All authority is fraud.
If a person has what it takes – whatever “it” might be – their having it and demonstrating it are all that’s needed to take them seriously.
You entrust your very life to the captain and copilot of your flight only because you believe they have what it takes to get you to your destination safely. Authority has nothing to do with it. Know-how and competence are the only relevant factors.
Here’s a simple thought experiment. Think of two captains working for the same airline, one with a flawless record and the other with a long list of flight mishaps and near tragedies but, inexplicably, they’re still flying. Their authority is exactly the same. If you trust your life to people based solely on authority, you’d trust both captains equally because both of them have authority equal to the other’s. If you care about whether they in fact have what it takes to get you to your destination safely and you’ll only trust them if they demonstrate know-how and competence, you won’t trust the hazardous captain, no matter whether they’ve got the same authority as the flawless captain or not.
In other words, if you care about your safety and are smart about it, authority doesn’t enter into the question one bit.
What’s more, notice that in order to answer your “will I survive the flight” question, you’d need access to the facts of their flight records.
So, now you can see what authority is really for.
Authority enables those who do not have what it takes to occupy positions they are unfit for and take actions that they have no business taking. Authority is also the excuse for keeping obscure or secret the facts which a smart person would need to answer the “do they have what it takes” question.
If we handled our needs intelligently and rationally, especially those which we now handle stupidly and insanely by means of authority, there would be no such thing as authority. There would only be a record of fact, because that’s all we’d need. We would not be told whom we should trust and whom we shouldn't trust, circumventing consideration of the facts. We would have transparency – something that never prevails in authoritarian situations. By “authoritarian” I don’t mean situations where authority is overbearing, but all situations which operate on the basis of authority.
Without authority, there is no “need to know basis” because, then, we would decide if we needed to know the facts or not. No authority would have stolen that decision from us and made it for us.
In other words, to the extent that a society is founded and runs on the basis of authority, to that extent it is irrational. And after sufficient time operating irrationally, it becomes insane.
That’s where we are now after more than 10,000 years of so-called “civilizations” and far longer under the domination of authority on smaller scales.
There are two kinds of question about the legitimacy of authority. We need to differentiate them and keep them separate.
One kind has to do with practical benefits and detriments. Lots of interesting stuff to explore there. Do we in fact need authority, even if it is a fraud? Could we in fact get along without authority, even if it’s not a fraud? In which situations do we absolutely need authority for us to handle them beneficially, and in which don’t we? Are there cases where we should use authority even if it’s not necessary? Etc.
This post is not about those questions. This post is about the fraud question. It is not possible to intelligently answer the practical questions without answering the fraud question first.
So, given that we were taught and everyone seems to believe that authority is not a fraud and is necessary and beneficial for handling human affairs, if it turns out that the real reasons for authority are:
to enable the inept to do what only competent people should be allowed to do; and
to serve as an excuse to obscure and hide relevant information, substituting it with a, “Because I say so!” from someone whose only claim to the right to say so is that they, too, were “authorized” to be in that position and act like they have that right,
then, regardless of practical considerations, let’s at least be honest and admit that authority is fraud.
Then we can have an intelligent conversation about how to use the fraud, if at all.
We were made to believe that authority is one thing. If it turns out to be a very different thing, and especially if it’s a thing we do not want and would not accept if we knew the truth about it, then “fraud” ought not to seem like a huge leap to us.