Auctorphilia

A brave new world

Auctor: Latin root of authority

Philia: love of

We all learn to trust authority. We learn from authorities: school teachers, college professors, mentors. We turn to authorities to solve problems: doctors, lawyers, mechanics.

But there’s a problem with authority and authorities: they often assume power over individuals by virtue of their authority. A doctor who refuses to listen to his patient has assumed power over that patient such that he can tell the patient what to do, and he assumes the patient should/must listen. A college professor might brook no dissent from his opinions.

In the course of our lives we’re naturally exposed to and guided by authorities and we get used to this. But there’s a flip side to this, and that’s the necessity to maintain one’s own curiosity and respect for one’s own opinions and insights, even if— or perhaps especially if— they differ from those of the authorities. This isn’t an argument for rampant social antagonism and revolt; it’s an argument for self-reliance.

My jumping-off point is a vision of a world where Enlightenment ideals of one’s own reason, perceptions, and experience are central to one’s sense of self and engagement with the world, and this is opposed to something I’ll call “auctorphilia” that in many ways is engulfing and smothering our world: a deference to, defense of, dependence upon, and even a love of authority (tied to an puerile obsession with “data,” without realizing that so-called data can be easily manipulated, and is. Basic honesty is the real datum we should be paying attention to.) Auctorphilia not because we necessarily want it that way, but because we’ve been told and conditioned— by authorities— that it should be that way, and because we don’t want to take responsibility for our opinions.

A recent example of an appeal to auctorphilia is the US Department of Homeland Security’s warning us of mis-, dis- and mal-information, which are supposedly threats to our country. Let’s stop and think what this mis-dis-mal information might mean, such that these are such a threat to our well-being. It means that you and I are too stupid to figure things out for ourselves and need to be told what’s what. In other words: all of our schooling, our training, our jobs, our advanced degrees, our plans, skills, hobbies, relationships, arguments, reading, sorrows, joys, mistakes, pains, trials, evenings drinking with friends, campfires, loves, loves lost, times we’ve been right and times we’ve been wrong; none of that, according to the DHS, has prepared us to think and judge for ourselves, and they’re concerned that our exposure to controversial ideas might “undermine public trust in government institutions.” Danger! But my argument is that we should never trust government institutions— ever.

According the DHS, if we hear on some social network or in person that the Hunter Biden laptop is real or that January 6 wasn’t an insurrection at all but merely a protest that got out of hand, then we’re supposed to either check ourselves right there and ask what the authorities have told us, or go home and look up what the authorities and fact checkers say about it. Better yet: get the tech companies to censor so we never hear in the first place.

Just to be sure we understand the dangers of information and know to only listen to trusted sources, CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, has provided us with useful infographics. On March 30, 2022, they provided us with a useful infographic on “Information Manipulation.” On April 1 (with no irony) CISA released an infographic on Social Media Bots, and on April 12 they released one on “Disinformation Stops With You,” advising upright citizens how to self-censor for the greater good.

Individuals are central to knowledge, experience, and understanding. Organizations and institutions and governments are not: they are derivative of the knowledge, experience, and understanding of individuals. Yet moving beyond the mere authority of a doctor or a professor, organizations and institutions and governments can amass great power, especially in an era of ever-expanding technology that allows a very few a great deal of power. This power in itself doesn’t necessarily make anyone or anything more authoritative; it merely makes them more powerful. And it’s an unfortunate truth that unbridled, unchecked power leads, almost inevitably, to corruption.

We have an example of this: the egregious abuse of power of our health agencies and even the entire medical community during the Covid pandemic such that safe, effective treatments for this disease were summarily suppressed and kept from the American people, and as a result lives were lost, the social fabric was rent, livelihoods and businesses disappeared, and people became afraid. The most terrible abuse of power was during the hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) incident, but the abuses are piling up.

