Authority

Obvious? Sure.

Respect for authority is built into our moral foundations as a key evolutionary mechanism for facilitating group dynamics, leadership, and sexual selection.

"No man has any natural authority over his fellow men." -Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Hierarchical social organization is closely related to authority. Some philosophers and authoritarians over-emphasize the importance of hierarchy, using the debunked [1][2] pseudoscientific concept of the alpha male to justify acting like an asshole. Social media has turned this into a phenomenon called the manosphere. Jordan Peterson is a psychologist and philosopher popular with these men because he reinforces the importance of dominance hierarchies on the premise that they are "natural" and therefore good.

Authority is Foundational

Jonathan Haidt points out that progressives generally fail to make appeals to our instinct for authority, preferring to focus on other foundations like justice, and see hierarchy as inherently oppressive. This puts them at a disadvantage when it comes to persuasion, since a large portion of the public still responds strongly to projection of authority. This has helped allow things like alt-right neo-fascism and the manosphere to proliferate.

"I've seen a human pyramid before. It was very unnecessary." -Mitch Hedberg, Strategic Grill Locations

It is natural for those who find themselves at the top of the social hierarchy to want to justify their disproportionate wealth and status by saying they deserve it because they are smarter, harder working, or more morally upstanding than other people. Promoting this belief encourages bootlicking and discourages taxation. This is why progressives tend to oppose hierarchies.

Authority is Domain Specific

How can we make progressive appeals to authority that fit with our equal justice ideals? The key is to make authority domain specific rather than intrinsic. Instead of "some people are better than others" it's "some people are better than others at some things." Until you have proven yourself in any given domain, your authority and status is non-transferable. Anyone who claims to support meritocracy would be a hypocrite if they deny the superiority of domain specific authority in the hierarchy of systems of authority.

Authority of Expertise

This will take a lot of restoration of trust in institutions, but the authority of expertise is the only real authority we truly have in an age of extreme complexity and specialization. We must be able to trust experts, and their education and experience needs to command authority within their domain. However, there are so many new technologies that age is no longer a reliable indicator of expertise, which has undermined the the traditional structures of authority based on it.

This is why for many fields, up-to-date technical certifications are more important than university education or years on the job.

Society needs to have new standards for quickly recognizing expertise they can trust.

Authority of Experience

Age has often been used as an excuse to command unearned respect outside of one's domain of expertise. Many young people have been burned when they were told to "respect their elders" but found their elders' expertise lacking. This is especially true in an age of technology, where the young have a significant advantage over the old when it comes to learning and adopting new tech. It is no longer the case that old people are wiser about things generally, when so many relevant things arrived long after their critical periods had closed.

A new model is needed, where we can respect the wisdom of experience, but acknowledge that with age does not necessarily come expertise. What matters is how long you have been working in the domain in question.

While we should still respect our elders in terms of care and dignity, when it comes to advice we should respect experience. Reinforcing this notion through education and ritual the way that "respect your elders" used to be will help solve the kinds of problems we are seeing with younger generations joining the workforce and being perceived as difficult. [3][4]

A Higher Authority

Religious appeals to a "higher authority" are powerful. The figure of god has the ultimate authority when it comes to truth and morality. [5][6]

This authority enhances the placebo effect of belief, since the more faith you put in that authority the more impact its commandments have on your psychosomatic response. In medicine, the placebo effect is enhanced by the medical theater of the hospital, the doctors in their white coats, the marketing of the pharmaceutical industry, and a variety of other factors that convey the authority that they know what they're doing and their medicine will work. This is evidenced by the fact that if you keep all the theater but replace the medicine with sugar pills, it often still works. There is a remarkable demonstration of this in magician Derren Brown's "Overcoming Your Fears" special.

We view doctors as having the authority to heal us, and many times that authority is enough to do the job. If you can do all of that in your own head just by believing in the authority of god, why wouldn't you? This is why believers think they have embraced an obvious truth, while atheists think they have embraced a lie. Unfortunately, the kayfabe of religion prevents believers from actually framing the argument this way, so they portray god as self-evident reality rather than a very useful brain hack.

