I'll start with a couple of paragraphs from a book titled Life: A User's Manual, by Julian Baggini and Antonia Macaro. In a section on Authority Baggini and Macaro were writing about Confucius' idea of authority.
"In this view, authority is a necessary good rather than a necessary evil. It is not simply a matter of power but of responsibility. Furthermore, the more authority a leader has, the less they have to resort to force. People follow a good leader the way the grass follows the wind, bending easily and naturally. Leaders can achieve this only if they are exemplary persons. Only tyrants [think of Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin] need to bully, cajole or terrorise others into submission, thereby showing not authority but a lack of it. When it is exercised well, authority suits everyone.
Confucius offers us a way of thinking about our problems with authority. If our issue is with those who have it, we might ask whether they are abusing it or whether we are too proud to accept their rightful exercise of it. If we don't feel we have enough, is it because we are being stopped from using it or because we want to wield a power we have not earned? And if we feel uncomfortable exercising it, we should ask whether we are simply shirking the proper responsibilities of our role."
In the second paragraph above the abuse of authority is mentioned. My point in this page is that if we feel that authority is being abused we (and our representatives) have a responsibility to try to correct this abuse.
In the list below I've placed just a few of the stand-out cases of where leaders should have been brought to heal but have not been.
- In India Narendra Modi has very publicly pressed for changing the nation from one that is open to all religions to one that will favour one religion, Hinduism, over all others. This is an undemocratic step and one that will disadvantage Muslims, Sikhs and others, who make up large minorities. There seem to be few politicians in Mr Modi's party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), who have made any attempt to stop him from taking this cruel and unethical step.
- Xi Jinping seems to have ambitions to become an Emperor of a new and bigger Chinese empire, and the National People's Congress is allowing him to get away with it. If he continues unchecked he is posing a risk of another war in the Pacific.
- Vladamir Putin seems to have much the same ambitions as Xi Jinping, his war against Ukraine seems to be a step in his intention to become a twenty-first century tzar of a new Russian Empire.
- In the USA Republican politicians have put aside their respect for truth and morality in their apparently unquestioning support for Donal Trump.
- Back in 2003 US President George W Bush, the UK's Prime Minister Tony Blair and Australia's PM John Howard started the disastrous Iraq War. The politicians in their respective countries could have stopped them, but if they tried at all they didn't try hard enough. (In Australia I recall that there were mass rallies and marches against the Iraq invasion. Many Australians tried to stop it from going ahead. Did we try hard enough?)
- In my country, Australia, both political parties that have formed governments over the last several decades have favoured the welfare and profitability of the fossil fuel industries over the urgent need to reduce climate changing emissions. We, the people, and our parliamentary representatives have a responsibility to correct this.
One way we can do this is to elect community independents to replace big party politicians.
- Whistleblowers have had to do the work that parliamentarians should have done. And they've often paid a heavy price.
At the time of writing Julian Assange was being released from many years confinement following his exposing of the wrongdoing of the US administration. Had the US politicians done their job the illegal acts of the US authorities would never have occurred. I've written more on the mistreatment of whistleblowers in the Australia section, below.
It seems that far too many of the people in the various parliaments and congresses that in theory run these countries don't have the courage to attempt to hold their leaders to any sort of civilised limits.
Have the Russian people gained by Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine? Many Russian soldiers have died in the conflict. The Russian people's taxes are going into the war rather than into improving the Russian infrastructure. Sanctions have been placed on Russia and the Russian people and the overseas assets of Russian oligarchs have been frozen. It seems that the Russian people have lost a great deal by Mr Putin's lust for greater personal power.
Certainly the people of Ukraine have suffered enormously. Perhaps the people of the majority Russian ethnic areas within Ukraine have suffered most; it is there that the fighting is most intense and destructive.
The Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, who should be looking after the Russian people have failed to control Mr Putin's lust for increased power and they have failed to act according to any credible ethical principles.
In China Xi Jinping has managed to awe or bully the members of the National People's Congress to award him the position of Premier for life or at least for longer than premiers were allowed in the past.
