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| Q3: My Dad as my model of a Strong Authority. In society we live under strong authorities apart from ourselves. We learn to live with these rulers who bring us zones of influence and change the rules we live by. Some of these strong authorities we vote democratically into Government so they can make rules for the common culture of Australia. In school we are conditioned to obey and respect strong authorities. The classroom strong authority is the classroom teacher. Most students respect their teacher because they respect the strong authority they have at home, their mother and father. Some students disrespect their teacher because they have no strong authority at home they respect. Thus the fragmented homes also fragment the idea of strong authorities ruling over them, and so dysfunctional kids grow up hating all kinds of strong authorities. As a society we have prisons for those who are radically against strong authorities and threaten the common culture other humans live by. But why does society organize itself into collections of cultural people who choose to allow a ruler over them as a strong authority? There seems to be inside the human genotype the concept to follow as sheep a ruler over us, who acts as a shepherd, a strong authority who rules over us. Politics is a cultural system in which the people have a strong authority (called Government) to rule over them socially.
We often have taboo on politics because many of us hate the idea of admitting strong authorities ruling over us, especially when we see the corruption of these authorities over our culture. But inside my home as a child my Dad and my Mum were strong authorities and they ruled over us. They had this right of politics because they procreated us and brought us into the world. They nurtured us and provided for us and kept us safe from harm. Parents are free to express their rules of politics as they dictate because they are the strong authorities in our home. There were many rules in our family home.
For example
Broad beans and brussel sprouts were especially difficult for me, LOL. Even to this day I have to remind myself of the toilet washing hands rule. And I miss the family eating together rule, as too many families eat as individuals while watching TV and we are losing the social networking of family. These political rules have been adopted by me as a Dad of my own home and to my own kids. I remember clearly forcing my own children to eat whatever was placed before them. It became a cultural political habit after some years, I hope my grown up kids embrace those years of love, just as I embrace those years of love gone by. In human genotype is the need for a strong authority and often if kids do not have a strong authority they rebel because they are wanting rulers to rule over them, to see if boundaries exist, to find love at the end of the rainbow, or to see if the storm just gets worse. Sometimes larger political zones of influence bring new rules that stress our smaller home politics�.
For example
These rules are stressing many parents in the home because if embraced these new rules bring conflict to child � parent relationships. As the children grow up to become strong authorities in their own home they have children of their own and thus begin to rule over them. Sometimes we may as parents embrace the same rules of politics our parents used, and sometimes we change our political rules over our children, because we dislike our parents as dictators, or because society has stressed us out with new rules of cultural change. And sometimes the same cultural event can be a memory leading to entirely different conclusions�.
I remember one example of this. It was a social night of dancing and my Mum and Dad were dancing together in an atmosphere of love and devotion to each other. The family chips were brought out after a while and we ate them in the car, while I watched the tender love of dancing, catching the occasional glimpse of Mum and Dad through the window afar off in the distance. Being the eldest in the family, I was in charge of looking after the children that watched from the Holden car. Strangely my second oldest brother remembers the same memory as he was left in charge, and resented the ordeal of looking after the children and feeling abandoned. So here we have a cultural event and two contrasting memories of the same event, one fosters love from the past event, while another fosters resentment from the same event. The difference is not caused by the past memory but by the present memories that build love based on the perceptions of past memories. Our present memories create our present culture of love and make our past biased so they fit our present culture of thinking. Thus it is not our past that shapes us, but our present that shapes us and this bias clouds our perception of past memories.
For example
I have always found it difficult to find work after leaving a school teaching career of more than 20 years. During the interview stage my skills of communication make it difficult to get past the short list stage. I have only had one job from a face to face interview, based on my attitude of being early and the German Australian interviewer having a love for German early attention to detail, I got the job based on that single attitude. All the other jobs I ever received were given without personal interviews. Rather than allowing my past failures cloud my present endeavour, I should embrace change, and learn from my past mistakes.
Another thing I have learned is all strong authorities truly do shepherd their sheep with love, according to the best intentions they have, (I always look for the best in leaders) and as sheep we should love and forgive their short fallings. This capacity to forgive one another is called grace.
