Illusions of Authority

ILLUSION: possession

• A common illusion is that authority is a possession of the leader.
• This picutre hides the relational character of authority. Authority expresses our agreement to be together.

ILLUSION: unaccountable

• When authority is misunderstood as a private possession, authority becomes unaccountable. If authority is "mine," then I have no need to give an account of it to anyone. As a personal possession, the leader's authority does not come under the community's review.

ILLUSION: privilege

• Authority distorts social power into privilege. Rather than a function of community service, authority becomes a special status.
• Once authority is imagined as a personal and privileged possession, mutuality and accountability are forfeit. When the leader is thus distinguished "from the rest of us," we are literally dispossessed of our own power.
  

IDOLATRY

• Such distortions spawn idols of obedience ["patriotism"!]. Obedience becomes a virtue for followers only.
• When the community's obedience is addressed to the leader or ideology that the leader represents, obedience is no longer a virtue of leadership.

OBJECT of OBEDIENCE

• There is a crucial confusion here: the leader shifts from being seen as the servant of the larger good and becomes identified instead as the object of obedience. The process of social -power is short-circuited. The energy of the group is diverted from the pursuit of its larger purposes, to the pursuit of social control.
• When Mahatma Gandhi and MLK challenge this idol, their disobedience safeguards a deeper obedience to the greater good at its core.