Moral authority is another important aspect of the god concept. It provides a paradigm for moral behavior, and a powerful reinforcement mechanism that can significantly help people be better people. It also imbues those people with that moral authority, causing them to annoy people with their self-righteousness. Or, if the moral authority is productively channeled, it allows leaders to charismatically inspire people to do the right thing, even when it isn't the easy thing. Moral authority is important, and there needs to be a shared vision of what that looks like so that it can be used to unite people instead of polarizing them.

This is the most important authority that progressives must find an analog for if they want to strongly appeal to this moral foundation. That is what the metaculture wiki is attempting to provide a model for.

Status and Why it Matters

Humans naturally pursue status. Seeking status incentivizes many competitive behaviors that lead us to accomplish great things. Status seeking for its own sake should be taboo, but social media and capitalism have led to its promotion.

We naturally want to be the best at what we do. We naturally want to have more power and therefore more freedom to do the things we want. If you can have all of the money and all of the political power, then there is nobody who can tell you what you can't do. However, this form of status seeking ends up taking away the freedom for many more people, which is a crime against utilitarianism.

The solution is to allow many different paths to status besides money and power. Achievements in sports, art, work, family, community building, and other areas can allow anyone to experience the happiness benefit of high status without diminishing the freedoms of others. Robust systems that provide balance of power allow for the necessary hierarchies in society to form, without concentrating power in any single one.

This discussion of status with Will Storr gives an excellent overview of why we value status and the many ways we can achieve it.

Why Status Matters

What We Confer Status To Matters

One of the major issues with using money as the primary meterstick for success is that we allow those who participate in grift capitalism to achieve equal or greater social status to those who invent things, perform scientific research, teach our children, or dedicate their lives to altruism.

Rutger Bregman's School for Moral Ambition is working to change these social norms and encourage our best and brightest minds to pursue the goals that align with their values instead of the ones that offer the biggest paycheck.

Order Over Chaos

The instinct for hierarchy is often described as the need to create order from chaos. The natural state of humanity is chaos, disorder, and disharmony. Only by exercising authority and leadership can great people motivate others to impose order on that chaos. This requires someone to have a master plan, and loyal followers to execute their vision.

This represents a Euclidean, designer-based mindset where the only source of order is the rational design of a conscious mind. It neglects the possibilities of emergent order that self-organizing systems represent. This is ironic since the biggest proponents of natural hierarchy are also huge fans of capitalism, which is the best example of a decentralized, self-organizing system humanity has ever created.

The fractal model of order through emergence allows us to satisfy our need for imposing order over chaos without the need for authoritarian impositions on freedom.

Authoritarianism

See authoritarianism for discussions of autocratic governance through consolidated power and absolute authority.

Types of Authority

Sociology has mapped the types of authority and leadership styles. This article outlines them.

Hidden Brain - Rising to the Occasion discusses the psychology of leadership.

Authority of Screens

We tend to overestimate how much we can trust people who appear on a screen. In the past, this authority was earned. You didn't appear on a screen without a billion dollar corporation backing you, checking sources, and being held accountable for the information that was broadcast. We have since shifted to an environment where anyone can appear on your screen without any vetting whatsoever. But the old people haven't recalibrated their trust accordingly, and many have taken the contrarian position that the unvetted information is more trustworthy than the vetted. Young people have not been taught modern media literacy because who would teach it to them? You have to know it before you can teach it!

In any case, here are some videos.

Max Weber - Authority and Power

Power, Dominance, Authority - Max Weber

Respect My Authority!

John Mellencamp - Authority Song

Fela Kuti - Authority Stealing

The juxtaposition of the next two songs highlights the different approaches that progressive and conservative take when it comes to authority.

Pennywise - Fuck Authority

Elevation Worship - Authority