TRANSCRIPT
When I was younger, I was often told by authority figures that I was anti-authority, that I was rebellious, that I talked back, that I could be rude, that I could be snotty, that, hmm, I wasn’t always respectful. And I grew up kind of thinking I was anti-authority. At a certain point, I even became kind of proud of it. I’m an anti-authority.
Well, recently I was thinking about that, and I was analyzing it and looking at it with some perspective and realizing that back then, I wasn’t actually anti-authority. What I was back then was anti-authoritarian. And that a lot of those people, most maybe even all of those people who consider themselves authorities and called themselves authorities—teachers, professors, coaches, other adults in my life, my parents—in some way, they really weren’t authorities. In a lot of ways, they were just authoritarian people.
So what’s the difference between an authority figure and an authoritarian figure? Well, I think it’s a little easier to start with what is an authoritarian. An authoritarian is someone who says that they are an authority, but they’re actually not. They’re actually someone who just has power, and they’re part of a power structure—often maybe a family system or a school or a university or an athletic team, a band, whatever it was. These people, they were in charge, and I had to listen to them. And they didn’t really earn my respect. I was just, by nature of being lesser in the power structure, I had to respect them, and I had to defer to them, and I had to listen to them, and I had to honor them, and I had to treat them as if they knew everything.
And what was the case in a lot of these different relationships I had with these people, if they really were not authority figures, they were just people who loved the power, and they bought into the power structure. And I’d been thrust into this power structure by no choice of my own. And so what happened is they told me how things were. They told me what I had to think. They told me what I had to— they told me how I had to spend my time. And I resented them. I didn’t like them. And so I rebelled against them. I fought against them. I felt like it was kind of like a prison that I was stuck in, and they were the prison guards.
Yet, as time went on, I did start finding some people who were really considered to be authorities. And I noticed with these people, I didn’t rebel against them. I honored them. I listened to them. I shut up. I wanted to learn from them. I asked questions instead of arguing with them, and I started gaining knowledge from them. I wanted to be more like them. With the authoritarian people in my life, the last person in the world I wanted to be like was like them. I wanted to be the opposite of them. I thought they were horrible people. I didn’t want to grow up to be like that.
Now, what I found that was interesting is when I did start to find more of these authority figures, I realized I wasn’t anti-authority at all. I was pro-authority, really. And I’ve always have been. I’ve always respected people who earned my respect—people who were really good at stuff, people who were smart, people who were wise, people who were kind, people who were respectful, especially adults who were kind, wise, respectful, mature, sophisticated people who had knowledge of the world, people who had knowledge of economic and political systems, people who spoke languages that I didn’t speak, people who were really good at music, people who were gifted at math and other things—physics, science, people who understood biology, people who knew a lot about the natural world, people who knew how to survive in the natural world. I had a lot of respect for that.
People who were really good at sports knew how to use strategy in different sports games, people who were good at chess, things like this. This I really respected. People who had read a lot of books, who knew a lot about history, I had a lot of respect for that. And I really wanted to learn from them. I took their advice, and in that way, I realized over time I loved that. I thought it was great.
But what I found interesting along the way is there were a lot of people I knew back in high school, even to this day, who were pro-authoritarian. They actually liked the authoritarian people. They would give their power to these authoritarian people. They liked being part of a power structure. They knew where they fit. They didn’t necessarily analyze the healthiness or unhealthiness of the authoritarian figures. They just deferred to them. They just listened. They just did what they were told. They were good little soldiers, and they followed these people who were horrible.
And ultimately, what I found is these power structures so often rewarded the people who just followed the authoritarian people. They rewarded people who were pro-authoritarian. And then at some point, when these younger people who were pro-authoritarian grew up, gained enough knowledge, and certainly learned how to fit into the power structure, that these structures would actually deem these young people, when they were old enough, they would deem them as leaders and make them into authoritarian figures. But they wouldn’t tell these people, “Oh, now you’re old enough and you fit into the power structure well enough, and you’ve deferred enough that we’re going to make you an authoritarian.” They don’t say that.
The power structures say, “Okay, you’ve now figured out enough. You now have enough knowledge and insight and age that we are going to make you officially an authority figure.” And they call these people authority figures, even though these people really are not authority figures. And I think, unfortunately, that is very, very common in the world. It’s common in other cultures. It’s common in my country, in my culture. It’s common in religions. It’s common with families. But people don’t actually open their ears and open their hearts to people who actually are authorities. All they say is, “I know the right way.” They follow authoritarian figures, but when they have someone who has real knowledge, they close away from it.
They don’t want to hear it because often what happens is real authorities, they break down the arguments of authoritarians. They break down lies. Real authorities stick with truth. They stick with the truth. They don’t need power structures on their side because they have something more powerful, and it comes from within them, and it comes from outside in the world. And that simply is truth.
