Madness and the Evaporation of Authority (Part II)

THE EVAPORATION OF AUTHORITY

(In conclusion to Part I yesterday)

This unorthodox proposal about language and thinking has far more corollaries and consequences than I can touch on in this essay. Here I want to draw attention to one peculiar consequence: the gradual evaporation of authority.

Authority is in essence a relationship between one person and one or more others. The fons et origo of authority is the author – the person. By extension we can exert authority over dogs and other animals, because we understand them to be conscious, however when we say a person has authority over an area of land, we don’t mean that person commands the soil, the trees and the animals but that person has authority over the action of humans within that area. The primary meaning of authority is a human relationship.

Authority is not necessarily authoritarian. It can be organisational, educational, defensive, ludic, social, spiritual and so on. But we do not talk of an engine having the authority to move a car. It has merely power. When I lift my coffee cup to my lips, I do not exert authority over the cup. I merely apply mechanical energy.

This observation is etymological and phenomenological.  It is not a proof. Each of us must notice for ourselves. What do you mean when you use the word ‘authority’? For you, is there a difference between ‘exercising authority’ and ‘controlling something or someone’?

With the rise of abstraction and its offspring, objectivity, authority tended to move away from the word of a man or woman to objective facts, impartial rules and institutions. If we collude with this movement, we give away our own authority and it accrues to the institutions to which we defer. If we do not take charge of our own savings for retirement, pension funds take control of them. If we do not care for our own health, the medical establishment tells us what to do. If we do not educate our children, the state will do so, and so on. As we hand over our responsibilities to institutions and policies we disempower ourselves.

The tendency to think with abstractions is like a force built in to our language that draws us away from personal authority and self-reliance and towards universal, structured solutions. The much mocked ‘prepper’ movement in the USA is a reaction against this force.

The apotheosis of abstract thinking in social organisation is Kant’s categorical imperative which urges us explicitly from the particular to the general:

“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”

Indeed, it claims that the generalised abstraction has a higher moral authority than the particular. This is the moral justification for the transfer of authority from the individual to the institution. During the Enlightenment impersonal institutions governed by rules and protocols began to proliferate and exert more and more influence on society. Many of these institutions were most excellent, from friendly societies to the Royal Society. The latter was a locus of prodigious invention and discovery. Only latterly has it sadly traduced its origins.

Nevertheless, in spite of this historical transfer, authority remains essentially individual. Authority is meaningful only insofar as it is a personal relationship. If it lacks the personal component, that which persists is mere power or control. It follows that institutions are authoritative only to the extent that the people who run them have authority, that is they have mastered themselves sufficiently to manifest authority, e.g. an authoritative judge, headmaster or referee. When the person who wields institutional authority has no personal authority something is lost, as recently exemplified by the fatuous pronouncements of Justin Welby and the petty behaviour of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner.

When institutions – misleadingly called “authorities” – become just systems which control people, we can say, if we speak precisely, that they no longer exercise authority. And when eventually we notice that our institutions lack authority but seek to control us, we arrive in 2024. The distortions consequent on this loss become grotesquely manifest when a 54-year-old woman carer is jailed for posting on facebook, and a career criminal who physically endangered people is not.

Thus have our institutions fallen. Whatever the overt political structure, when a Government has power but no authority it moves towards dictatorship.

THE RESILIENCE

As authority evaporates from our institutions we can ask, “Is it condensing elsewhere?” Where, now, if anywhere, can we find authority? Who are the new nobility, and what are they doing?

Some of them are the independent thinkers and honest scientists who publish on independent media such as The Daily Sceptic, Rumble and Substack.

Early on in the Covid debacle authoritative voices such as John Ioannidis, John Lee, Mike Yeadon, Sunetra Gupta, Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff spoke up. Practitioners like Peter McCullough, Paul Marik, Pierre Kory, Meryl Nass and Tess Lawrie honestly reported their own experience. They refused to comply with the institutions within which they found themselves at the beginning of 2020. Many have been ejected from those institutions precisely because they have the integrity to assert their authority.

Media figures such as Toby Young, Mark Steyn, Neil Oliver, Del Bigtree and JP Sears advocated honesty when the mainstream media became propagandists.

Researchers, clinicians and statisticians like Carl Heneghan & Tom Jefferson, Jessica Rose, Joel Smalley, Clare Craig, Robert Malone and Steve Kirsch relentlessly publish real data that contradicts the coercive mendacity of the poodle press.

Independent minded academics like Sinead Murphy, David McGrogan and James Alexander think and publish outside the tortuously slow academic press.

Many other writers and countless independent bloggers are fighting the tsunami of psychosis. I am delighted that there are far more such people than I can list, and far more than I know of. Beyond those who are publishing are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people doughtily remaining honest in the face of institutional chicanery and corporate malice.

These people have been labelled “The Resistance.” That makes sense. However I offer another name as well, “The Resilience”, because I do not care to be identified by what I reject but rather by what I embrace, and that is resilient, responsible authority.

All these people have authority. It is founded in their personal experience, their own values and their courage. They strive to tell the truth as they see it and are open to correction. They are not grandiose. They do not seek to seize control but rather to reduce the control that others exert.

MY CONTRIBUTION

My small part in this is threefold.

Firstly, and above all I do my best to be polite and truthful, which at times means being sceptical.

Secondly, I write blogs such as this.

Thirdly I have written a strange book, The Bug in our Thinking and the way to fix it.  It is not expository – it is not about. It is not instructional – it is not advice. It is a story – which perhaps may affect. It is a story of many stories and like all good stories it cannot be reduced to facts, or a moral or guidance. I do not seek to make others think as I do, but rather to offer indirectly means of deepening or clarifying our thinking. I commend it to you and all your friends, relations, colleagues and adversaries.

This blog, like all writing, will become more and more easily misunderstood as it falls away into the past. However each of us, if we are willing to perceive the sometimes very painful present, can strive  to see clearly, to speak truthfully and to fuel our resilience. Eventually some of us will have to restore authority to the institutions that have betrayed us.

 

Hugh Willbourn is the author of “The Bug in our Thinking and the way to fix it”.

According to a recent review, “Willbourn’s book is exceptionally accessibly and clearly written—a marvel of non-professional-academic, or real, philosophy.” It is available by clicking here, and internationally as a paperback, ebook and audiobook at Amazon.

 

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