If people do wrong us, and if we foster resentment about the wrong, we can become bitter about it. Thus the opposite of grace is bitterness. Bitter people are not willing to forgive themselves and so cannot forgive others who may have wronged them.
I am starting to use words that are difficult to define, and thus I have to ask you what you mean by a strong authority?
Why do humans have strong authorities ruling over them? And why do we tend to follow the culture of other humans blindly without asking why we follow the belief rules underneath that culture?
So here I list some of my thoughts about strong authorities:-
(1) Strong authorities are shepherds who care for their sheep.
In Australia, a strong authority is a farmer who cares for his sheep in his own fenced enclosure.
I remember my sheep childhood years on a sheep property in which thousands of sheep went freely over the land as they chose, but only within the boundaries of the fenced enclosure. Everything in life has boundary fences and our freedom is expressed only within those boundaries. Our skin is a boundary between a healthy body inside and the dangerous world of bacteria outside. Our roads have boundaries that allow freedom to travel safely along them. I remember as a child navigating the dirt tracks with the hollows and rises along the road as we travelled along the tennis court road. Of course some farmers do better jobs looking after sheep than others do, and some farmers make poor rules or fail to care for their sheep properly.
One thing I noticed about strong authorities is they rule over the sheep, in order to �save� the sheep. The sheep see their shepherd as a �saviour�. What is there to �save� sheep from; that requires a �saviour�? In a sense a politician is a saviour that saves his culture of people from economic or social difficulties. The greatest political saviour I remember was Winston Churchill, the prime minister of England during the Second World War. Mr. Churchill did am amazing job rallying the people together. My Dad too, has been a �saviour� for me as a child growing up in his home.
The highest esteem any strong authority has: is to �save� their subjects.
My Dad �saved� me from poverty, from experiencing physical hardship and emotional hardship, something my Dad remembers himself as a child growing up with his Mum. It was tough for a kid in Australia in those faraway days, but not something I cannot imagine or show respect for. The ANZAC is a memorial for the strong authorities who went to war to save their sheep from potential abuse and allow our great country the freedom to graze as she wishes within the ocean boundaries of her coastline. I often wonder if it was not the sense of adventure and the royal wage that conscripted so many off to war rather than our natural love to save our own. But I am an optimist and I love to see the best from people�s attitudes. There is enough wickedness in the world and gloom abounds, so one has to learn to see love expressed in others despite the problems we see and feel coming our way. The problem with this �saviour� concept and this �saving� us from danger is it naturally implies other people are out there ready to harm us if given the opportunity.
Why are there bad people out there and even bad strong authorities ready to harm and abuse us if given the opportunity? Why can�t all people and all strong authorities live in peace? Why did we have a first world war and a second world war? Why do so called terrorists continue to make our national peace and safety a threat? Why is it unsafe to walk the city streets late at night?
And so the question arises what is bad ? And what is good ? and how does a society decide the rules it culturally adopts to live by, and whom is the strong authority that defines the rules as good or bad in the first place ?
Science is terribly good at defining physical objects in society in the natural world. Science can make new objects beam with new technology and thus better technology is paralleled to a stronger society.
In ancient times cities protected themselves from other bad societies by walls of stone. They hurled stones or spears at bad people to protect their own people inside their cities. Later on bronze spears proved sharper than copper spears and so Alexander the Great was able to cut down his enemies using better technology. Later on with the invention of steel, the superior sword cut off the bronze sword and pierced through the leather armour making a mockery of the less advanced technological society. And in modern times the Japanese discovered grinding steel into a powder and feeding it to chooks and collecting the poop to recycle back into steel, made a low phosphate grade of steel that allowed for superior edges that never went dull. This caused a superior razor sharp edge that kept its sharpness for longer and was highly prized as an instrument of war. Today we have the gun powered by gunpowder.
Is the gun bad ? No. Good people can use the gun for good purposes. Bad people can use the gun for bad purposes. Science cannot define the moral use or ethical use of a gun.