So for me in my life, I really very strongly do not want to be anti-authority. I want to be pro-authority. I like authority. And part of the reason I like authority is I want to know what is real and what is true. I like science. To me, science is the search for truth. It’s the study of trying to get to the truth of whatever any particular question is. And the people who are really good at figuring out what the truth is, or who really come up with what the truth is, those are the authorities. And I want to know them, and I want to learn from them, and I want to become more of an authority myself. But I don’t want to be an authoritarian.
I don’t know what is the authority. And also, to me, an authoritarian is just kind of a cult leader—someone who has a bunch of false ideas and manipulates other people in a power structure that has been created to get other people to do what they want and get other people to just yes-yes-yes, mindlessly listen to them, mindlessly follow what they say, but not ever use a person’s own internal capacity to figure out what is truth.
Now, it’s also not so easy. We live in a very technological modern world. I mean, I remember thinking when I was a kid, I can’t even understand how a television works. I don’t really get quite how a radio works. I mean, I know I’ve had it explained to me, but really, could I build one? No, I don’t know how to do that. So in a way, it’s like—and that’s 40 years ago. Forty years later, it’s like, how does a computer work? How do all these circuits work? How does anything work? It’s very hard to understand technology. So when it comes to authorities, it’s like how do we assess who knows?
What truth really is. So sometimes when people talk and they use a lot of fancy words, especially around technological things, it’s sort of easy to say, “well they’re an authority, they know.” But there are people who fake it. There’s people who do a lot of talking about stuff, but they don’t really understand technology. They don’t understand engineering. They don’t understand electricity. They don’t understand physics really well, but they talk a good game. So they can seem like an authority.
So sometimes it’s a bit of a work to figure out who is an authority and who isn’t, or to what degree is somebody. And now I’m going to take this in one slightly different direction, a little bit away from technology and towards psychology. The idea of, in the world of psychology, in the world of therapy, what is an authority and what is an authoritarian?
Well, with things like science, math, and physics, and electricity and engineering, you can kind of ultimately come down to pretty simply what is real and what isn’t, what is right and what isn’t. Does it work? Does it not work? There are formulas, there are mathematical equations that you can ultimately determine what truth is. But when you get into psychology, it’s a little bit more mushy. And that’s part of the reason why it can be pretty hard in the world of psychology to sort out who is an authority and who is an authoritarian.
How do you figure out what is truth when we’re talking about internal stuff? When we’re talking about feelings, when we’re talking about psychological development, when we’re talking about childhood experience, when we’re talking about trauma, when we’re talking about post-traumatic reactions, when we’re talking about love and sex and sadness and growing and healthiness and unhealthiness and meanness and selfishness and altruism? These are kind of hardness sometimes to figure out what actually is truth.
And yet, to me, the people who have figured out what truth is in this area are the authorities. Or people who have figured out more of what the truth is are more of the authorities. And people who haven’t figured it out but talk a good game and sound really confident, those to me are more authoritarians.
And what I found in the world of psychology, also the world of religion, because the world of psychology and the world of religion are kind of similar, kind of overlapping cultural traditions, all these things, these are areas that are rife with authoritarians. They’re rife with subjective truth, not objective truth. Not truth that really is true, but truth that can shift, truth that can change, truth that lots of people, whole cultures, whole religions can accept as true, but maybe aren’t true.
So how do we figure out who is an authority in the world of psychology? How do you go to a therapist to know if they’re an authority or an authoritarian? A lot of therapists, they wear a tie, they look fancy, they wear nice clothes, they sound smart, they have a good degree, they have a PhD after their name, they have credentials, they have good universities. Oh, they’ve been licensed for 30 years, they charge a lot of money, they’re on insurance panels, they’re very respected. Maybe they’re doctors. They can use all the different diagnostic language. Well, does that make them an authority?
I think a lot of people, they get there and they’re so overwhelmed by the intensity of this experience of being in therapy. And also, they feel, people often feel so vulnerable. That’s a healthy part of the process of going to therapy, to open up, to be vulnerable, to be willing to change, to be willing to learn. Well, from the position of being really vulnerable, it’s very hard to sometimes to figure out if someone is an authority figure that deserves being respected or if they’re authoritarian.
And most of the time, in my experience, the people who are the professionals, the mental health professionals, do have a streak of authoritarianism in them. They are authoritarians. A lot of times they don’t have a lot of really strong backing for their point of view. They may have studied a lot of theories that are kind of questionable or sometimes are even wrong, and they stand by them so strongly, and they’re so confident. And when the other person doesn’t necessarily manifest, when the client doesn’t manifest what the therapist wants, often the therapist will blame them. “Well, you didn’t do this and you didn’t do this, and it’s your fault, and you’re stuck, and I’m telling you what you need to do that’s right, and you have to do this.” And sometimes it’s like, it’s really wrong what they’re telling clients to do, or it’s really mixed up.
