Trust, authority and Philosophy

Reading random fiction and such, I keep being faced with models which seem strange to me. I cannot, outside of my family unit, recall ever dealing with a sympathetic or inspiring authority figure. How does that even work anyway? So I'm wondering if anyone has good psychology or philosophy books to recommend on themes and topics which relate to my inquiry. Thanks Lainons

Anarchist theory talks a lot about the ways in which positions of power attract cruel, weak and incompetent people, if that's what you mean. Not that everybody in a position of power is necessarily like that, but everyone like that is attracted to positions of power, and hierarchies can facilitate the integration between authority and mediocrity. This text might be close to what you're looking for: http://humaniterations.net/2017/06/14/your-freedom-is-my-freedom-the-premise-of-anarchism/

>>12243 > recall ever dealing with a sympathetic or inspiring authority figure. You never had a single good teacher? I can count at least 3. The common factor was all of them were close to retirement aka free to act as they wanted.

I appreciate the spontaneousness of your question, I will try to give it a satisfactory answer. I think your naive approach translates into not knowing where to start? Or maybe I'm wrong. I'd recommend reading french ethnologist Marc Augé and sociologist Jacques Ellul. Both are from very different academic backgrounds and write about separate topics, but their respective theories go hand in hand. In his book ''Non-places'', Augé deals with the decaying state of the social institutions (such as democracy, christianity, the belief of nation state, etc.) from an architectural point of view. He describes a process by which modern architecture has limited the size of the public space in which citizens can exchange ideas, participate in social life or achieving communal goals, while allowing the remaining space to be saturated by vertically integrated condo-towers, american chains and highways. He argues that modern individuals were robbed of the capacity to establish connections that went above the status of mercantile with each other. In his interviews (branded dialogues with Marc Augé), he approaches the same topic from a philosophical angle, which he calls the alterity crisis. He underlines the extinction of general truths that are socially deemed unquestionable. So, individuals fill the void on their own to figure out where they stand in the social order, and this ordeal can drive you crazy, because everybody is out there trying to figure out this crap. This in turn leads to general mistrust between individuals that are only thinking short-term, ready to sell their mom for a promotion, thereby not having to deal with as much people (read competition) as they advance through the free-market economy. Ellul's The Technological System picks up the same reflection from a structural, less personnal point of view. His argument is that man is progressively being taught to be removed from the labor market, and the punch is... he doesn't really mind. He doesn't mind because successive changes in the cursus of schools, colleges and universities across the industrialized world have oriented the vision of labor towards undecisive labor. In other words, the pieces of a productive machine will never come under question, because the human participating in the chain of production will never be brought to doubt the fundamental use of the work he is accomplishing - even if he is autonomous to assure its performance and operation. Men in charge of the operation, and the stratas of workers beneath him, will never be able to be sympathetic let alone inspiring, because the results (the final manufactured product) yielded by the workers does not benefit them in any senses, from personal to the metaphycial sense. If you are looking for answers that find their roots in the political culture, I'd recommend reading Francis Fukuyama's The Origins of the Political Order or his other book Trust. If you're looking for a more psychological angle, there's Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault that is an absolute (albeit dense) blast. I hope you will find something that suits your style, because in the end they all talk about the same phenomenons, more or less, in different words.

>>12303 Not OP, but thanks Lain. This is likely the best thing i've read around here in a while.

I have much the same attitude, but I'm also bitterly aware that this is probably all stemming from my daddy issues.

>>12303 OP here. Some interesting reading material that, and yeah, I don't really know where to start. But your post is close-enough.