275 Paramount Authority

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">There are many sources of authority: if you want Moral authority, you refer to your church; and legal authority is ensconced in the Judiciary; for authorities on commercial matters, you would ask someone from the business world; cultural authority comes from the ethnic group from which it derived; creative authority is reserved to artists; and the ultimate in authority is the violence embodied in the police & military. All of these groups vie for supremacy, but which is most important?</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Well, all sources of authority have some claim on the title of Most Important. For example, for a society to endure, it requires productivity, which would seem to indicate that commercial activity is of paramount importance, therefore, whatever it takes to maintain commerce has authority. However, right now, Moral authority via the SJW movement is in ascendance, but like all religions, it suffers the backlash from the people whose liberty they are impinging. Legal authorities can incarcerate you, even take your life, but the web of enforcement is thin & extended; it is unlikely that people will follow The Law simply because of threat of penalty. Cultural authority is the most subjective of all authorities, certainly it cannot be universally applied, and remains more an oddity rather than any fount of wisdom. And art is in the eye of the beholder, as ephemeral as the wind it is sometimes made of. Obviously, it's an interconnected relationship, so ask yourself which authority, if removed, causes the others to cease functioning or collapse? It's an authority that rarely gets mentioned, the authority from which all others derive... All external authority flows from your personal authority, because without a tacit agreement from you to adhere to the rules of society, there is no authority.</p>