So it’s very hard. I have been a person, a therapy client myself, who is in therapy with authoritarian therapists. And early on, I didn’t know if they were authoritarian or not. And sometimes they were older than me, and they seemed more mature, and they seemed like their lives were so together. They clearly had more money than I did. They had nice offices, they had degrees, they weren’t crying. Here I was coming in crying. I was lost. I hated myself. I was being open about this. My relationships weren’t good, and they were saying, “Well, you know, I’m just listening,” a lot of times, and giving me feedback as if they had their lives so put together correctly that I just, even if parts of me felt like, “Well, I don’t know if this person is any good or not, maybe they’re full of BS,” well, on the inside, another part of me is like, “You know, I just need to trust them.” And often I did, and I got burned for it. I realized over time they really weren’t authority figures. They didn’t really have that much to offer me. But by the fact that they were in a power position, they could hide it pretty well.
So how do I trust authority figures? And how would I suggest other people know who is an authority figure and who isn’t? How do you sort it out? Well, my answer ultimately that I’ve come to, and I think it’s true for everyone, and this is just me, this is my version of me thinking that I’m an authority on this subject, is ultimately I found and I believe it, and this is from having been a therapist and having watched a lot of people grow and a lot of people explore themselves on the inside and spend a lot of time listening to people.
I think everyone has a core of truth inside of them. Everybody, myself included, bad people, good people, young people, old people, children, people who are dying, people who may have no official authority on paper, people who even are authoritarians on the inside. Everyone has the potential to connect with truth. And ultimately what I see is it’s about looking within and finding the truth within us and ultimately believing that that truth deep inside us. For some people, it may be very buried. For some people, it may be less buried. Over time, maybe everyone can unbury it. But ultimately it’s about connecting with that truth within us. It’s like a bell, bing, that has the perfect tone, and that we all somehow have the capacity to know what truth is inside our relationship with our own self.
And I think, in my experience, and I’ll say this, maybe I’m an authority on it, but I believe it to be true, is that that is the ultimate gift of being a human being, that we have this capacity. And in a lot of people, a lot of family systems, a lot of cultures, a lot of religions, a lot of schools of psychology, they separate that, people from that. They separate that, the people from their relationship with their inner self, their ability to know truth. And I think what a lot of different power structures do is they want people to trust the power structure, not to trust their own self on the inside.
And what I’ve seen is when people can look within, especially when they’re really encouraged and loved for who they really are when they’re very, very young children, then it’s a natural process for young children to really look inside and trust themselves. It’s a little harder when people have gotten screwed up along the way, when people have been in authoritarian situations, when they’ve been in cults, when they’ve been in screwed-up families that are like cults or are cults, when they’ve been in screwed-up relationships, etc., etc. People get very distanced from themselves. They get distanced from the authority that’s actually inside of them.
And it can take a while to find their way back. It’s like they’ve gotten way lost on the path of life, and to find their way back to their inner self, to find their way back to their ability to self-reflect, to listen to that bell of truth inside of themselves. That’s where authority starts.
And also, well, I’m going to give one little caveat. So yes, the truth is within us, but it’s also out in the world. I think nature is a wonderful place to find truth. Bing! That tone of truth is also out in the world. So for me, those were two places that I found it in my life. Even in my childhood, I didn’t really find it so much in my family. I couldn’t trust my parents, my teachers, etc. But I could be alone in nature, and I could be alone with myself in nature, listening to my own inner voice, listening to the truth of the world in nature, not touched by screwed-up human beings.
And I developed it, and more and more and more, I developed my connection with truth, with myself. And as the result of that, when I became much more… it’s almost like I got perfect pitch. I’m not that it’s always there. I’m still screwed up, and I get lost sometimes, and I get confused, and I can go on wrong paths, and I make mistakes. But I got stronger at it. So a lot of me, I think, has it much better than I ever had it before, which is the ability to just say, “This is truth. I can feel it. I know it. It’s coming from within me. It’s connected to the truth of the outside world.”
And when I have that connection with truth, when I meet someone as an authority figure, I can assess the truth within them—the tone in their voice, the look on their face, the look in their eyes, the way they hold themselves, their body language. I can assess them against the truth within me, and I can just feel this person—somebody I trust or not. And that’s not the whole picture because then I have to listen to the words they say. Then I have to listen to their intellectual arguments. Then I can listen to the consistency in what they’re saying, and all this can add up to how much do I follow this person as an authority figure and how much do I not.
Are they 40% authority and 60% authoritarian? Are they 20% authority and 80% authoritarian? Are they 90% authority and 10% authoritarian? Trying to sort it out because ultimately, I really do want to be pro-authority, and I really do want to be anti-authoritarian. And I think that’s the clue how I’ve done it.
And I really do believe, from what I’ve watched in other people and from what I’ve watched in myself, is these things I’m talking about with myself are human capacities that ultimately everybody has. So I think, yeah, and even can ultimately figure out what is authority and what is authoritarian, and they can figure it out in themselves and transfer it to their relationships with others in order to learn and grow.
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