Legitimate Authority III
Last time we talked about chaos and order as implosive and explosive forces that find balance and create a citadel in the shape of a perfect sphere. Human history has yet to find that balance and we experience dramatic swings between order and chaos. Revolutions come along to break up dysfunctional orders and authoritarian regimes are established from the exhaustion of sustained chaos. What would a balanced human world and story look like?
One of the first challenges to deal with would be inertia. Individual humans go through cycles of awake and asleep for legitimate biological needs of exploration and restoration. If we have trouble surrendering to sleep or not wanting to get out of bed these are signs that inertia and a stickiness has become an impediment to our life force that is worthy of inspection.
The animal world does not reward any lagging response while the spiritual world and its persistency is committed to tradition and dogma that persists through time. These are the masculine and feminine polarities related to order and chaos that must find balance through stability and fluidity. Ocean going ships have baffles in their holding tanks so that the fluids do not slosh around and create an inertia that tips the ship over. Human organizations of all sizes need baffles too.
To this core idea of layered citadels we have assigned the name citadelization as one of the tripartite requirements for life to sustain itself and is very similar to a ship’s need for baffles and for an ideal functional balance between stability and fluidity. Life has chosen periods of awake and asleep for deep spiritual and cosmic needs. Human organizations must optimize around this reality that our personal ship is rocked back and forth by life’s waves and we must have buffers and baffles to remain upright.
Citadels are not designed to simply protect us from change, they are a balance point in the sea of life. Legitimate authority is a key citadel and a balance point between order and chaos. We humans attempt to organize into win-win collectives because, even with all our past failures at human organization, we are better together. So getting the agreements by which we create buffers and baffles between order and chaos is the essence of legitimate authority.
Religion, economics, politics, etc. etc. are all subsets of legitimate authority. And the more we can focus our agreements to keep a human organization together at the core level of legitimate authority then all the subsets will remain drama free. And that can only come from within each cell of the organism. We create a police, a legal and a justice system to arbitrate what legitimate authority is so we can be free from life’s dramas and swings. But this never works for long because these are just macrocosmic representations of the microcosmic citadels required by every living organism.
We cannot surrender our internal authority without losing external authority and becoming a slave to the system. There can be no sustained win-win agreements between slaves except to overthrow the system together and set each other free to start again. Legitimate authority is internal authority first and foremost. And the ideal internal authority has the perfect balance between stability and fluidity with baffles of citadels.
Both personal and human history has been written by sustained violations of legitimate authority. If we do not have the baffles of citadels, we will be capsized by the first big wave. See how communist infiltration of a free society always follows the same blueprint. Destroy the family. Destroy the church. Destroy private property. Destroy internal authority. Destroy trust in oneself and one’s neighbors. Remove all the baffles and all the independent centers of gravity founded upon legitimate authority and a massive civilization can be easily capsized into slavery. We have seen it over and over again.
If we owe anything to ourselves and to those humans we invite into a win-win relationship it is to never surrender legitimate authority to any outside force or organization. An authority can only be legitimate and remain legitimate by arising from each individual willpower directed by individual choice into a collective win-win agreement.
No matter how enslaved we might become by the latest temptation of external authority (in this age called technocracy, digital currencies and AI), it is actually impossible to remain alive and remain a slave for very long. They cannot co-exist. Legitimate authority always comes from within backed by all the citadels that make us sovereign and unique.
Life rewards cooperation. Life does not reward surrender. Love your baffles. Love your citadels.