On March 23, 2020, Dr. Vladimir Zelenko published a protocol that he claimed prevented even those most susceptible to Covid-19 from getting serious Covid and dying, and the mechanism of action for his protocol— HCQ, azithromycin, and zinc for five days— was fairly well-known and plausible. Yet this suggestion was immediately put down in the most bizarre, outrageous, and inexcusable abuse of medical authority that perhaps has ever occurred. When Dr. Fauci heard of this protocol, he didn’t ask twenty of his most trusted doctors to test it with their own patients— we were, after all, in an emergency and a life-threatening situation and had to do the best with what we had despite no randomized controlled trials. No: Dr. Fauci got on TV and told us all how anything to do with HCQ was merely “anecdotal” and therefore not worthy of consideration by real authorities, as if nearly everything about Covid wasn’t anecdotal at that point. Not only that, but studies using the wrong dose in the wrong patients at the wrong time were then done to “prove” to the medical community and the world that HCQ was not only ineffective, but outright dangerous: everyone got in on the act of deception propagated by supposedly trustworthy authorities. Dr. Meryl Nass has documented all these bizarre goings-on associated with this fiasco.

Our authorities let us down in the most outrageous way. Yet auctorphiliacs hung on their every word, even when the most modest investigation would’ve demonstrated that the authorities were off-base, as medical dissent was widespread even if suppressed by a complacent and uncritical mainstream media. Recently a book came out by Drs. Tyson and Fareed documenting how a version of the Zelenko protocol saved numerous lives, even as some states, pharmacy boards, and medical authorities were working hard to stamp out “unauthorized” use of HCQ.

What does all of this mean?

It means that while some of us are seeing what really happened during Covid, many others still trust the authorities to guide them and inform them, and the pernicious dangers of unbridled, unchecked power exhibited in full color during Covid goes unrecognized. And the lesson here is: not any more, and not ever again. We can never again allow authorities to get away with anything without asking questions and getting answers, without holding their feet to the fire, without them being answerable to we, the people, and we can never again allow them to be dictators of our behavior or censors of medications that fully qualified, educated, and licensed physicians recommend.

It matters not whether they’re political authorities or medical authorities or climate authorities or whatever: authorities can be, and have sometimes been shown to be, miserably and continuously wrong. But authorities could never have gotten away with their abuses of power during Covid if it weren’t for auctorphiliacs positioned in newsrooms who helped convince the rest of us that blathering idiots were instead the truest of scientists, and that medical malfeasance and the bastardization of data were not to be questioned if we all wanted to “stay safe.”

It’s a harsh reality that authority can never, ever be trusted. I can’t emphasize that enough. This doesn’t mean we should constantly argue with trained professionals, but it does mean that we should never assume that anyone knows what they’re talking about: this attitude is absolutely necessary because otherwise the power invested in organizations, institutions, and governments becomes corrupted. Question everything, examine everything, take no pronouncements for granted. This is the antidote to authoritarianism and the cure for auctorphilia.

This new world order that we, the people, are calling into being isn’t a world for authoritarians or auctorphiliacs. It’s a world for good, decent people who— quite naturally by virtue of being alive— have the knowledge, understanding, and experience to make their own decisions, even during a pandemic. This is a world where people are curious, can think for themselves, can debate without being censored, can present ideas, and need not fear for their jobs if they question authority or assert their own bodily autonomy.

The rejection of auctorphilia isn’t political: anyone can do it. In the 1960’s the left was keen to reject authority; today the left unfortunately seems to crave the comfort of sanctioned group-think and it’s the right that’s in rebellion. But we must never forget that it’s not the authority of organizations, institutions, and governments that’s the central problem, because these will always be with us in one form or another. It is, rather, the other side of the authoritarian relationship, those who are auctorphiliacs, who are the real danger when their numbers grow so great as to allow for a tipping point of unbridled power and corruption to take hold.

The individual is the source of authentic judgement and understanding, not authoritarian institutions. This is the new Enlightenment; may it grow, live long, and prosper.