Tag: authority

Cloaks of Authority

From a commentary about the biblical significance of the cloak:

The use of cloaks as a symbol of authority is prevalent throughout the Old Testament. In ancient times, a cloak was a sign of status and power and was often worn by kings, priests, and other high-ranking officials.

There are many other symbols of authority; for example, a judge’s robe, a crown, a scepter, stars (on an epaulet), a corner office on the top floor of an elegant office building, and the Oval Office in the West Wing of the White House. Titles also confer authority, even without the trappings of a robe, a crown, and so on. But let us here call all such things cloaks of authority.

Cloaks of authority used to obscure the human beings in whom authority is vested. That is no longer the case in the age of the internet, which spreads truth and fiction in equal measure — and leaves it to the individual person to sort them. The sorting, of course, is done mainly in accordance with the individual’s preconceptions about who is “good” and who is “bad”. And most persons, it seems, seek out the truth or fiction that supports their preconceptions.

Nowhere is this state of affairs more evident than with respect to the presidency of the United States. Perhaps it’s just my faulty memory, but it seems to me that most voters used to believe that one candidate was better than the other, and they accordingly voted for that candidate. Now, it seems that most voters are fearful of what one or the other candidate might do if elected and vote against that candidate because he represents the greater of two evils.

Given that, the presidency (among many other positions of authority) is no longer held in awe, though it is regarded in fear by about half the populace. But even those citizens who support the incumbent do so, for the most part, because he is considered to be the lesser of two evils.

One might say that the imperial presidency is in decline because the “emperor” has no cloak.

Pot. Kettle. Black.

Americans, like most people in the world, are besieged by authority. How (many? most?) Americans can still believe that theirs is a land of liberty puzzles me greatly, and has done so for many years.

Take Joe Biden — please! — who yesterday said of China’s Xi: “He is a dictator in the sense that he is a guy who runs a country that is communist,” … adding that the Chinese government “is totally different than ours.” Different? In what way?

Atop of all of the millions of pages of federal, State, and local regulations that specify what Americans may and may not do and how their products and services must be produced (or not) — and atop of all of the chicanery that Democrats (mostly) deploy to acquire and sustain the power to tell Americans how to live — there has arisen in the past decade a vast industry of government lying, spying, censorship, and unequal justice that Xi might have designed. (See, for example, “Obamagate and Beyond“, and consider the latest revelation about the censorship industry.)

Americans, like most Westerners, seem to mistake relative prosperity for liberty. (There’s a good example of that in “Biden’s Popularity and Gasoline Prices“.) But like the proverbial frog in the pot of water, Americans will understand what’s happening to them only when it’s too late to do anything about it. (See “Economics: America’s Mega-Depression” and “Convergence Theory Revisited“.)

You have been warned.