Governmental authority claims to be the primary obligatory authority guiding YOUR behavior. If you accept the validity of this claim, then you are obliged to obey under any and all circumstances - even where it conflicts with your own moral standards. Is there any instance where you would place your own judgement above your government's law? If so, then you do not recognize its claim to authority as valid.
I disagree with the premise that governmental authority claims to be the primary obligatory authority guiding MY behavior. It is not the government that keeps me from robbing a bank or killing my neighbor. Those are things I would not do regardless of the government.
If you believe you have the right to decide when to obey - to pick and choose - then it is not authority, just a suggestion.
I reject this premise as well. I do not know if you are a parent or not, but as a parent I have authority over my children (while they were children), but they did pick and choose and often faced the consequences of those choices. Does this mean that a parent has no authority?
I spent 20 years in the Marine Corps, I had people in authority over me and I was in authority over other people. Never once was that authority absolute either direction. If I was given an order that I felt was unlawful it was my duty to ignore it (and it did happen) just as if I gave an order that was deemed unlawful then it was to be ignored.
If authority has to be absolute to be authority, then there will never be such a thing as we are not robots but humans with free will. Even in your utopia there would be no authority, which is what I said anarchy was and I was told that was incorrect.
And if you don't even recognize their authority as valid, what right do you have to support government as an authority over anyone else? To do so is to suggest that you have a right to decide when to obey, but everyone else doesn't. It's an assertion of an inequality of rights; in which case you must prove a basis for this distinction between you and the other 325 million people who you are subjecting to an invalid governmental authority by your support.
I recognize their authority as valid, but not absolute. Nobody will ever had absolute authority over me, but me. NO matter what system is in place.
Precisely. Nobody has absolute authority over you. You want to say they have authority, it’s just not absolute, but what does this really mean? It means you decide in every instance what you will do, whether you will obey their commands or not. So where is their authority? What power does it exert? None at all. You are the only authority over you.
So no, the parent does not have authority over the child. The officer does not have authority over his subordinates. There is only an illusion of authority, a smoke-and-mirrors display that is only maintained by the willingness of the subordinate to forget who’s in charge.
Now, you may choose to embrace the illusion, as per your well-established absolute authority over yourself; but do you claim such authority over me? Over my children? Over anyone else but yourself?
You are reasonable enough to recognize that, no, surely you have no such authority over me, any more than I have over you. So why will you not bring your actions into alignment with your own knowledge and understanding? Why will you vote for someone to act out this charade of invalid authority over me? Why will you support a system based on a premise you know to be false?
There is only one reason - fear, and the resultant desire for control. If, by your actions, you acknowledge my absolute authority over myself, I may do something you won’t like, or even something that may hurt you. This you cannot abide. And so you will lower yourself to live a lie; to support an illusion, an injustice that has been dangled before you as a temptation. A sword, to wield against your brother, so that you may draw his blood before he can draw yours.
And high above circles the vulture, mouth watering with every stroke. You have given him his meal, and worse, knew what you were doing and did it anyway.
We have now come full circle back to my original definition of anarchy, the nonrecognition of authority. Since there is no authority, in your view other than that we have over ourselves, there is no society.
A society needs rules and order, but rules and order require submitting to an authority other than yourself.
Money become meaningless, as who has the authority to say how much that money is worth? Each human decides for themselves how much the money is worth since they authority of themselves and nobody else.
Why should I pay attention to the stop sign, it has no authority over me.
With this view, you have no authority to tell me that the land you are standing on is your private property. You can tell yourself it is yours, but you cannot tell me or anyone and if you do, we have no reason to listen to you. We now have total chaos, which is what I have stated anarchy was from the beginning.
If there is no authority other than yourself, then there is nothing that is off limits, everything is fair game and nobody can complain to anyone else, as they have no authority to tell them they are wrong.
If there is no authority but self, then morals a meaningless word, there is only what each individual feels is right.
An employer has no authority to tell an employe what to do or how to do it, the employee can just do whatever they want.
A woman can tell a man not to rape her, but she has no authority to make him stop so he does not need to listen.
Yes indeed, 138 pages, more than 1000 post and we are back to you proving my original view of anarchy was correct after all!
That calls for a nice IPA!
Have a great night!