Not Remotely Good Enough

I’m very encouraged to see articles like “Authoritarianism is making a comeback” getting around. And this one is over a year old now. As far as I’m concerned, every step in the right direction is a good one. And yet I read it with a pit in my stomach, although a little more hopeful than…

Thought You’d Never Ask

Much if not most (I’m tempted to say all) of our thinking about authority has been perverted by indelible imprints of authoritarian upbringing, education, and incessant social reinforcement. We’re all brainwashed, literally, and it started before we could even talk, when our parents first negated and violated our wills, and sometimes our rights and bodies,…

Getting Free From Authority

Authority is a story we tell each other. That’s all it is, no more. Telling a story does not make it true. Telling it again and again does not make a story more true with the telling. Repetition automatically creates credibility, but this effect is a cognitive foible that we need to be aware of…

Supremacism

What is supremacism? Most people seem to think it’s superiority taken to extremes, but that’s to misunderstand how minds work. The need to be treated as superior isn’t the kind of thing that’s good in moderation but a terrible in excess. The need to be treated as superior is a defect of the psyche that…

Cynics

Cynics make a basic and glaring mistake of characterization. And they do it twice. One, they characterize all of us by the worst of us. Two, they characterize each one of us as we are at our worst. So our best isn’t credible enough to characterize our nature, but our worst is. That hardly seems…

Real Wisdom

I see spirits. But don’t worry, I’m not alone. So do you. Of course I don’t mean mythological, paranormal, metaphysical, ethereal spirits, (although I don’t rule them out, either.) I mean something much more real and pragmatic. I’m talking about the spirits which all those other kinds of woo-woo “spirit” are more or less just…

Anarchy Means Chaos — In Figments of the Paranoid

[Updated August 26, 2022] The entire argument that “chaos will ensue” from lack or absence of authority – and I mean lock, stock, barrels and, of course, plenty of smoke – rests on nothing more than blind faith. Look as hard and as far as you like. Blind faith is all you’ll find under all…

Authority as Excuse for Violence and Domination: The Insanity of Authority

Note: This is a rough excerpt from one of the chapters of my upcoming book. Authority is used to excuse power exercised for no good reason or for bad reasons, which is worlds apart from authority implied by knowing what should be done and the competence to achieve it. Yet we call both by the…

Authority? Think Again

Me, the authority on anything? Naw. I only maybe feel like I am, sometimes — and the feeling itself, I’m pretty sure, is just a waning vestige from decades of authoritarian brainwashing. I’m authoraholic in recovery. I think it all depends on your starting point. Note: Second only to our right to remain living safely,…

Power: Lust Or Addiction?

After six decades of life, I still can’t believe how eagerly people bend over backward to deny the obvious and swallow whale-sized lies just so they can cling to myths of the need and merit of following “leaders”. For all the supposed sophistication of “developed” societies, when it comes to running a society, we think…