So there's this moment in the book of Genesis where God tells Abraham to go to the mountain with his son Isaac and offer him up as a burnt sacrifice.
So I had a conversation on election day where this guy told me government officials should always be considered suspect.
So there's some minor workplace rule I wasn't following until a supervisor called me on it–so I started following it.
It's one of the constants in human life, and these are just a few ways it's cropped up for me in the last week: authority. We all have deep enough feelings about the word that you'd almost think it ought to have four letters. We love authority. We hate authority. We suspect authority. We want authority. We think the right people ought to have authority.
But what is authority? Is it as simple as, "I have the power to compel your obedience, so you'll do what I say because I say so"?
Sometimes it feels that way. In my upcoming novel, Nothing Collapses, we take an extensive look at the Rough River Dam. It's a real life dam, and Kentucky residents will likely know it well from spending time at Rough River Lake. Beautiful place. Beautiful lake. I used to go there in the autumn with my family, admiring the reds and yellows of the leaves and skipping rocks with my little sister. It's a beautiful place to rent out a cabin in the country and get away from the city for a week. I have fond memories of the place.
But there's a complex history to Rough River Lake. One that cuts to the heart of our suspicion of authority.
You see, there wouldn't be a Rough River Lake if there weren't a Rough River Dam. A hundred years ago there was just the Rough River. That lake only exists because the dam was built in the 1930s under the auspices of the TVA–the Tennessee Valley Authority. And beneath the gentle waters of Rough River Lake lie the remains of family homes.
Families that were driven out of their homes, willing or not, under Eminent Domain. And I'm not here to argue the merits of the TVA, or the New Deal, or any of those things. I'm not here to praise or condemn. You could argue that public works projects, like the building of Rough River Dam, performed a crucial role in ending the Great Depression. You could argue more credibly that they gave needed work to many Americans who were able to feed their families and stand proud knowing they had a respectable job.
You could argue, in other words, that the Rough River Dam and the many other projects like it did more good than harm.
But I ask you to put yourself in the place of some rural Kentuckian of the 1930s. Times are hard, but you're working the same land on the side of the Rough River that your family has been working for generations. It's a settled way of life, living by the turns of the seasons. You plant in the spring–tobacco, maybe–and then the days grow hot and you tend the crops. Then the days grow shorter, cooler, and you harvest in the fall. After the cold of winter you start the cycle over again, sowing new crops for a new year.
And this has been your family's life for as long as your grandparents can remember.
Then one day you're visited by a man in a nice motorcar. He's not from around here, he's well-dressed, and his movements are the quick, precise movements of a big-city man. Chicago, maybe, or New York. He tells you he's from the Tennessee Valley Authority and that a dam is going to be built, which will leave your family's land, your family's home, completely underwater. And they'll pay, of course–they won't pay what the land is worth, but they will pay. And you'd better take the money because in a year or two the only permanent residents around these parts will have gills.
He doesn't put it as starkly as that, of course, he's a professional and he uses big, soft words. The iron fist comes with many layers of velvet glove.
But the point is clear. There's no question of choosing. There's no question of negotiating. There's no question of a free exchange between equals. The government is taking your land and your only choice is what to do with that fact.
And it's not only you. How many hundreds of families across the southeastern United States faced exactly this situation? How many people had to move, how many families uprooted, how many lives and lineages irrevocably altered by the TVA and other programs like it?
That's authority.
Again, I'm not here to condemn. It may well be that these programs did more good than harm. But there's no denying that they did harm.
And this is just one example of what authority can do. One government program, at one time, in one place. Governments have done much harsher things in other times, in other places. Where men in power contemplating the problems of state abstractly have made decisions that irrevocably changed the lives of millions.
So maybe we should be suspicious of authority. Question motives. Wonder what kind of people can stand themselves after making decisions like that.
I'm no bleeding heart, myself. I think terrible decisions sometimes have to be made, and ultimately those terrible decisions will rest in the hands of the men who are capable of making them. But then again I'm a bit of a rebel and I certainly have no love for authority for its own sake.
What to do, then, in a world where it's possible to lose all you've worked for because someone far away has decided it's for the greater good? Hold authority accountable? But how to do that when you're only one person caught up in the machinery of a modern society so big and so complex you'll never understand it even if you study its workings every waking moment until they put you in the ground?