(2) Strong authorities are relationship driven. The sheep must obey and follow the shepherd. .
Another aspect of strong authorities is they are created on relationships. The sheep must follow and obey the shepherd. The classroom teacher dictates to the students the expected behaviour during class time. The judge decides the outcomes in court and the accused must obey the decisions. The policeman writes out the speeding ticket and the driver is expected to pay the infringement. The parent disciplines his child because the child refused to properly obey the parent. The bull that jumps a farmer�s fence is quickly brought back to the farmer�s boundary enclosure and disciplined.
I remember my Dad�s judgments� were fair and gracious. I remember the time my selfishness drove me to steal a few blue sapphires rather than return them safely to a family common purse to be shared by all. There were days I remember having a temper as a child and I cannot remember why I did that in those days. But what I do remember from my Dad was his kindness and fairness. My Dad did not have a double standard, and he lived according to his own belief rules as he saw them.
(3) Strong authorities must have a standard.
The last aspect of strong authorities is they must have a standard. . A standard is a creed, or a collection of rules, or a system of cultural habits, or a written set of laws in which the strong authorities rule over their subjects by. In Australia we have the constitution as our standard. . We also have England as a back up plan, should Australia itself decide to make its own rules and changes to the ones we already have without proper consent by the public.
So where did this need of strong authorities come from? Why must there be leaders and followers? And why are there standards that define how our zones of influence are established? Why do we have belief rules we choose to live by in the first place? Where does our need for social relationships come from in the first place? Why do humans live in families with Mums and Dads rather than based on other arrangements? Where does all this social structure come from?
People choose to follow a belief rule based on little ethical evidence
Most people purchase cars for example based on colour only. I remember our Holden Belmont, the �Yellow Mundy� that took us on many trips, even to Western Australia in 1975. Some people happily purchase products based entirely on the taste, or smell or colour or the feelings they get from using the product. Some of us purchase food based only because it is cheaper than its competitor. While these are all valid ethical indicators, is this wise? What do we mean by wise?
Wisdom is the ability to make ethical decisions based on a set of standards stored in our minds.
For some people this set of standards is always changing, or varies from product to product or from one life decision crisis to the next life decision crisis. For some people the set of standards is more or less the same for all ethical decisions.
What is interesting though for all ethical decisions humans make, is they are always based on little empirical evidence.
Wisdom is always based on little empirical evidence.
For example
When Thomas Edison went about looking for an electric current that made light, his competitors and sponsors told him to give up looking. He did find that electricity flowing through a carbon filament glowed white hot making white light for a few hours in a glass tube to protect the glowing thread, but Edison wanted to achieve the same thing with a make stronger thread made of metal. Thomas Edison made a belief rule �that there was a metal that could glow white hot and make white light without melting.� After 20,000 experiments and several years that almost cost him bankruptcy, his sponsors came again unto him and said to give up, your �experiments have proved you�re a failure�. But no Edison wisely replied, �My experiments have successfully proved thousands of different metals cannot achieve my belief rule, I have yet to find a metal that can�. Based on the years of research Edison had little reason to continue, but wisdom is always based on little empirical evidence.
Instead wisdom is based on hope. We hope our standards will see us through successfully.
All of us make wise decisions based on hope. We hope that the car we buy based entirely on colour will be a �good� car and not a �lemon�. We hope the product we are eating will not make us fat even though we base our wisdom entirely on the taste of the product. We purchase the cheaper product based on the hope the manufacturer is still caring for us despite the cheapness of the product.
And so Thomas Edison was hoping for a metal to make his belief rule prove successful. And he found such a metal, a rare metal indeed of extreme melting point and toughness. It was called tungsten.
If it wasn�t for the profound strength of Edison�s hope we would not have white light coming from electricity and our homes would have remained in darkness at night.
So if wisdom is the process of hoping our standards inside, will see us through life successfully; why is it that we are unwilling to adopt new belief rules when they come our way?
