The nature of authority
In the latest post we talked about the death of Alexis Grigoropoulos: The death of Alexandros Grigoropoulos (drugs, guns, cops and tasers part II). Since then, Greece continues to be shocked by riots, protests and various forms of resistance against authority.
Some people even managed to occupy the national tv network, at the same time, that prime minister Kostas Karamanlis, was speaking in front of his political party.
Link: www.youtube.com
These protests and actions have caused similar demonstrations in other parts of the world. However, all these protests raise some very important questions. In european countries for example, we don’t see such actions. We don’t see violent protests happening every day. Many of these actions are could be considered unacceptable by western standards. Nonetheless, these "uncivilized" protests, have found imitators. Even in USA, a country where police authority holds supreme, we saw the occupation of the New School University in New York: http://www.newschoolinexile.com/.
What is considered acceptable or not is usually determined by the current authority. And it is authority we will discuss about in this article.
One can see authority in many different ways. In a first view, we can say that authority is something that has appeared in one form or another in most human societies throughout time. It can serve many purposes, and certainly, plays a major role in the shaping of societies and civilizations.
Most people in western societies view authority as a protective and beneficial force. Authority is there to preserve law and order so that we can continue with our peaceful lives. All offenders are caught and punished. However, we must not forget two things about authority. First, authority is compromised of people. Secondly, authority can be described as a system unto itself.
When we say that authority is compromised of people, we try to state something that many people forget. Authority is not to be treated like a supernatural alien entity, but rather, as a group of people which can be studied like all groups. Many times we tend to refer to notions just as the juridical system as something that lies in some higher plane, and we forget that it is controled by people which possess the same limitations and abilities as us. Additionaly, the institutions which control authority constitute certain environments. Wherever we have a certain environment, we have a certain set of attributes which are deemed adaptive. Whatsoever, these abilities, might not be the ones that are most productive for general happiness and social prosperity.
A very nice view on the subject can be seen on this video on youtube, concerning the concept of Pathocracy (even though I disagree with many of the things this guy says, the core concepts he describes are quite good)
Link: www.youtube.com
When we say that authority is a system unto itself, we mean that it constitutes an entity that forms its own laws that shape its interaction with itself, the members that consitute the system and the other systems which are affected by it.
Furthermore, man, as a social being, has evolved, through natural selection, various evolutionary traits that determine its attitude towards authority.
It is now that we must refer to the experiments of Stanley Milgram and Solomon Asch concerning obedience and conformity. Detailed explanations of the experiments can be found in wikipedia: Asch conformity experiments, Milgram experiment
What Asch’s experiments have shown, is that subjects many times changed their beliefs in a task that constituted in a simple task of deciding which straight line, among three, was the longest, due to peer pressure. Even though Asch considered his experiments to show that man can resist peer pressure, nevertheless, they have been stable hallmarks in the scientific literature of obedience.
Solomon Asch
Milgram’s experiments showed how someone under the guidance of an authority figure, which in the experiment was a scientist in a white coat, could torture someone. The experiments raised a lot of uneasiness, since they had been done only 15 years after the end of the second World War and showed some evidence that nearly anyone could become a torturer, as long as he was ordered by a figure in authority. Wikipedia quotes
Milgram summarized the experiment in his 1974 article, "The Perils of Obedience", writing:
The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.
Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.
Stanley Milgram
Of course, we can’t leave out Philip Zimbardo’s experiment on imprisonment (Stanford prison experiment) which has also been transfered in the movie Das Experiment. Wikipedia quotes
Prisoners and guards rapidly adapted to their roles, stepping beyond the boundaries of what had been predicted and leading to dangerous and psychologically damaging situations. One-third of the guards were judged to have exhibited "genuine" sadistic tendencies, while many prisoners were emotionally traumatized and two had to be removed from the experiment early. After a graduate student Zimbardo was dating objected to the inhumane conditions in the prison, and realizing that he had been passively allowing unethical acts to be performed under his direct supervision, Zimbardo concluded that everyone including himself had become too absorbed in their roles and terminated the experiment after six days.
Philip Zimbardo
As you see, many elements are combined to create a strange mixture which has evolved through time into modern societies, where self-claimed democracies, ruled by chaotic bureaucratic institutions, allow various groups with different and opposing opinions and forms of actions to survive, while at the same time, trying to supress their existence to allow the existence of the system of authority.
The line between right and wrong is highly blurred, due to the many interacting groups. The western states dissaprove the use of violence, while at the same time they use it to control their citizens. What is beneficial for society is confused with what is beneficial for those in power. In this article we presented some very basic stuff concerning notions and scientific facts about authority. In future posts we will delve deeper into the subject, presenting additionaly political views on this matter.
