[ren]

Interesting question: is authority a bad thing?

Why "bad" and what range of meanings of bad are meant? is my first response to the question..

I'm not sure if I understand, after reading all the responses on this thread, what everyone believes "authority" to be. So it's difficult to answer my first response at this point. There's quite a range of implications of meaning in some of the posts. So I would have to ask the question, at this point, what is authority? Where does authority occur and why?

One of the ways I view society is functionally, in that it's a collective, ongoing problem solving process, and it requires some degree of organization to achieve solutions. That's a very general statement. From there you can begin to look at specifics, like the problems being solved, and the organizational strategies employed to solve those problems.

When societies become complex, have mutliple layers of specialization with concurrent role assignments, and those are organized in a way to accomplish tasks, there are different strategies for organizing the group to accomplish those tasks.

For example, in a participatory democratic based collective, with a productive purpose, within a larger, complex society, the decision making can be completely decentralized and each decision may require a group debate to assure agreement. This can be a very messy process in which little actually gets accomplished, if the group is large and the tasks are complex, like building automobiles from scratch. It can work fine in a small group, say three guys that do remodeling services and each are fully competent in all the tasks involved. I don't know of a single for profit corporation of any size that has even attempted to experiment with a participatory, democratic organizational strategy. Compare that strategy to, for instance, a military. If a military was organized as a participatory democracy where everyone votes on battle plans and how they will be employed, how would it fare when it comes up against a highly organized, chain of command, well trained fighting unit? I don't think that takes a lot of effort to imagine.

I'm just suggesting that type of analysis as a way of looking at organizational principles in order to understand what authority is about, so that some sort of way of making sense of the lead question can be come to, through an evaluative process.