I would like to re-present the question of authority in a manner that I don’t believe anyone currently alive today can answer. The question I’m raising is how do we solve the problem of the apparently never ending “war of all against all?” Granted that, pace Nietzsche and Freud, human aggression is not the sine qua non of our existence, yet we still have to confront this question. To this point in human history most of the answers given in the west have been variations of the notion that “the truth will set you free,” whether that is the truth of a sovereign charged primarily with maintaining a civil truce (Hobbes, Locke) or the truth of an inner light which necessarily leads everyone to relinquish the use of cruelty (Plato, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud). In an interesting and weird twist on Marx’s historicism, Rawls proposed to distribute justice by requiring those who hold power to relinquish power. This gives me pause, and I often wonder what our world would look like if every citizen were required to spend one week on a long term residential, psychiatric unit and one week attending the poorest school in their home state. I love Rawls’ vision, but pragmatically I don’t know how he ever proposed to implement it. Of course, utopian theorists often don’t know how to implement their vision, though I’d rather hang out with their lot than with pragmatists like Lenin or Jefferson, thank you very much! In the end I prefer figures who lead by example rather than by fiat (the authority of effort as opposed to the authority of commandment.…)
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