Authority is one of those tricky concepts that nobody can pin down. It’s about power, it’s about faith, it’s about speaking from a place of experience. It’s about convincing or persuading other people that you know more about something enough for them to stop believing what they think and start believing what you think.
At least that’s what I think it’s about, but I don’t think I have any real authority on this issue so you don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to. For the rest of the article I’m going to assume that your going to assume that I have authority because I am the author of this post. But you can accept this statement as a disclaimer. I understand that moaning about people writing from a place of authority, when I have no palpable authority is hypocritical and useless. Needless to say I’m going to do it.
It’s just annoying. When you really start thinking about authority it’s overwhelming. Take this tax scandal we’ve got at the moment. People in my circle of friends believe that our beloved Prime Minister has no authority over us because he’s never really experienced what it’s like to scrape a living in the life of us ‘peasents.’ That’s why we’ve all spring boarded from this tax scandal to “THROW HIM OUT” as if that’s it, we’ve got the evidence, we’ve got the authority, get rid of him!
Of course Cameron doesn’t help, with his response of throwing more information as if it’s evidence that he continues to have the authority to make decisions for us. But the response is to say ‘well why didn’t we know this before?! You must be hiding something else!’ And yet why would he have shared it if we have never truly accused him of it? It’s a catch 22 paradox. Yet those around me seek authority over arguably the most influential force of authority in our country. That’s why it’s about power. That’s why it’s confusing.
I mean that’s the problem of speaking from authority on the macroscale. One person of power versus a mass of people, who all seem to agree on a point, who feel that they can come to enough agreement to accumulate enough power in their own voices to match the authority of this one big voice. But that’s basically communism right?
But this is just politics and life. My main issue is with people who write from a position of false authority, who assume authority or abuse authority.
Again, authority is like a bad fart at a dinner party. You don’t know who’s got it, you don’t know where it’s come from, it’s source or ownership, you just know what it smells like. Equally, there are times when it reeks around a person and brings that person to the forefront of a conversation and dependent on that persons personality and the attitude of the room, you either laugh about it or kick them out. But there is no real way to indicate a lack of authority. You just know if somebody doesn’t have it.
It’s when people assume authority that they become dangerous. Like Donald Trump talking about building walls with no economic or general architectural plan. Or like people having a go at parents, when they have never brought a kid up themselves and have no knowledge of what it takes to be a parent. Or when rich or well off people make general assumptions about the lives of those ‘beneath them’ based on meeting one or two people. Or when people like Sam Smith find out about issues and causes that are plaguing society and suddenly act like something needs to be done and begins to tell everybody about what they are doing, as if it is the only thing that can be done, in an attempt to rally people behind them. These people who take no previous study in to what other people are doing, have always been doing, or how other people have been affected by these issues. These people have no time for other people, because they are too busy sucking on their own thumb on a desperate attempt to inflate their own self-worth.
Sometimes we lack authority over our own voices. We say things we didn’t mean, about people we love or about issues that we have no knowledge about. It’s these moments when we are most dangerous to ourselves. When we have to stop and smell the roses and seek desperately for that foul pungent odour of authority. Do I really deserve to have an opinion on this matter? Can I truly say I have enough experience in dealing with this issue to begin spouting my point of view? Do people need to hear what I have to say? Can I offer anything new or beneficial? Where is my authority?
This is probably one of the oldest questions of authorship. Ernest Hemingway said he couldn’t write about bullfighting until he’d been struck in the side by a passing horn. You see, I now tried to borrow authority by quoting somebody else. Are you even going to google to see if this is true? Maybe I made it up to sound believable. But it doesn’t matter because I’ve been to bull fighting and it’s basically the same thing. See now I have authority over bull fighting and Ernest Hemingway because I’ve said I experienced it. But have I really experienced it? How do you know? And what does that really have to do with bull fighting or Hemingway? Authority by any connection is questionable.
My point is… Think before you write, think while you read, never assume that anybody cares what you think and you’ll probably get more people reading if you stop caring about what they think. But you lose your soul and humanity if you go down that route, and there’s nothing more important to a writer than those.
But hey. It’s just my opinion guys!
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