is not one which falls upon the government or the army or any corporation, but upon every individual. And any individual who chooses to act upon the reasons of another, the reasons provided by a figure of "authority" who may have already taken reasons from another, is degrading his or herself into less than what he or she truly is - an independent person with independent reasons and feelings.
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Nope, doesn't work that way. I have to respect you for you to have any authority over me. If I don't respect you as a person I'll think you're just some know-nothing-at-all dolt barking orders and I don't listen to dumbasses with an entitlement complexe.
Obedience is not the mean of authority. Obedience is not a end in itself, is not obedience for the obedience sake.
This is what most people don't understand when it comes to authority, because they think like children.
There are parents who think obedience is for obedience sake, and thus they don't have authority, and their childrens don't respect them as parents. Because the aim or mean of authority is not obedience. That is not authority, that is stupidity.
This is what most people don't understand when it comes to authority, because they think like children.
There are parents who think obedience is for obedience sake, and thus they don't have authority, and their childrens don't respect them as parents. Because the aim or mean of authority is not obedience. That is not authority, that is stupidity.
I think I understand what you're saying - that authority is merited not on the basis of a person's ability to tell someone else what to do, but on the basis of the person's knowledge over the situation in question and the trust of the obedient party that the authority is respectably giving instruction which will be for the good of all involved?
I think this is a more optimistic view on authority. But it hardly ever occurs that the obedient party makes his or herself enough aware of the authority's reasoning and motives that they would make the same decision of their own accord.
Plus, one who is given a title of authority is under constant temptation to restrict information from the obedient party, and every piece of information is critical for the making of an individual decision, therefore no person should ever assign another person the power to tell them what they should do.
When ever I meet an authority figure I just ask what would dresden do, then promptly start burning down buildings.
I dont see authority as something illegitimate to be challenged and overthrown nearly as much as I am disappointed by its representatives.
That's because one stems from the other
Create a hierarchy and corruption and oppression will emerge because coercive hierarchies are the breeding grounds for those things