Quotes About Authority

Meaning and authority always go hand in hand. Whoever determines the meaning of our actions – whether they are good or evil, right or wrong, beautiful or ugly – also gains the authority to tell us what to think and how to behave.

Notwithstanding the danger of mass unemployment, what we should worry about even more is the shift in authority from humans to algorithms, which might destroy any remaining faith in the liberal story and open the way to the rise of digital dictatorships.

As bureaucracies accumulate power, they become immune to their own mistakes. Instead of changing their stories to fit reality, they can change reality to fit their stories. In

A single priest often does the work of a hundred soldiers – far more cheaply and effectively.

As a species, humans prefer power to truth.

When everybody uses the same oracle, and everybody believes the oracle, the oracle turns into a sovereign.

Yet once biologists concluded that organisms are algorithms, they dismantled the wall between the organic and the inorganic, turned the computer revolution from a purely mechanical affair into a biological cataclysm, and shifted authority from individual humans to networked algorithms.

In the early twenty-first century, politics is consequently bereft of grand visions. Government has become mere administration. It manages the country, but it no longer leads it.

In the end, it's a simple empirical matter: if the algorithms indeed understand what's happening within you better than you understand it, authority will shift to them.

How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism?

Anyone who has ever dealt with the tax authorities, the education system or any other complex bureaucracy knows that the truth hardly matters. What's written on your form is far more important.

For centuries humanism has been convincing us that we are the ultimate source of meaning, and that our free will is therefore the highest authority of all.

great power inevitably distorts the truth.

As much as we should fear the power of big corporations, history suggests that we are not necessarily better off in the hands of overly mighty governments.

The shifting of authority from humans to algorithms is happening all around us, not as a result of some momentous governmental decision, but due to a flood of mundane personal choices.

Truth and power can travel together only so far. Sooner or later they go their separate paths. If you want power, at some point you will have to spread fictions. If you want to know the truth about the world, at some point you will have to renounce power.

Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfed and irresponsible gods who don't know what they want?

If you want power, at some point you will have to spread fictions. If you want to know the truth about the world, at some point you will have to renounce power.

The most important segments of many religious dogmas are not their ethical principles, but rather factual statements such as 'God exists', 'the soul is punished for its sins in the afterlife', 'the Bible was written by a deity rather than by humans', 'the Pope is never wrong'.

If I believe in God at all, it is my choice to believe. If my inner self tells me to believe in God- then I believe. I believe because I fell God's presence, and my heart tells me He is there. But if I no longer feel God's presence, and if my heart suddenly tells me that there is no God-I will cease believing. Either way, the real source of authority is my own feelings. So even while saying that I believe in God, the truth is that I have a much stronger belief in my own inner voice.

Since all social orders and hierarchies are imagined, they are all fragile, and the larger the society, the more fragile it is. The crucial historical role of religion has been to give superhuman legitimacy to these fragile structures. Religions assert that our laws are not the result of human caprice, but are ordained by an absolute and supreme authority. This helps place at least some fundamental laws beyond challenge, thereby ensuring social stability.

In the end it was communism that collapsed. The supermarket proved to be far stronger than the gulag.

You can do many things with bayonets, but it is rather uncomfortable to sit on them.

By manufacturing a never-ending stream of crises, a corrupt oligarchy can prolong its rule indefinitely.8