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Good Reasons to Reject Authority

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Version 0.12
Copyright © 2008-2009 by Zack Smith.
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From time to time I encounter a person who does not reject, or even question, authority. I always find them baffling at first because, after all, blindly accepting authority is a patently unintelligent thing to do.

If a person has any intelligence and has not been brainwashed, they will at least question authority. Indeed, a smart person will have a natural inclination to question anything that seems illegitimate -- including any bad argument or rationale -- and the prime example as regards authority is that of whether an authority figure deserves to have any power at all.

Children growing up naturally understand the importance of liberty and free inquiry. That understanding is hard to suppress. Kids ask who, what, why, where and how. Yet in order to learn about the world, children make an exception for their parents and other adults. Rather than question, kids come to believe parents without questioning.

What a bad authority figure does is, he or she effectively induces people to re-enter that childlike state, to give up desires to question, to inquire freely and act without arbitrary restraints. The bad authority figure induces people into the childlike state of giving to that bad authority the enormous privilege of not being questioned or opposed.

After the natural inclination for questioning and liberty has been suppressed and the authority gains immunity from any challenge by the people it has duped, the problem becomes one of what the dupes don't do:

  • The important questions they do not ask.
  • The thoughts and actions they do not allow themselves.
  • The actions by authorities that they do not challenge.

The Reasons

Why reject an authority? Ah, let us count the ways.

They are incompetent.

  • A mayor mismanages a city intot the ground.
  • A CEO mismanages a company.
  • A preacher claims to represent the truth yet spreads obvious lies and fairy-tales and uses poor logic.
  • The appointed officials who mishandled the Katrina response.

They are less intelligent than you.

  • The dumb criminals who videotape their own crimes and upload the videos to YouTube.
  • The dumb cop who tries to confiscate video-cameras to prevent evidence of his wrongdoing from being made public.
  • The dumb drug dealer who tells bystanders not to videotape his broad-daylight drug deals.

They are thugs.

  • The mafia boss who demands allegience and money.
  • The banker-criminals who hold entire national economies hostage lest we give them "bailouts" i.e. protection money.
  • The police-state goons who try to intimidate the public into submission.

They are corrupt and self-serving.

  • A government scientist deliberately ignores key evidence about 9/11.
  • The county health inspector who takes bribes.
  • The election official who is rigging elections.
  • The Congresswhore taking legal and illegal corporate bribes.

They punish independent thinking.

  • The religious leader who demands belief and conformity yet offers no proof of any supernatural beings.
  • The corrupt police chief or city official who demotes or punishes any underling that looks into forbidden topics like "why did the rich person not get arrested for having drugs" or "where did all the confiscated money go".

They are power-mad.

  • The cop who was abused as a child by an authoritarian parent and therefore suffers from a generalized feelings of guilt and powerlessness, resulting in a need to control and punish other people, often employing the cold-hearted practice of telling innocents they are guilty, when actually the cop's years of malfeasance has made him/her guilty beyond forgiveness.

They are allied with people who harm you.

  • Congresswhores take legal bribes from Israeli organizations. Note that Israel has been implicated in bringing about 9/11 by independent investigators and indeed about 60 Israelis were arrested after 9/11. Some of those arrested had been witnessed to be filming the collapse of the Twin Towers and cheering when they fell.
  • Congresswhores take legal bribes from corporations that are destroying the environment.

They are not paying you.

  • The employer whose paychecks bounce risks encouraging whistleblowers. Article.

They are not including you.

  • The employer who refuses to give employees a personal stake in the company (stocks etc.) ironically receives more criticism, albeit mostly behind their backs or manifested in the form of employees quitting to pursue better prospects, than an employer who shares power.

They have not done due diligence.

  • The city official who imposes a new ban or tax without asking for public input or without listening to it.
  • An official who wants to start a new project (e.g. a foreign invasion or a building project) without checking whether their own country or state can (A) do it successfully to completion or (B) can even afford to or (C) whether it will have good consequences.
    • Invasion of Iraq.
    • The Shanghai bridge built too low (recently in the news) so that many cruise ships cannot reach the cruise ship port.

They are disastrously short-sighted.

They are rabble-rousers i.e. stoking public hatred.

  • After 9/11, many people wanted to strike back at the Muslim world, which makes emotional sense to people who believe that Muslims perpetrated 9/11, as corrupt authorities claimed and continue to claim. But even just a tiny amount of analysis or understanding of physical laws shows that Muslims did not perpetrate 9/11. Consequently one realizes that somehow criminal elements in the government were behind 9/11, surely even members of the Bush administration. Click here for information on the 9/11 cover-up.

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