Dear Friends,
It seems to me, we have returned to appeal to authority, exchanging the human hearted authority of God… for the cold hearted authority of scientists, despots and bureaucrats. Just as the clergy of old seldom reflected the actual will of God, instead reflecting their own, today’s authorities pervert science and the “will of the people” to their own selfish ends. In both cases their authority demands unquestioned obedience. Not obedience to God, the public good or science, but to the usurper, who claims to know the will of God or is omniscient in matters temporal. If this is not obvious to you… you haven’t been paying attention. When you are not allowed to ask an authority a question, without getting berated, he or she is not a real authority. They are masquerading as an authority to shut down debate.
We have grown to worship authority in an unhealthy way. From our early days in the public school, where we are told to mind the teacher, we are inculcated into a cult of authority. Our games teach us to obey the coach, the rules and the spirit of the game. By the time we get to college we believe like a zealot, everything we are told by authorities. So much so we dare not burn a calorie thinking about it. Obviously, part of civilizing a child, is to teach respect for the rules and authority but to teach acquiescence to authority and mindless rule following, is to prepare children to be slaves, not citizens. A citizen is taught to listen to the authorities but also to think for yourself. Ask why, and if the supposed authority cannot answer, they are not worth listening to in the first place.
Actual authorities are often right, but they are often wrong as well, because they are subject to the echo chamber effect. That is why God gave us a brain. We didn’t get wings, yet we fly, we didn’t get gills, yet we operate underwater… and we refuse to use the one thing he did give us. Instead delegating our thinking to the authorities. No sane person would say an actual authority on a subject should be ignored. That would be to cut off a primary source of information. A wise person however understands that authorities always live in echo chambers. The predominant ideas get echoed and magnified to the point no one dare expose a weakness. That is why it is so hard to change a paradigm. Which shows us why we must debate the authorities, because we stand outside that echo chamber.
One of the advances of the Enlightenment was to abandon appeal to authority and replace it with discourse and debate as the arbiters of truth. Of course, post modernists don’t believe in objective truth anyway, therefore there can be no way to get to an accord with them. So debate and discourse are only means to distract, while power is amassed, to force the issue in favor of the post modernist. The post modernist is not interested in coming to terms but in total victory. Their supremacist attitude allows them to discount anyone else opinion as that of an oaf. Why would a superior person listen to a subhuman? This attitude makes appeal to authority all the more attractive… and dangerous. There is nothing like an echo chamber filled with arrogant pricks to lead a people to disaster.
A sure sign you are not dealing with an open minded authority, is when you see someone attacked personally for asking a question, while the question is not answered. Even someone who is mentally retarded has the Right to ask questions. If someone claiming the mantle of authority cannot even answer the question of a person with an IQ of 80 or less, they are not an authority, else there is a factor their peers haven’t thought of. In that case the idiot is smarter than the genius. So we see that everyone has potentially significant input. It is only the arrogant supremacists that seek to return to appeal to authority. Because of their supremacist attitude. Appeal to authority, as it turns out, appeals to their ego, fueling their arrogant sense of superiority. It would be best for appeal to authority to stay passe.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
