On Authority

Everything you know is very little. Let me stress that by stating it again but less Yoda like. You know very little. And I’m not saying that as an attack on you, the reader. It is true of everyone. The things you know are the things you have seen and experienced for yourself. The rest of everything in your head are things you believe. That collection of things you believe is the vast majority of what is in your head. Therefore what you know, what you’ve seen and experienced for sure, are only a small portion of what is in your brain. Everything else you have taken on authority.

Now in our modern society with its modern sensibilities about things (which I’m certain will seem silly to the next few centuries of people and absolutely ridiculous to the people further on) we’ve come to find the word authority and the idea of taking something on authority as a bad thing. And why not, is it not better to know things for yourself? Well sure, who can argue with that. Except that there are many, many things which are difficult to know for ourselves and even more that are impossible. For instance, I know how a nuclear reactor works, or at least I believe I do. I’ve read about how a nuclear reactor works. I’ve studied nuclear science. I’ve learned and memorized a variety of equations dealing with the subject. I’ve watched nuclear fuel being put into a reactor, and I’ve watched electricity come out of the turbine to power an electrical grid…well not really that last one, but that’s not the point. The point is that I’ve seen all these things but I’ve never seen a nuclear chain reaction, and I never will, because it happens at the atomic level. I can see plenty of indications of nuclear reactions, but those are just inferences. Things that tell me that something is indeed happening and it seems to follow along with all the things I know should be happening.

The same is true of History. None of us witnessed the American Revolution or the Civil War. We have war memorials, battlefield guides, documents, books, and historians that all tell us that those things happened, but in reality all we are doing is trusting someone else’s story. In the end that is what the vast majority of our knowledge is, information given to us via sources, more often than not sources we don’t know and have never met. And we trust these sources. We trust our parents when they tell us stories about ourselves as children that we don’t remember. We trusted our teachers in elementary and middle school, and then lost that trust because we trusted our high school teachers more and they said things that disagreed with our earlier teachers, and so on through college as our trusted professors told us stories that conflicted with our earlier teachers and even our parents. We trust the author’s of books to tell stories truthfully (at least non-fiction books) and to present us with fact based, well-reasoned arguments when they tell us these stories. All this trusting in what is ultimately Authority, of one variety or another, and we have the audacity to say that taking things on authority is bad.

The reality is that taking things on Authority is only bad if you do so blindly. And now I’m going to make a statement that you aren’t going to agree with. All of us are blind, including you. We blindly accept the majority of the information we are told. We have done so our whole lives. Some of us have experimented with the world quite a bit and yet as much as we may have peaked from under our blindfolds in some ways, it gets tucked around our eyes in others. I have no solution to offer you concerning your blindfold and how to get it off, nor do I claim to be a man who can see. I only claim to be someone who recognizes that they are wearing a blindfold. That I enjoy reading articles in print and on the web that agree with my opinions and will readily accept any “fact” they throw my way. That I get angry reading articles I don’t agree with and will point out the logical and factual errors in the writer’s work as readily as I can. That I accept history on an almost face value, and that while I have studied some of it heavily, I will never know for any certainty what really happened. That I accept scientific articles based on opinion as much as good rigor on the part of the scientists, although with how politicized science is, it is difficult to find real scientific rigor. That I think that reading many different articles about a given topic, from disagreeing viewpoints, makes me feel like I know something about that topic when really all I’m doing is parroting someone else story…who is likely parroting someone else. That is what I do, because that is what we all do. Some of us are better than others, but we all have our blindfolds on.

So the question then is, how blind is it okay to be? None if you can get to it, but like so many goals it remains unachievable. But it is the goal. The idea here is to know as much as you can, which is to say if you want to know something you have to see it and experience it. Like I said, an impossible goal, given history and other subjects are beyond our senses, but you do the best you can. You try to find Authorities you can trust and who you can believe, because in the end that is what you are doing, you are believing them.

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