Authority

“Great advances in knowledge necessarily involve the rejection of authority.”

This statement was from a past GRE exam. Contestants were asked to agree or disagree with it, then support their claims accordingly. As a matter of practice, I decided to formulate a response to this passage within the allotted forty-five minutes. Those of you who read me regularly can fancy a guess as to where I stand on this issue, so I need not share the response I generated. Besides, I feel it to be far too technical for my liking, though probably not technical enough to dupe the computer program that marks these exams.

I'm writing today wondering if this was inserted in a standardized exam as some sort of cruel joke towards students, who are trained to accept and succumb to authority from the moment they are thrust from the confines of Mother's womb into the cold, cruel, lonely world. Can we count on our young to be the great thinkers and entrepreneurs if we insist on having them think in line with authority? If we were to plot, on a timeline, our trying to figure everything out, then scaled backward, we would see, over and over again, how wrong conventional wisdom was, yet we insist on indoctrinating our lineage with the beliefs to which we, ourselves, submit, all in the name of picking a career to barely keep their heads above water.

The "authority" aims to coerce the rest of us to see the world through its eyes, rather than through our own. The "authority" sells us on the merits of war, or the free market, or ownership, or fear. The "authority" tells us what to think because either it feels we are too dumb to think for ourselves, or it fears our ability to draw our own conclusions and thus aims to deliberately dumb us down. The "authority" judges us, grades us, assigns monetary sums based on how well we measure against the standards it creates. Frankly, I'm sick to death of all of this.

I have a profound aversion towards judgment. For all the years I've been on this planet, I've been assessed according to someone else's standard on how I should act, what grades I should receive, what words should be in my vocabulary, what job I should have, and so on, and so forth. So long as I was racking up the 80s and 90s on my report card, I thought nothing of it, for I had that warm and fuzzy feeling that accompanies achievement, until I asked myself if I really need validation. My best friend in elementary school, the city chess champion at the time, is now sitting in a jail cell fifteen years hence because he didn't measure up to the curriculum and was subsequently rejected by it. A dear friend of mine, a gifted musician and generally adept and astute being, struggled through school because she didn't measure up to the curriculum. The world is filled with brilliance that is suppressed by the standards of the "authority".

Personal accolades, though highly touted as a means to amass some money or prestige or any other form of self-gratification, are irrelevant, for it doesn't take an academic or a politician or a CEO or a clergyman to know how the world is: all that is required is for one to see.

I wonder if any of the kind folk at the ETS office in New Jersey happen to be reading this.