Tuesday, July 11, 2006
AUTHORITY AND FEAR
Authority
I have experienced plenty of cases in real life, not in scientific laboratory which creates the base fort he following flow of ideas. The question is how do people behave when exposed to some authority and why do they behave that way. My experiences go mostly with Czechs, in the years 1990 to 2006.
Many years ago I let one Czech construction company to construct my house. At that time I still behaved to Czechs as to westerners. If there was something wrong on the building site I tried to solve the problem the friendly way. Mostly I earned just bad words for that. Several years later I had my hotel repaired by another Czech constructing company. This time it was me who used dirty words, and the result was that the workers really did work.
My next experience goes with the children at Czech schools. The whole story got repeated. When I was good to the children they mostly did no t obey. When I started to punish them they started to obey.
I have plenty other experiences showing the same behavioral pattern. If approached friendly, some people react unfriendly, if the same sort of people is approached in a hard way they usually do what they are told.
Another experience which I have is that I have heard several parents telling their kids they will get it the hard way when going to school. This sentence was used many times and always when Czech parents did not know how to make their children obey.
This type of behavior had been really strange to me and it took me long time to find out what is that all about. The solution is incredibly simple. It is the pure question of how people perceive authority.
Most Czechs I have met perceive authority only through fear. Someone who does not scream at them, does not threaten them with whatever kind of punishment, is not perceived as authority. Quite opposite, if somebody approaches this type of people in a friendly way he is mostly perceived as a weak person.
This shows what Czechs need to perceive someone as authority to be obeyed. Only persons who can threaten with punishment are perceived as authority. Persons who try to get performance out of Czech people using the friendly way mostly will have no good responds.
So, fear seems to be the most important feature in Czech system of recognizing who is and who is not an authority. It seems to me really strange that Czechs recognize only that single type of authority, the type which is equipped with the ability to punish. Czechs usually do not recognize any other type of authority.
There must be reason for this single type of authority adored by Czechs. I believe it is the way how Czechs have been domesticated. In their whole history they had had someone else ruling over them, until 1990.
Just a small return to fear: right now some kind of smart IT Alec has sent me a virus and makes me afraid of loosing my data on my pc and offers me a super antivirus program to buy which will help me to get rid of this virus. This is again a primitive use of fear in order to boost up sales of some kind of miserable program. So the fear is misused by nearly all people against all other people.
Also kidnapping, high-jacking etc are only different forms of applying fear to achieve one’s goal. As I have stated already before even governments use fear in order to bring their own people to a state of complete obedience and respect to them as authority. This system is severely inhuman in the terms of moral and human quality. It is indeed human when we realize that it is us, people, humans, who “invented” this system.
After this small excurse into types and forms of activities “producing “fear I want to come back to authority. In order to be recognized as authority and respected as such, authority must be linked with power. There are several types of power and might. Different authors will most probably use a different set up of types of power.
One of them, beyond any doubt, is the power of knowledge. Knowledge itself does not make the authority. It can become authority when joined with positive human traits like help, passing the knowledge further, or with bad traits, like preparedness to cheat using the knowledge.
The next type of authority is e.g. the assigned authority, such as directors and teachers have. This type of authority is mostly linked with the possibility of a sort of punishment. Nowadays such a punishment is not slaps or any other kind of beating, but with the possibility of destroying the person’s life by not enabling the person access to money. This threat functions really good. As nowadays a person without money is expelled of the society, which represents a good threat through fear of loosing social contacts.
If this is really so much highly used system of making people do what somebody else wants, there must be some background to it. I would assume that this background is the type of people we are, mostly simple, lazy, egoistic etc. In dealing with such people very often the only thing to make them behave properly is fear, and the threat which creates the fear.
I have experienced plenty of cases in real life, not in scientific laboratory which creates the base fort he following flow of ideas. The question is how do people behave when exposed to some authority and why do they behave that way. My experiences go mostly with Czechs, in the years 1990 to 2006.
Many years ago I let one Czech construction company to construct my house. At that time I still behaved to Czechs as to westerners. If there was something wrong on the building site I tried to solve the problem the friendly way. Mostly I earned just bad words for that. Several years later I had my hotel repaired by another Czech constructing company. This time it was me who used dirty words, and the result was that the workers really did work.
My next experience goes with the children at Czech schools. The whole story got repeated. When I was good to the children they mostly did no t obey. When I started to punish them they started to obey.
I have plenty other experiences showing the same behavioral pattern. If approached friendly, some people react unfriendly, if the same sort of people is approached in a hard way they usually do what they are told.
Another experience which I have is that I have heard several parents telling their kids they will get it the hard way when going to school. This sentence was used many times and always when Czech parents did not know how to make their children obey.
This type of behavior had been really strange to me and it took me long time to find out what is that all about. The solution is incredibly simple. It is the pure question of how people perceive authority.
Most Czechs I have met perceive authority only through fear. Someone who does not scream at them, does not threaten them with whatever kind of punishment, is not perceived as authority. Quite opposite, if somebody approaches this type of people in a friendly way he is mostly perceived as a weak person.
This shows what Czechs need to perceive someone as authority to be obeyed. Only persons who can threaten with punishment are perceived as authority. Persons who try to get performance out of Czech people using the friendly way mostly will have no good responds.
So, fear seems to be the most important feature in Czech system of recognizing who is and who is not an authority. It seems to me really strange that Czechs recognize only that single type of authority, the type which is equipped with the ability to punish. Czechs usually do not recognize any other type of authority.
There must be reason for this single type of authority adored by Czechs. I believe it is the way how Czechs have been domesticated. In their whole history they had had someone else ruling over them, until 1990.
Just a small return to fear: right now some kind of smart IT Alec has sent me a virus and makes me afraid of loosing my data on my pc and offers me a super antivirus program to buy which will help me to get rid of this virus. This is again a primitive use of fear in order to boost up sales of some kind of miserable program. So the fear is misused by nearly all people against all other people.
Also kidnapping, high-jacking etc are only different forms of applying fear to achieve one’s goal. As I have stated already before even governments use fear in order to bring their own people to a state of complete obedience and respect to them as authority. This system is severely inhuman in the terms of moral and human quality. It is indeed human when we realize that it is us, people, humans, who “invented” this system.
After this small excurse into types and forms of activities “producing “fear I want to come back to authority. In order to be recognized as authority and respected as such, authority must be linked with power. There are several types of power and might. Different authors will most probably use a different set up of types of power.
One of them, beyond any doubt, is the power of knowledge. Knowledge itself does not make the authority. It can become authority when joined with positive human traits like help, passing the knowledge further, or with bad traits, like preparedness to cheat using the knowledge.
The next type of authority is e.g. the assigned authority, such as directors and teachers have. This type of authority is mostly linked with the possibility of a sort of punishment. Nowadays such a punishment is not slaps or any other kind of beating, but with the possibility of destroying the person’s life by not enabling the person access to money. This threat functions really good. As nowadays a person without money is expelled of the society, which represents a good threat through fear of loosing social contacts.
If this is really so much highly used system of making people do what somebody else wants, there must be some background to it. I would assume that this background is the type of people we are, mostly simple, lazy, egoistic etc. In dealing with such people very often the only thing to make them behave properly is fear, and the threat which creates the fear.
# posted by Dalibor @ 10:27 AM 
