Reducing political “authority” to its component parts

[Moorlock]

A couple of days back I was doing an informal cost/benefit analysis of my self-employment tax resistance, and one of the benefits I came up with was this: "Making the tax collector seize the money from me, rather than handing it over voluntarily, more authentically represents the sort of relationship I feel we have."

Kind of droll, but there's something behind this that's more than tongue-in-cheek.  It wasn't until yesterday that I thought about it more carefully.

I was about half-way in to Hannah Arendt's Between Past and Future where she starts to discuss the nature of political "authority":

Since authority always demands obedience, it is commonly taken for some form of power or violence. Yet authority precludes the use of external means of coercion; where force is used, authority itself has failed. Authority, on the other hand, is incompatible with persuasion, which presupposes equality and works through a process of argumentation. Where arguments are used, authority is left in abeyance.  Against the egalitarian order of persuasion stands the authoritarian order, which is always hierarchical. If authority is to be defined at all, then, it must be in contradistinction to both coercion by force and persuasion through arguments.

It seems to me that political authority typically evolves from an origin of mixed coercion and persuasion.  It is the pinnacle of political achievement, and almost all political bodies strive for it (with the exception of a few totalitarian systems which are content to rely mostly on coercion).  A political system of 100% persuasion — the anarchist ideal — is what takes place in non-state settings: a group of friends deciding what sort of pizza to order will typically use persuasion, even if this results in setting up a democratic or monarchical decision-making process by temporary consensus.

But at the large-scale political level, even a 100% persuasive origin can evolve (or devolve) into an authority-based state.  This is the mythical origin of Hobbes's Leviathan, of Robert Nozick's minimal state, and various others in-between.

Outside of philosophy, things are typically more mixed: The Federalist Papers were a measure of persuasion, the repression of various unpersuaded Americans (e.g. John Frie's Rebellion, Shay's Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, etc.) was a measure of coercion. Mixed together with many other ingredients, of such a recipe was our republic made, and it is the relatively high proportion of persuasion in that mix that gives its founding such a good reputation.

One way of looking at political authority is to think of it as a mixture of coercion and persuasion that is held in reserve: an energy that is potential, rather than kinetic — like a battery.  Another physical metaphor is to consider authority as the momentum built up through the application of coercion and persuasion, such that the momentum itself has the same sort of power that the original coercion and persuasion did.

Authority allows the government to coast: "we would persuade you, but you are already persuaded, remember?; we would compel you, but you are already compelled, remember?"  Meanwhile its subjects feel persuaded without knowing quite which arguments persuaded them, and feel compelled without ever feeling the grip on their shoulders or the bayonet at their backs.

Over time, a government that has reached its maturity in authority, even one that was born largely from persuasion, will tend to abuse this hard-earned authority — to cash it in for all of the various and notorious tempting corruptions of power.  This it could not have done originally by persuasion alone, though perhaps it could have if at the beginning it commanded the tools of coercion it now commands as an authoritarian government.

But such a government, because the coercion behind its authority is held mostly in reserve — frozen, invisible — may still hold the esteem that it earned from having evolved through a relatively high proportion of persuasion.  Indeed it may insist that its present corruption is fully justified by its humble origins, and it may use its authority to embellish its own origin myth.

If a government's authority is challenged, it will temporarily retrench into a position from which it can unleash its potential political energy as kinetic political energy and thereby remove the challenge.  This involves using the tools of coercion and persuasion that it has kept in reserve.

And this may expose the true mixture of coercion and persuasion that represents the power-behind-the-throne.  As Gene Sharp wrote about Gandhi's civil disobedience campaigns in South Africa:

The original "naked force of conquest" had been translated into the sanctity of law.  ... [Leo] Kuper points out that civil disobedience brought the violence behind the law and the domination into actual operation.  "Satyagraha strips this sanctity from the laws, and compels the application of sanctions, thus converting domination again to naked force."  The nonviolent challenge had not created, but only revealed the violence.  "Force is implicit in white domination: the resistance campaign made it explicit."

In other words, by challenging the authority of the government, you call its bluff and force it to reveal its hand.  If it has a strong, persuasive hand, well, there you go, and maybe you're even persuaded.  If it has a strong, coercive hand, suddenly people begin to feel its grip on their shoulders.  If the hand is weak on either count, suddenly this too is exposed, and the power-behind-the-throne is revealed to be not so powerful after all.

The point is that it may be important and useful to force the government to retrench from authority to its more concrete basis in coercion and persuasion, even if you do not have the power to overcome it once it has retrenched.

The danger of this approach is that if you demand the government drop its mask of authority and show you the fangs of coercion that lie behind it, it may show them to you good and hard.  And the stronger your challenge to authority is, the more vicious will be the government's reaction.

The more benign the government you challenge, the more it will retreat into a stance dominated by persuasion over coercion.  The more malign it is, the more it will bring out the hardware.  But the paradox is that the longer you wait and the more malevolent the government becomes, the more dangerous it is to challenge it while at the same time this challenge becomes more imperative.

The way out of this dilemma is to become less averse to challenging political authority (and this means saying "no" to its commands, not merely grumbling "I disapprove" to its heralds) — and to make this challenge at the first sign that authority is misused, rather than waiting until it has become so tyrannical that it knows no limits.

