“It’s the Authority, Stupid!”

Isn’t amazing how a person can dance all around a common theme without seeing it? It seems to me I’ve been doing that in my recent posts—both implicitly attack the authority inherent in many current systems. Yet I was clueless as to that until just now.

In the case of the scientific method, I think that authority has been accumulating in the system, most notably over the past 20 years (give or take). The process itself is an excellent means of acquiring and evaluating information. The difficulties begin when individuals are asked to unthinkingly accept all “scientific” findings (often without an understanding of the differences in rigor among the many research methods possible) as Revealed Truth. The insult continues when individuals who were not participants in some study are expected to accept the findings as relevant to their lives. It should be obvious that research on vitamin efficacy conducted on smokers might not map neatly to nonsmokers—but what about more subtle differences among individuals? If there is something to the idea that brain specialization and lateralization depend to some degree on handedness, how should lefties interpret all the brain-scan science coming out—especially since the studies may not ask the participants about handedness? What about ambies (ambidextrous individuals)?

While more obvious means of exercising authority are visible in other systems, science has its share of personalities, as I mentioned in the previous post. And we needn’t even start pointing fingers at individuals—the idea that any research that has the name “Harvard” or “MIT” attached to it is necessarily better than work from Utah State University or the University of Cincinnati is very common. What magic imbues Harvard and other so-called Ivy League schools with infallibility? If anything, I daresay those top-tier schools’ researchers and support staffs (and those who fund all their research) probably believe the hype overmuch. This hierarchy extends to states, too—research from Western states (with the USSA squarely at the top) is typically seen as better in general than that coming from non-Western ones. But why is Swedish research necessarily better than Lithuanian research? Might not other areas’ differing contexts and histories offer fruitful avenues for exploration? I recall looking down upon the Polish landscape while flying from Lithuania to Georgia last summer (don’t ask about the route); I was very surprised to see that Polish fields are shaped very differently from American ones, or even from their neighbors’ fields. Surely there’s some reason(s) for that.

All that said, self-help authors who peddle their systems tend to be worse, it appears to me. Lobo recently bought some books on the subject of a certain popular diet system; and from the little I’ve seen of them, they’re fairly absolutist: one must follow the rules precisely or problems are guaranteed to ensue. Never mind the inconvenient fact that many people lived moderately healthy lives without following this diet for at least a few thousand years ... It’s as if allowing the possibility of anything slightly different somehow negates the entire system, which is utter rot, of course.

I am not enough of a social scientist–historian to offer an intelligent guess as to whether these trends are causally linked to the increased authoritarianism we’ve witnessed in the USSA’s coercive rule systems, or whether the relationship is correlational and perhaps more indirect. This much seems to be accurate: as any system grows, its complexity makes it easy for authoritarian types to say, “Just trust us” with increasing frequency—and far too many individuals do. I don’t know which is worse—that too many of us succumb to authority (for a variety of reasons); or that to the degree that we do submit, we help allow current authority’s hubris to keep progress in check.

The phrase “command and control” is not usually thought of as a short list of steps, but perhaps it ought to be. Anyone and anything, whether parent, advisor, state-based government, self-help guru, or system that tries to command certain behavior, ideas, or attitudes is attempting to control. It is our responsibility to ourselves as free individuals to resist nonthinking compliance, to critically examine the system and its claims, and decide for ourselves if it might work or not.