Adonis Diaries

Principle of Legitimacy? And Authority figures bias

What rules and how authority is challenged?

Perceived Legitimacy is based on 3 rules:

1. People who are asked to obey to authority have to feel they do have a voice: if you speak up, you are heard and negotiation is put on rail

2. The law has to be predictable. A reasonable expectation that the law is not going to be broken or cancelled or “reformed” in a short span of time.

3. Authority has to behave fairly. All groups, ethnic groups, religious, minorities, genders, economic classes…have to be treated in the same way under the law.

All 3 rules have to be applied consistently.

Otherwise, major and convincing reasons must be clearly stated to the people.

How you punish is as important as the act of punishing itself.

To bring Law and order is dependent on legitimacy and how strong it is perceived.

Suppose the election law is perceived and documented to bias particular groups. Isn’t it legitimate that citizens surge against this blatant deviation from the agreed upon rules.

If the Constitution is not applied consistently or a few clauses favor particular groups, it is legitimate to question authority.

If the parliament votes to extend its tenure beyond the Constitutional mandate, it is legitimate to resist the political system.

If the old rich classes and deep-pocket institutions have far more leverage to lobby for laws that are not fair to the whole citizens, it is legitimate to start a political and social opposition movement.

If law enforcement is not playing by the rules and consistently, the neighborhood will perceive their law enforcing officers as illegitimate.

For example, a new tactic is applied to round up randomly delinquents based on administrative laws and not for actual crimes committed, or the crime is minor and the incarceration period is not proportional to the crime.

Do you believe the neighborhood will ever cooperate with law enforcement during serious events?

Do the neighborhood believe that Law and Order is a great concept for the community?

For example, US law enforcement in large cities incarcerated 60% of Black juveniles in the last 2 decades.

In North Ireland, the British army regularly rounded up the catholic youth and randomly searched houses. The result was a total fiasco of these tactics.

Israel still apply the British administrative detention law enacted during its colonial mandated period of Palestine.

Israel has detained “administratively” 60% of the Palestinian youth and for long periods without any charges: A consistent tactics for de-humanizing the Palestinians and humiliating them.

The Authority bias poses two main problems:

1.  The track records of an authority is sobering.

2. Authority figure craves recognition and reinforce their status. The cloth makes the priest, the military officer, surgeon, and every profession.

Every day, more symbols and props are used to signal “expertise”. It is kind of authority changes like fashion, and society follows this fashion in blind obedience just as much.

Do you know that Crew Resource Management (CRM) program, for instructing airline pilots, co-pilots and the crew to openly discuss any reservations they have on difficulties facing the flight, contributed more to flight safety in the past 2 decades than any technical advances? Pilots were considered as God during the flight and no one in the crew dared challenge his decisions.

Do you know that up the year 1900, patients were better off avoiding physician offices and paying them visits for medical predicament? The poor hygiene practices and bloodletting methods harvested the “healthy” patients who believed this authority figure of a white-clad physician is going to cure them.

Why not a single economist, out of 1 million economic professionals, failed to predict the Timing of the financial crash of 2008?

And yet, the only job of these handsomely paid economists are to forecast economic growth and interest rate fluctuations.