[David]

Fascinating  insights. 
Quote<The more benign the government you challenge, the more it will retreat into a stance dominated by persuasion over coercion.  The more malign it is, the more it will bring out the hardware.  But the paradox is that the longer you wait and the more malevolent the government becomes, the more dangerous it is to challenge it while at the same time this challenge becomes more imperative.>

This is a very good point.  A common question for anarchism is how to prevent a new gov't from taking over.  The common answer is that a free society is an armed society.  That is true to a point.  If an attempt at forming a new gov't somehow does so in such a way as to have some authority, or an extreme high level of respect, occurs, thereby legitimizing it, guns will actually be counterproductive.  Violence against a legitimized and accepted gov't only makes it grow.  It is only after a gov't loses most or all of its legitimacy, or in the case of an imposed gov't, (gang or invader) never had any legitimacy to begin with, do guns offer any hope of freedom. 
I like the maxim that 'good people can and should challenge or disobey bad law'.  This has to be done as a lifestyle, as in, frequently.  Waiting for minor tyranny to grow to bigger tyrannies means waiting till it is almost too late.  This is powerful.  If the disobedience of bad law had happened, often, and as a lifestyle, in germany, russia, usa, the holocaust, massive prison system and usa internment of japanese americans would never have happened. 
Nonviolent resistance is about forcing the gov't to lose its legitimacy.  In fact, for those of you who are gun cleaners, without the nonviolent resisters, your long hoped for revolution will never happen.  If you attack the gov't, you will be slaughtered to the cheers of millions of people more afraid of your revolution than the gov't. 
The ironic thing is if the gov't was to decree that those who do not want to pay for gov't, or receive its 'benefits', can live in peace as long as they stay somewhat separate from mainstream society, the friction would vanish to some degree over night.  If I could have a colony on some land that I buy, and can ignore taxes, zoning, regulations, licensing (unless I enter mainstream society with a passport) my opposition to most gov't would be nil.  The exception being their barbarity towards others. 

Quote<"Making the tax collector seize the money from me, rather than handing it over voluntarily, more authentically represents the sort of relationship I feel we have."> 
I agree, they are going to steal your wealth anyway, you might as well make it hard for them to do so. 

[John Edward Mercier]

Funny... because that can still largely be done here in NH, though one needs to know the loopholes. The problem is will you keep your end of the contract.

[Kat Kanning]

Thanks for the thoughful post, Moorlock.  Haven't thought much about Hannah Arendt since reading her in college. 

[Russell Kanning]

I agree with you. There is nothing quite like making the government show itself.

Sometimes people are also so scared of the coercion, that they invent arguments to try to convince themselves that they are actually being persuaded. When you stand up to the thugs and they strike you ... it pulls away the curtain.

[John Edward Mercier]

Its called 'carrot and stick'...
But no taxpayer ever fools themselves into believing their getting the carrot.

[srqrebel]

What a spectacular piece!  Thank you for bringing into sharp focus what I have previously instinctively understood, yet have never managed to articulate it this clearly, either for myself or others.

Very well written and insightful... +1!

[srqrebel]

The danger of this approach is that if you demand the government drop its mask of authority and show you the fangs of coercion that lie behind it, it may show them to you good and hard.  And the stronger your challenge to authority is, the more vicious will be the government's reaction.

True, but therein lies a silver lining.  The more vicious the government's reaction, the more they exposetheir evil nature, and the harder the popular backlash against them.

The worst thing that can happen is that they ignore you -- yet even that undermines their power, because it causes people to fear them less.  "Just say 'no'" civil disobedience traps the gov't in a no-win catch 22.

When you fight something, you make it stronger.  The beauty of peaceful, "just say 'no'" civil disobedience is that you are not fighting at all -- rather, you are cleverly inviting the gov't to fight you. 

The most effective civil disobedience is that which induces the gov't to over react.

[John Edward Mercier]

As long as the populous believes the government to be acting an evil manner.

[David]

Its called 'carrot and stick'...
But no taxpayer ever fools themselves into believing their getting the carrot.

I have to disagree.  Many, many people tell themselves that they are paying for the 'cost of civilized society', or that the money is used to benifit some lesser fortunate people, and that somehow they (the taxpayer) is benefited. 

[John Edward Mercier]

Who does getting the 'stick' equal a benefit?
The people who receive the 'undue benefit' get the carrot.

[KBCraig]

Its called 'carrot and stick'...
But no taxpayer ever fools themselves into believing their getting the carrot.

The majority of people who get tax refunds every year have fooled themselves into believing the government is giving them money.

[John Edward Mercier]

None that I know of. They witness the amount paid in, and the amount returned, and understand these two sums not to be the same.

I do realize that many do not understand that they're giving the government a zero percent interest loan. But I also realize that many prefer this method as they have little to no spending restraint (Prime candidates for Congress).

Ask yourself some questions. How do we pay for the collective things we have? Who benefits from them? Are these the same people?

The NEA is anti-NCLB... not the federal dollars... just the strings attached. The purposes of Legislature and Congress could be achieved in one afternoon... but divvying up the spoils just takes so damn long.