When we are younger as a child or as a baby, we experience love from our strong authorities and so we naturally have hope in the belief rules coming into us as habits of culture, and we live by them because we bask in the love from those around us basking from them as well. This is called getting caught in the belief system of others by association. Thus the culture of the home is engrained into the children often without them thinking about this, it becomes natural to accept the wisdom of our family home as the wisdom we also choose to live by. This perpetual association of wisdom from family homes is what made countries and society strong and why the family is the centre of strong social structure.
The association process is developed into children over time slowly each second continually reinforced by family values and family authorities day after day, and it is the time spent by conditioning our children that causes the association of values and ethics caught from their parents. Thus the more time a follower spends with a leader the more the follower is conditioned to adopt the wisdom process of the leader and accept all the belief rules the strong authority has. Some bad authorities can take advantage of this conditioning process and can hypnotize or brainwash or chemically drug the mind within a few days with an entirely different new set of ethical standards.
Another subtle way of getting different wisdom engrained into younger children is through media conditioning. This is a different kind of culture engrained by association. It too is based on repeating the belief rule again and again until through boring repetition the cultural wisdom is adopted into the person�s mind to cloud or confuse the cognitive decision process when making wise decisions.
A classic example of dysfunctional computer game conditioning gone wrong, is of a 13 year old boy in USA ; �the Condamine killings�, if I remember; the boy gunned down many students and teachers as a physical replay of some wisdom learned from a computer game. The younger human mind is not able to separate imagined reality from physical reality. And often wisdom comes about through experience. This is why older people are often with better wisdom than younger people, because they have learned from their mistakes of poor wisdom.
So young people are more open to experiencing wisdom conditioning whether from the family home, from family culture or from outside media sources such as the TV, the computer games, the Internet, the Magazines, the books they read and so on.
As children grow older as teenagers especially when the hormones of change kicks in, there are major changes to the mind and development of the body. The person matures into an adult and reasons with the wisdom he or she already has and resists any newer incoming wisdom.
The reason for the resistance to wisdom from then on is because each soul becomes its own boss and thus any additional wisdom that comes in is challenged by the wisdom already existing inside the soul.
A soul is a living person capable of making decisions based on freedom of choice . No strong authority can force the will to make a decision, although strong authorities may affect the consequences of the decision.
In contrast to this,
A slave is a living person making decisions based , without freedom of choice. The strong authority is controlling them so much that even decisions are made only within the boundaries of the strong authority, and the slave is fearful of making decisions based on freedom of choice, hence they remain slaves or victims of abuse.
I have never thought of this before, so I guess by these definitions here, that a child growing up in a parent�s home is a slave to their parents. As they change in maturity the child becomes partly a slave sometimes and partly a soul to make adult decisions as the teenager matures.
I remember how a child caught in abuse is so fearful of the strong authority abusing them they cannot tell their parents who have now become lesser strong authorities over them. It must be tough on children pushed from pillar to post by strong authorities all the time, and I think of the orphans who wander through life without family wisdom from loving parents (either natural or fostered), and who instead receive the abusive slavery of controlling child intervention.
But as the adult develops so does the soul inside to make decisions based on their own freedom of choice. Often teenagers are �know it all,� arrogant and angry tempered souls trying to find their own belief rules in a confusing world. I was one of those �know it all� teenagers and I remember how my parents were puzzled dealing with me. Even now I do not understand why I was the way I was.
I am thankful for the love my parents gave me and my Dad who was able to allow such dysfunction in me grow in its natural course, and not decide to seek further medical help.
And of course there are those parents who love the sense of authority empowering their teenagers with wisdom that they never want their children to leave their own nest. It takes risk to allow children to become free thinking souls and allow them to leave the nest. If they want to return to their parents it is because the adult children love their parents and have respect for the strong authority they experienced growing up.
It�s tough on teachers controlling a classroom of grade 9 students because they are in between the change from being slaves to strong authorities and having an independent mature mind to make adult wise decisions. Often the students do not know what they want and the struggle for personal identity enrages while they continue growing up.
