14 July 2008
Author-ity
I
have a love of words. I play with them. I change them. I take them apart. You
often find tremendous wisdom messing around with words. The simplicity of the
messages within words is often poetic. Take “authority” for example. If you
split the word, the meaning becomes, “You’re the little (ity) author of it
all.”
You’re the little author of everything.
What a wonderful thing to know. I’m authoring my whole life, and no one has any
author power over me unless I write them into that role. It took me a while to
get to that understanding because I used to believe that other people knew
everything, and that I knew nothing. My life was spent trying to catch up to
speed. In fact, I went to college because I was acutely aware of what I didn’t
know.
I’ll blame it on my neighbor in high school, John. In the summers, John lived
next door at his aunt’s house. He was a couple years older than me, and he used
to sit on the concrete porch, smoking a clove cigarette in the morning, reading
the newspaper. In high school, though I was a good student, my interest in the
newspaper was the comics. But John read through each section of the newspaper.
I never quite understood what he found so fascinating. Finally, one day I
picked up part of the paper he was done with and began to read it. It was an
article about the Middle East, and as I got into it, I realized that I didn’t
know anything about the Middle East. I didn’t know where Israel was. I didn’t
know who the Palestinians were. I didn’t know why they were fighting or what
the United States had to do with it. I looked up, and asked John what he was
reading. He said the stock page. I had no idea what stocks were either. Why
wasn’t I learning these things in school, I wondered? I should have at least
been able to make it through a newspaper and have some kind of understanding of
its contents. I thought to myself, “I’m pretty ignorant.” It was at that moment
that I decided to go to college.
And college was great. I loved it. I took every 101 class I could: sociology,
psychology, art appreciation, film studies, political science, history, music
appreciation, religious studies, etc., etc. I caught up enough so that I could
make it through a newspaper without any casualties. But there were two things
that absolutely blew me away in college. I never did recover from them. The
first was when I learned what Freud’s philosophy was and it’s impact on the
then modern world. I was blown away. I thought, “This man knows nothing about
anything and even less about women.” That anyone could find merit in his assumptions
was incredible. It was the first thing that really shook the foundations of my
belief that authorities knew more than I did.
The second and third things that made me think that maybe I knew something that
authorities didn’t was the use of the third person in writing and the citation
system. When you take the “I” out of your writing, you’re hiding. There’s no
such thing as an I-less piece of writing. Period. And I thought, and still
think to this day, that it’s asinine to write as if there is. It’s really just
a cover. You’re pretending that your opinion is absent from the piece of
writing but, of course, it’s all over the writing because you wrote it. The
writer is always writing from the writer’s perspective whether the “I” is
present in the writing or not. I’m not saying narration doesn’t have its uses.
I’m saying that to pretend that the narration does not have an author is a
dangerous thing. It creates fertile ground for cowardice. Individuals can
pretend that they’re not actually present in the writing. This kind of norm
makes people scared to voice their own opinions. It makes them try to remove
any evidence that they’ve been there. This is a falsehood and to perpetrate
such a falsehood struck me as immature.
That our educational institutions could push this form of writing and call it
superior to the “I” writing made me look again at those that I called
“authorities.” Then came my involvement with the citation system. Citations, in
and of themselves, are great things. They’re an easy way to find primary
material, and I love primary material. There’s nothing so wonderful as reading
what a person actually said and in its proper context no less. But to have
to cite what someone else says to make your own argument valid is ridiculous.
How does the fact that someone else said it make it more true? It doesn’t. In
that act of validating an argument by citing someone else, the writer is
limited to what has been written before. What happens, then, is that you end up
with a few individuals running the show simply because they have balls to voice
their own opinions. Having balls does not necessarily mean your ideas are
sound.
The issue goes pretty deep because our legal system is based on it. When I was
in law school I was floored to learn that it was nothing but the citation
system gone amuck. And anyone who studies constitutional law will tell you the
amazement that you feel when the Supreme Court hands down a decision that’s
plainly unconstitutional but then becomes constitutional because the Supreme
Court’s interpretation of the law becomes part of the law itself. So you have a
whole nation that has to follow something that makes no sense simply because
the Supreme Court said it was so. People say stupid things all the time, even
people in black robes who have both experience, and sharp legal minds. The fact
that these people say something is true does not make it so.
Now, no system is perfect, and ours works pretty well by and large even with
the hiccups. There’s always going to be give and take in life, and I’m fine
with that. But you will never convince me that because another person’s says
something is true it’s true. You will never convince me that because a billion
people say something is true that it’s true.
What’s the standard for truth then? Who’s the real authority? For me, the
standard of truth has become my gut.
That’s right. I’m now convinced that the only authority is my own gut. Oh, but
you can’t legislate that, you might say. You can’t monitor it. You can’t
measure it against an outside standard. No, you can’t. And yet, I’ve been paying
attention to it for an extended period of time now, and I’ve found that it’s a
consistent little sucker. It gives excellent advice. So far, its accuracy rate
is 100%. I can’t say that about any outside standard I’ve ever employed.
Of course, my record at following my gut is not quite so impressive. This is because
I’ve believed what I was taught in school—that a rational person distrusts her
own feelings. A rational person looks to an outside person or a book or other
source or what-have-you to tell her what’s right and wrong. Well, guess what?
I’m not so naive now. I’m learning to unlearn that line of thinking, and it’s going
pretty well.
And I’m not the only one. I notice more people doing the same, not only in my
generation, but in the younger generations as well. My son knows a lot of
home-schooled kids, and these kids have learned to think for themselves.
They’re not smitten with following the mass line of reasoning. They see the
holes. They’re much more inclined to make up their own mind instead of
swallowing what a teacher or book or television says about the state of things.
I notice that they influence their friends who are in the school system quite a
bit. I notice that there’s a trend with all of these kids toward listening to
their own desires and inclinations. I find this tremendously heartening. As a
result of being single minded about their own desires, the creativity that
these kids express is amazing, and it’s only going to get more interesting.
I think the most important skill anyone can learn in this world is to listen to
their own feelings, to notice what’s going on in their body and decipher the
message. This is a high art, and it’s more useful than any set of rules or
norms that have ever been, or will ever be, compiled by humans. It’s the
birthplace of true creativity, and that’s something to be celebrated.
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About Samantha
Samantha Standish is a writer and a former intellectual property and corporate law lawyer. She received her B.A. in history with honors, and her B.A. in Spanish with honors, in 1989 from the University of California, Santa Barbara and went on to get her law degree Cum Laude from the University of Maine School of Law. In her legal career, Samantha worked in government and the private sector, most notably in the financial planning and software industry. In her personal life, she’s been married for twenty years and has a fifteen year-old home schooled son. Samantha resigned from the bar in 2005 and has devoted herself to bridge writing (making complex ideas about space/time easy to understand for the average reader) ever since, focusing mostly on self-help articles for artists and writing bridge books on the side. In her words, “The first forty years of my life were fact finding; the next forty years are about applying, expanding and exploring what I’ve learned.” Her books can be found at samanthastandish.com. Samantha’s NWV blog is titled The Magical Life.