Growing up from a kid, I never realized that I had anything called authority crisis. But unfortunately I think retrospectively speaking, I have had serious authority crisis, by recognizing it, it made me aware of the root of my personal issues.
What is authority crisis?
From a large scale, say from a nation point of view, it means you might be in trouble of defining the authority within your country.
It will be the theme of this book that the critical difference between the Chinese and most of the other developing countries begins with the fact that the Chinese have been generally spared the crisis of identify common to most other transitional system. … — “The spirit of the chinese politics”
Growing up from a developing country, especially the country has been under heavy structural change throughout my entire childhood, I actually have established a mindset that I don’t need an authority.
Maybe even worse, I might at some point even think authority is evil so that I need to avoid any authority. Because when the family was in trouble, or the nation was in trouble, there has been no single time the country has done anything to remedy the issue. Instead, the family itself played the vital part in digging out and resolving the issue; while the country is unfolding by itself, moving forward and backward for its own purpose.
Moreover, within the family, I don’t agree with my parents due to the loss of authority notion, at school, I don’t agree with my teachers. I just don’t believe anything could work out the way it was planned, no matter how sounding the plan was at the moment.
It was a pattern.
I identified it long time ago, in some sense, I was smart. Even today I’m a bit smarter than regular in identifying who’s promising a feigned beautiful thing without any credibility, a nice way to say a liar. This serves me good because I had too much in the past, or shall I say, too many lessons.
However, the problem is that, I had been in trouble to re-establish the authority. Therefore, I hope you get the meaning of the authority crisis.
Legitimacy always needs competence; nothing so shatters the mystique of authority as helplessness. — “The spirit of Chinese politics”
Working Model
So, there’s a thin line between a working model and a liar. They almost equal to each other at some point. However, there’s a basic requirement that we have to apply before we declare a working model. That is, do you know whether it actually had worked or do you actually just believe it will work? Maybe the intention for both are all nice and pure, the REAL intention from other’s perspective can be very different. I think this is the argument that I start to establish to tell some one between these two. Keep in mind, I’m not looking for a nice person here, I’m looking for a working model.
Therefore, we normally have some level of legitimacy to start with. Legitimacy is always nice to hook us in at the first place. But that is not enough, because it needs to be verified by the competence. How do we verify? Check it against the result today, check it against the result tomorrow, and keep doing it until after couple of years later no one bothers to check it. But my recommendation is that, you keep doing it with no exception, because it’s just too dangerous to just believe something to be a working model, especially you want to apply it to yourself for a while.
Difficult as it sounds, there’s always a working model in this world at some point. If this model fails, there’ll be another model. If we can keep our eye open, and pay less attention to the failed case, we might be able to get started in looking for the working model more easily. Maybe it might still take you a while to find it, at least you don’t have to spend too much in denying, defending or any un-constructive actions.
Once you find a legitimacy with competence; then it might be time we establish it as an authority, at least for a while, so we can enjoy a peace of mind until next time.