Another aspect of wisdom conditioning is the willingness of young minds to make relationships with others based on little empirical evidence about them. This seems to be part of the human genotype but always carries the risk that the soul can be abducted or abused by other people or made victims or slaves to strong authorities the same age as themselves. This kind of influence is called peer group pressure.
Another aspect of young minds is the fact they take risks more than older or matured wisdom souls because they have little experience in wise decisions. So they drive too fast, party real hard and burn both ends of their candle. As the axiom says, wisdom is always based on little empirical evidence.
When the Television advertisement comes on and says �This car has the greatest economy and features to make it the best car on the road�. How much of the ad is based on feelings of emotion? The colour soothes your eyes, the dramas of pictures entice lust, the sense of power tempts your ego and the presentation tests your pride. How much of the ad is based on cognitive facts? The price is shown and the new engine technology may be briefly explained. So on the basis of a hundred repeating messages of the same car, the souls stores the wisdom process for a future decision to be made. So when the soul actually goes to purchase the car, how much of the wisdom decision process is based on empirical evidence? Well the purchaser sees the colour, the interior, the style and price and goes for a test drive, and after the feelings tick all the boxes, the car is purchased. The car becomes the owners possession based on little empirical evidence. Humans form relationships to other strong authorities based on good will and faith. These aspects are not well quantified by Science or easily explained. Humans tend to trust people empirically based on little evidence, and based on the little evidence they have collected about that strong authority; Hope that their wisdom process will be successful with that relationship.
That�s how all relationships work.
If the process is soured by slavery or victim�s abuse, the human may never risk taking on a new relationship ever again.
Some of us may never try a relationship with a strong authority because we assume if nothing good happened to other people who tried the strong authority, than nothing good will happen to me. This makes perfect sense if the product or service the strong authority is selling has no instant satisfaction guaranteed.
If we see a person really enjoying a chocolate bar, than the feelings we see in that person creates a zone of influence that affects my own mind. So we process the incoming message, �is the food I see safe for me to eat, or do I eat it with happiness because I see the other person eating it with happiness�?
And if there is no instant feedback from the relationship, with the product or service we receive from the strong authority, we learn to distrust the strong authority. This is why strangers give out lollies to children in order to build trust relationships with them, before abducting them. This is why with any relationship there must be a sharing of goods and services, so we develop trust in the relationship.
My Dad shared many goods and services with me as I grew up under his tender loving care. As a young person we tend to hang out for that one occasion each year for the love our parents would share each year, known as Christmas presents. I remember the pillow sacks my Mum made full at the end of our beds and the joy we felt having a blessed home. I also cherish to this day a donkey steam engine my Dad and Mum purchased for me as a teenager, possibly 16 years old. I have kept the steam engine in running order for over 30 years. I remember the time my Dad paid my first term college fees at Earle Page College while they left me alone for the first time in my life to experience University studies. Such was the helping hand and dedication my Dad gave me starting off with my own life. I remember the times we built my own houses together, and the morning and evening �smoko� my Mum gave us all to allow us to rest and recoup our energy from building. These were my greatest thrills with my Dad because he shared his time and talents with me, and I am ever grateful for this experience. Other times my Dad shared with me was his insistence to visit his Dad and Mum often and bring us all along. Listening to Grand-dad Thompson talk of old times with his size 13 thong flapping up and down on his heel was a sweet memory for me as a child growing up. I wish I could do the same with my own children, but somehow my own divorce tore apart my children amd they have never recovered from the emotional and physical explosion. Alas how much love they have missed.
So far in my message to my Dad, there have been some words difficult to explain because they are outside the realm of Science and cannot be easily explained.
There are words like �trust�, �faith� �ethical�, �goodwill�, �bad�, �good� and �moral� that are all difficult to explain where they come from. Science would like us to believe they come from animal instincts and thus like the apes we evolved from, our ancestors developed ethics in order to improve our changes of survival. Wisdom is always based on little empirical evidence, but it�s not based on zero evidence. Only a fool would believe in some fancy story without any evidence at all.
Next in my Dad's letter we consider Strong Authorities from outside of our family.
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