The article “Avoid Authorities” does not mean that we must rebel against everything that any authority says. It is not helpful to reject statements without trying to understand them. However, for the development towards a self-responsible adult it is also not helpful to adopt statements of another person or organization without understanding them first. That is what I mean when I say avoid authorities.
Role models are important for our development. Good role models can massively accelerate our development, inspire us and enable us to perform much better. We all depend on them as children. And also as we get older, role models continue to be important for our life. But we should have in mind that as we get older, we also become role models for others and should get our orientation more and more from our own experience and knowledge.
Children are allowed and expected to fully trust their confidants. It is a necessary step in the development of all humans. An adult on the other hand has a developmental deficit when he continues to adopt the statements presented to him without verification. That is rarely the case. The important question is, how do we verify?
Fundamentally, every human looks for accordance of new input with his existing Weltbild. If the input matches the Weltbild, the verification is successful. When a source delivers mostly matching input, a relationship of trust is building. On the other hand, when confronted with statements not matching our Weltbild, we usually reject them. The verification fails. The reference for our verification is not reality, but our own individual Weltbild. That’s why people react so differently to the same statement, although we all live in the same world. Most people do not like to follow up input that they rejected. That is unfortunate, because dealing with the things we reject has the most potential to bring us forward in our development.
Our need for inclusion and harmony can push us to judge certain people or institutions as trustworthy. Often we adopt those judgements from other confidants. Then the statements made by those sources are perceived as truth, the demands become law. Questioning the source is judged as treason, as an aggression and provocation. That is typical especially for someone who has no orientation whatsoever when left alone. Avoiding authorities means to me, that an adult can disagree with a statement of his biggest idol just as easy as he can disagree with a statement of a random person. To be able to do that it is a necessity to have trust into my own discernment.
A good role model, a good teacher helps us to be able to compare our Weltbild, our worldview and our beliefs with reality. The closer we are to reality with the Weltbild given to us when we were young, the easier this task becomes. A teacher can also demand of us to absorb input without questions and then reproduce it with the same words in an exam. We don’t need to always reject that method, but we should understand it as a preliminary stage before the real learning begins.
A personal relationship with our role models becomes less of a necessity as we get older, although it would still be worthwhile. For a small child a role model must be physically present. At a young age we need someone we can touch, who can feed us, watch over us and raise us. As we get older, we become able to choose role models that we only interact with indirectly. This phenomenon is quite new in the extend we see it today. It became relevant because of radio, television, the internet, and last but definitely not least social media. Already as teenagers many humans look for role models in this virtual world, where we can only look through a small window at the selectively created and polished self-presentation of another person. That does not only concern influencers, but also politicians and other people of public interest. We need teachers – not influencers. Good teachers answer questions, give inspiration, suggest ways. They do not celebrate themselves, they give room to their pupils to also develop on their own.
Often a person we barely know or don’t know at all is especially attractive as a role model. We see their success, which they happily present, and imagine their entire life to be soaked in bliss. The dark side of their life, their problems and their unsatisfied needs remain hidden, we often don’t see it. Striving to live the life of a little-known role model can therefore often turn out to be a mistake. Trusting a person we do not know personally, or an organization, is an equally bad idea if we want to be more than a follower.