He is threatening to invade Taiwan. Who would be advantaged if China did invade and incorporate Taiwan into a greater China? Certainly not the Taiwanese people. Would the Chinese people gain anything? It would seem not. Xi Jinping and the National People's Congress would increase the number of people they could tyrannise; it would give them some satisfaction. Of course the invasion and conquest of Taiwan would cause huge death and damage for the Taiwanese people, similar, one would expect, to the death and destruction that we have been seeing in Ukraine for the past several years.
Many of the people in China would like to have more freedom. The people of Hong Kong have gone from a democratic system to authoritarian rule by China, with losses to freedom of speech, freedom of the media, freedom in general. But those in power want to hold onto power and they rightly fear they will loose that power if they give the people more freedom.
The members of the National People's Congress could rein in Xi Jinping's excesses and give more freedom to the Chinese people, but instead they are failing the Chinese people in order to retain their own positions and power.
In my country, Australia, there is not at present (2024) any one leader who is exceeding his or her authority, but there are only two political party groups (Liberal-National coalition and Labor) who have been able to form governments in the last quite a few decades.
Both of these groups are failing to provide ethical governments that serve the wishes of the people and take on the responsibility of urgently limiting climate changing emissions.
In Australia we have been seeing a gradual whittling away of our freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom to protest, etcetera.
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Brown Hill Range, one of the Hallett wind farms, Mid-North SA
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| Renewable energy, mainly wind and solar, has been a great success in Australia, especially South Australia, which had gone from practically no renewable energy in 2000 to 70% in 2023. SA had little fossil fuel industry especially after the last coal-fired power station closed down in 2016.
The fossil fuel industry, with support from governments, not only the Liberal-National coalition governments, have resisted the development of renewable energy strongly and dishonestly. Consequently other Australian states had only about half the renewable energy percentage of SA at the time of writing. | |
We are seeing whistleblowers who expose the misdeeds of big business and government being punished rather than rewarded.
In the
Australia-East Timor spying scandal a whistleblower made public the shameful spying that the Australian government carried out on a poor neighbour. Had parliamentarians done their jobs the spying would not have happened. Other whistleblowers have exposed war crimes committed by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan and suffered for it.
We are seeing what is effectively attempted rule by the fossil fuel industries due to what can only be called corruption in the two dominant political party groups and many of our parliamentarians.
The leader of the opposition in Australian federal parliament, Peter Dutton, has proposed that nuclear power stations should be built in Australia. It is obvious to experts in the field and any thinking person that this strategy is foolish, expensive and too slow to achieve the needed emissions reductions. Many politicians, including those in the Coalition, must realise the stupidity of Mr Dutton's policy, but they are not holding him to account.
There is hope for a more responsible, honest and democratic representation in Australia in the near future, at the federal election of 2022 ten community independent representatives were elected.
For an explanation of what community independent politicians stand for see the Community Independent Project.
I have to say that my knowledge of the government of Iran is very limited, but in spite of this I'd like to make a few points, perhaps because Iran is distinctive in being effectively a theocracy, one of very few in the world.
The people of Iran understandably rebelled against Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979. Unfortunately for them, after coming close to getting a democratic government, they replaced one tyranny with another; they replaced a secular tyranny with a religious tyranny.
As I've written on another page, religion is delusional. Several centuries ago the people of Western Europe were also tyrannised by authoritarian religion; but through complex processes that tyranny no longer exists, except in the minds of those people who are still subject to the religious delusion.
There have now been several generations of Iranian people since the 1979 revolution. The freedom of the Iranian people is limited by the unelected Supreme Leader, who is a Muslim cleric.
Governments of Iran are elected, but candidates have to be acceptable to the Revolutionary Council and that, itself, is apparently under the control of the Supreme Leader. The members of the Revolutionary Council seem unwilling to give the Iranian people more self government and freedom. Is it up to the Iranian people to somehow limit the power of those who are running the country if they are to achieve more freedom?
In my country, and around the world, we are seeing leaders of political parties and nations who are abusing their power. Their motivation seems typically to be ambition and lust for power.
The leaders of those nations that have democratic governments, or governments that have some democratic features, have parliaments or similar bodies that are supposed to represent the people and limit any tendency in the leaders to excess.
Those representatives or politicians are failing in their duties.
In democracies it is the people who elect the representatives. So the people have the responsibility to carefully choose representatives who will do their duty.
