Authority

Some thoughts on our relationship with authority.

I’ve been thinking about authority lately and what this means to us in our daily lives. It might not be something we think about very much. What’s your relationship with authority like? It might be more complicated than you think. It might remind you of authority figures in your life and the relationship you had or have with them, and it may or may not be an easy reminder. I know people who both slavishly follow certain authority figures for no apparent reason and buck against others, for no apparent reason. They both want what that figure means and to be able to rebel against it. It’s very complicated.

There might be something about the type of authority certain people exhibit and how this makes us feel. There are obvious authority figures in everyday life - the police, teachers, managers and other people who enforce rules. What do those rules mean to us? Rules are generally meant to give us some social order and form a code for fairness and safety. Do we have private feelings about what kind of authority is ok and the kind that isn’t? How do we feel about rule ‘followers’ and rule ‘breakers’? Do we feel contempt for those people who follow the rules, as I know some do? These people are interesting because their contempt can mean that they feel they are somehow better or more deserving than other people, but they might also follow traffic speed limits - or maybe they don’t. There are always people who think that certain rules don’t apply to them but they do to everyone else, to the annoyance of everyone else. What happens when the lack of rule following leads to consequences? We can think of public authority figures who are using authority in a contemptuous way, in a kind of ‘look at me I can get away with anything’ kind of way. But there are consequences to this too, very serious ones. It’s very dangerous when narcissists are put in a position of authority because then that authority is used simply as a means of power and control to meet a need in the narcissist.

And there is bullying, which is another kind of authority. Bullying is authority gone a little bit mad, bullies are clever and pick their targets carefully. They use the shame of their targets to get away with with it, and it is almost always never witnessed by others. The target is isolated and entrapped by authority. As adults, bullies can learn to be very charming and sociable. It’s a sadness that they themselves have likely been the victim of a bully, and this is the only way they can see themselves in the world - by trying to feel powerful over someone else.

We live in a society where we appear to give authority to others, politicians, for example, but does this actually work in practice? How often is a politician replaced by another that we didn’t give our vote to, and therefore holds a position of authority that we didn’t give our permission for? In this circumstance we might feel betrayed or relieved, depending on the behaviour of the previous post holder. We are reminded, though, that we have might have little say in who is given - or who takes - the authority.

How do you feel about authority in your life? Are you an authority figure yourself? When we look at our own relationship with authority, sometimes it is surprising.