Power and Obedience: Why Do People Follow Those They Do Not Trust?

Power and Obedience: Why Do People Follow Those They Do Not Trust?

KAKALI DAS

You may believe that most politicians are corrupt, think they lie to get into office and look after themselves long before they look after you.You may distrust almost every name that appears on a ballot, and even be right about some of them.Yet your distrust does not necessarily reduce their power.

Tomorrow, you will still follow the rules. You will pay the taxes the state requires, stop where the law tells you to stop, fill out forms, respect deadlines and respond when an official letter arrives with a government seal. You can distrust the person who holds power and still obey the office they occupy. Why do human beings obey other human beings at all?

The question is older than modern democracy, older than political parties and older than the nation state. It goes to the heart of political life itself. What makes authority possible? Why does a small number of people govern millions? And why does that power often survive even when those being governed have little faith in the people exercising it?

In 1651, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes published Leviathan, one of the most influential works of political philosophy ever written. Its famous frontispiece showed a gigantic crowned figure whose body was made up of hundreds of smaller people.Hobbes had lived through the English Civil War. He had seen political authority collapse and violence spread. His starting point was therefore deliberately grim.

Imagine a society with no common authority. No police. No courts. No government capable of enforcing a decision. No institution with enough power to prevent one person from attacking another.It might sound like freedom.Hobbes thought it would be closer to terror.

Human beings are sufficiently equal in their ability to harm one another. The strongest person still has to sleep. The weakest can find a weapon, gather allies or attack when the stronger person is vulnerable. If nobody can guarantee your safety, you have to protect yourself.If you neighbour notices, he begins protecting himself too.You see his preparations and become suspicious. You prepare in response. He interprets your preparation as a threat.Fear produces more fear.In such a world, even peaceful intentions become difficult to trust. There is no reliable authority to break the cycle.

Why build a house if someone can take it? Why cultivate a field if another person can seize the harvest? Why accumulate knowledge, wealth or property if there is no institution capable of protecting them?

Hobbes described the resulting condition as a war of every person against every person. In such circumstances, he argued, life becomes solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.His answer was the social contract.People surrender part of their individual freedom to a common authority. Instead of each person acting as their own judge and protector, everyone accepts a sovereign power capable of enforcing rules and maintaining peace.

The bargain is straightforward.You give up some freedom in exchange for security.You agree not to take revenge into your own hands because you accept a system of law. You accept restrictions on your behaviour because you expect others to accept them too. You stop being your own army because the state claims the responsibility of protecting you.For Hobbes, fear was central to this bargain. People obey because they know what may happen if the authority disappears.

But Hobbes leaves us with another problem.A sovereign may rule millions, but a sovereign is still only one person.A king has two hands. A president has two hands. A prime minister has two hands. No ruler can personally compel millions of people to obey.

So where does the enormous power of government actually come from?

More than a century before Hobbes, another thinker had begun asking a question that points in a different direction.Around the middle of the sixteenth century, the French writer Etienne de La Boetie wrote what became known as the Discourse of Voluntary Servitude. He was remarkably young when he wrote it, yet his question was fundamental.

Why do people obey a ruler who could not possibly control them by physical force alone?La Boetie’s answer was uncomfortable.The ruler’s power is largely supplied by the people being ruled.The soldiers enforcing the ruler’s commands are people. The officials administering the state are people. The workers collecting taxes are people. The money sustaining the machinery of government comes from society.The ruler may appear powerful, but the machinery beneath the ruler is made of ordinary human beings.

La Boetie therefore turned the question of power upside down.Instead of asking why the ruler is so powerful, he asked why the ruled continue to provide that power.His answer was partly habit.People are born into political systems. They do not choose the institutions that exist when they are born. They inherit them.Their parents obeyed them. Their grandparents obeyed them. Schools teach them. Laws reinforce them. Public ceremonies give them symbols. Everyday life makes them seem permanent.

Eventually, obedience stops looking like a decision.It simply looks like reality.This is one of the most enduring observations in political philosophy. Power does not always need to persuade people every morning. Once a system becomes familiar enough, people can reproduce it automatically.The government existed yesterday, so we assume it will exist tomorrow.The office has authority because it has always had authority.The rule feels legitimate partly because it is old.

David Hume, writing in the eighteenth century, made a similar observation. He was fascinated by what he called the ease with which the many are governed by the few. The arithmetic alone is strange. Those who govern are usually vastly outnumbered by those who are governed. If political power depended entirely on physical strength, the numbers would favour the population. governments survive.

Hume’s explanation was opinion. By opinion, he did not mean that people necessarily admire their rulers. He meant that government depends on a widespread belief that its authority is real and that its commands will be followed. Consider money. A currency has value because society agrees to treat it as valuable. A banknote is a piece of paper. A number in a bank account is simply a number. Their economic power exists because millions of people participate in a shared system that recognises them as money.

Political authority has a similar quality.A government can issue an order because people believe that the government has the authority to issue it. Officials act because they believe their offices give them that authority. Citizens comply because they recognise the system within which those orders operate.

This does not mean everyone approves.A person can hate the government and still pay taxes.A citizen can distrust a politician and still follow the law.A voter can believe that political leaders are self serving and still recognise the authority of a court.Disapproval and obedience can exist at the same time.This is where Max Weber becomesuseful.The German sociologist tried to understand why people regard certain forms of authority as legitimate. He identified three broad types.

The first is traditional authority.People obey because the arrangement is rooted in custom. It has been there for generations. Its age becomes part of its justification.The second is charismatic authority. People obey because of a particular person. The leader appears extraordinary, inspiring or uniquely capable of representing a cause. This kind of authority is personal. It depends on belief in the individual. The third is legal rational authority.This is the form most familiar in modern states.Here, people obey not necessarily because they trust the individual holding an office but because they accept the rules attached to the office.