And that is the question. Maybe that's why so many people fall into apathy about politics–it's too big for me, it's as inevitable as the weather, I may not like it but it's not like I can influence it in any meaningful way. Or at the opposite extreme, they get caught up in vast political programs so enormous and abstract that they never have to worry about touching reality. Or just pick the party that suits their prejudices just to put an end to the need to think about things.
And that may be the key: to think things through. To start from yourself and your own life so you can understand how you, personally, ought to relate to authority. The sad fact about people is that most of them do not think. Most of them do not decide. Most of them do not take the initiative to create the lives they want to live.
Which gives authority much of its power. People who don't have the agency to think, decide, and create are easy to lead along. They'll be driven by the crowd, or the messages in the air, or whatever distracts them from themselves for the next nine seconds. Because they don't have a clear aim determining their actions, they'll accept the priorities of others, the judgements of others, and ultimately the decisions of others. Or at least they won't resist them.
People who don't know what they want eventually come under the influence of people who do.
Which is another of those sad facts about people: they don't want to be free. And don't misunderstand me–if you go to the average person and ask her if she wants to be free, of course she'll say yes. We've all been told we're free and that it's a great thing to be free. We all gather on the lawn to watch the fireworks on the Fourth of July, say, "Give me liberty or give me death," and go back to work the next day to do a job that makes us wish we were dead.
I'm not blaming the authorities for any of this, to be clear. If you're unfree and uninspired it's entirely your own fault.
Because if you put authority at the heart of the question, you're looking at the matter all wrong. Authority may be something like the weather–you hope the storm won't come today, but there will be a storm someday. But the answer to the question isn't to become a meteorologist.
Some people say we should be suspicious of authority. But what do they do about it? Do they become journalists? Do they root out corruption? Do they expose the misuse of power when they find it?
Not usually. Usually they watch the news, maybe share a post on social media about how awful some situation is, or how detestable the politician all their friends have decided is detestable is. They confine themselves to watching the authority–ostensibly with a critical eye, but ultimately with a kind of resigned acceptance of whatever it does.
And why? Because they don't want to be free. They've given up on their freedom, choosing to make themselves into passive pawns of whatever fate brings their way. And there are all kinds of reasons why they do this.
They've decided they can't get what they want, so it doesn't matter what happens.
They worry about what the neighbors will say.
They're waiting for that right moment that will never come.
They have good intentions and dream great dreams, but somehow always get distracted.
They let others–often friends, often family, often lovers–convince them it's their duty to give up whatever it is that gives them the best chance at happiness.
The root of all of it, as always, is both infinitely simple and infinitely tragic: they won't claim their own authority.
No one is really free who doesn't know what they want, or who isn't willing to do what it takes to make it a reality. People who look at authority as something external, something purely outside of them that's imposed on them, will never be free. All the political freedom in the world will not make the slightest difference to a man if he's internally decided he's not free.
And unfortunately, that's the exact situation for so many people today.
But for those of us who are determined to be free, there's plenty of reason for hope. It begins by internalizing the fact that you are not powerless. And that can be difficult–the world we live in does a poor job of teaching people they have their own power and agency.
But authority isn't only something outside of you. It's something within you as well, and you can learn to use it and work with it. And it begins by recognizing that you can have the life you want, if you choose it and commit to it in action.
Life is always going to be hard to bear. Whether you claim your freedom or not you'll still suffer, you'll still have to work hard, and you'll still hit bumps and misadventures along the way. You'll probably put as much work and effort into unconsciously making yourself unfree as you would into consciously choosing your freedom. Nothing will ever make life easy. All you really have is the ability to choose whether all that effort and all that suffering will be for something… or for nothing.
The road is long, and hard. Sometimes you'll have no idea where the right path lies, or how to find it. The princes of the earth may help or hinder you, or (which is best) they may ignore you entirely. But somewhere in you there lives that glimmer, maybe just a little glimmer, of what you would do if only you believed you could.
Keep that glimmer alive. Hold it close and let it warm you. Commit to following it through. It will not lead you astray.
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