You do not stop at a red light because you admire the mayor.You stop because the law requires you to stop.You do not pay a tax because you personally trust the tax officer.You pay because the tax system has legal authority.The individual can change while the office remains.This distinction helps explain one of the great contradictions of modern political life.Citizens do not have to trust their leaders personally for the state to function.The institution can survive the individual.A minister can leave office. A government can lose an election. A judge can retire. An official can be replaced.The chair remains even when the person sitting in it changes.This is why political authority is more complicated than popularity.

Hobbes showed why people might surrender freedom for security. La Boetie showed how rulers depend upon the participation of the ruled. Hume showed the importance of opinion and habit. Weber showed how authority becomes legitimate through tradition, personal charisma or established law. None of these explanations requires citizens to love the person in power. That is perhaps the most important point.

Modern government does not necessarily run on trust in individuals. It runs on a combination of institutions, expectations, habits, laws and beliefs about legitimacy.This also explains why contempt alone is a weak form of resistance.You can ridicule a politician every morning and still obey the rules every afternoon.You can believe that every politician is corrupt and still participate in the institutions that give political offices their power.You can distrust the people running the system without withdrawing from the system itself.

The eye roll costs power very little.The more difficult question is what, if anything, would change the relationship between the governed and the institutions governing them.That question leads to another ancient debate, this time about freedom of a different kind.What makes a human being content?

The Greeks, Romans, Buddhists and Chinese philosophers approached the question from very different traditions, but several of them arrived at an unexpectedly similar conclusion.The problem may not always be that we have too little.It may be that we want too much.Epicurus, writing in ancient Greece, divided human desires into different categories. Some are natural and necessary: food, water, shelter, friendship and basic security. Others may be natural but unnecessary. You may enjoy a feast, but you do not need one to survive.

Then there are desires that have no natural limit – wealth, status, fame and power.The difference matters.Hunger has a stopping point. You eat, and eventually you are full.The desire for wealth has no equivalent point of completion.There is always more.There is always someone richer, more famous, more powerful or more admired.The finish line moves as soon as you approach it.

Epicurus therefore suggested that a happier life might require not endless accumulation but a better understanding of what is actually necessary.The Stoic philosopher Seneca made a similar argument from a very different position. He was wealthy and politically powerful, yet he warned against becoming dependent on wealth.

Having something is not the same as needing it. If you cannot imagine being happy without a particular possession, position or social status, then that thing has acquired power over you.Seneca therefore distinguished between what is necessary and what is enough.Modern consumer culture has almost erased the second category.There is always another phone, another house, another car, another promotion, another holiday, another achievement.The market does not need you to be satisfied.It needs you to continue wanting.

The Buddha examined the same problem at an even deeper level.Siddhartha Gautama was born into privilege, surrounded by comfort, yet eventually abandoned that life to understand suffering. The Four Noble Truths placed craving at the centre of that inquiry.We want pleasure to remain, pain to disappear, people to behave differently.We want ourselves to become someone else, circumstances to conform to our expectations.

But everything changes.The object of desire changes. The body changes. Relationships change. Wealth changes. Reputation changes. Political power changes.When we demand permanence from things that are inherently temporary, suffering follows.The Buddhist answer was therefore not simply to acquire better things but to understand craving itself.Epicurus asked us to distinguish between necessary and unnecessary desire.The Stoics asked us not to become dependent on what lies outside our control. The Buddha examined the craving that makes us cling to things in the first place.

Different traditions, different centuries, different vocabularies, yet a similar warning emerges.Wanting can become a form of dependence. And dependence is closely related to power.The person who cannot tolerate losing wealth can be controlled through money.The person who desperately needs status can be controlled through approval.The person who cannot imagine life without political influence can be controlled through access to office.The person who needs constant recognition can be controlled through praise and humiliation.

What we cannot bear to lose can become the thing that governs us.This brings the two questions together. Why do we obey?And why do we desire?The answer to both may have less to do with individual freedom than we like to believe.We live inside systems we did not create. We inherit laws, customs, institutions, currencies, social expectations and ideas about success.Most of them were already here when we arrived.We learn how to behave before we learn to ask why.That does not mean everything we inherit is wrong. Nor does it mean that all authority is illegitimate. A society without rules can produce insecurity just as surely as excessive authority can produce domination.

The point is more basic.We should know what we are obeying and why.The same applies to desire.We should know what we want and why we want it.There is a difference between choosing something and simply continuing a pattern because everyone around us follows it.There is a difference between respecting an institution and surrendering our judgment to the person occupying it, between enjoying wealth and being owned by the desire for more.

MAHABAHU MIRROR          

Freedom, then, may be less simple than the absence of authority.It may begin with awareness.To understand why a government can command millions without personally controlling them, why habits can be more powerful than force, why an institution can survive the people who occupy it, why desire can keep expanding even after our basic needs have been met.And, perhaps most importantly, to recognise that not every form of obedience is the same.Sometimes we obey because we are afraid, because everyone else does, the institution appears legitimate. Sometimes because the law requires it.And sometimes because we have never stopped to ask whether we are still choosing.

The ancient philosophers were not offering a single formula for freedom. They were doing something more difficult.They were asking us to examine the invisible forces that shape our lives.Power does not always arrive with a raised voice.Sometimes it arrives as a form, a deadline, a uniform, a tradition or a number on a screen.Desire does not always arrive as greed. Sometimes it appears as ambition, comparison, insecurity or the quiet feeling that what we have is never quite enough.

The challenge is not to reject every authority or every desire.It is to recognise them.Because the first step toward freedom is not necessarily refusing to obey. It is knowing why you obey. And the first step toward contentment may not be acquiring more. It may be discovering what, in the end, was enough.

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