Can You Comply With “The Authorities” Without Granting It The Right To Rule Over You?
A simple question over a word we use constantly during discourse over relationships, contracts, medical procedures, transactions, agreements, and countless other arrangements between people. Yet when the subject becomes about political authority, the meaning of consent seems to change without notice. Suddenly, consent can supposedly be demonstrated by voting, obeying "the law", paying extortion taxes, remaining within a particular territory governed by invisible lines drawn on the sand, using public services, accepting government-issued documents, contracts, participating in an economy regulated by the State, and much more. However none of those things, by themselves, establish consent but behaviors.
In short, consent is a voluntary agreement. It is the coming together of senses and accord. It is to yield when one has the right and power or will to oppose. It is a voluntary acceptance of what is proposed and what is to be done. It defines two separate requirements: agreement and voluntariness. Remove either one and the concept changes entirely.
If I invite you to my birthday party and you accept because you genuinely want to attend, you have voluntarily agreed to the invitation. If you decline because you do not want to attend, you have voluntarily refused it.
Now change the circumstances.
Suppose I tell you that you are coming to my birthday party and threaten to beat you if you refuse, and you believed it, strongly enough so that you show up out of fear.
Did you consent?
You physically attended, sure, and you may have even smiled, sat down, eaten the cake and joked around with the others there. Anyone observing only your behavior might conclude that you agreed to be there, but you didn't. You complied.
Francisco de Goya, Shackled Prisoner, c. 1815. Black chalk, red chalk and brown wash on laid paper. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Public-domain artwork.
That distinction becomes even clearer when the threat is unmistakable. For example, if someone points a gun at you and demands your wallet, and you hand it over, nobody with any understanding of the word, would seriously argue that you consented to being robbed. You chose to hand over the wallet, but your choice existed within a coercive circumstance. The mere fact that you complied with the demand does not transform the demand into a voluntary agreement.
This seems obvious when the coercion is personal and immediate, yet the distinction becomes strangely blurred when the coercive relationship is institutional, widespread, or socially accepted. For example:
A police officer pulls you over tells you to produce your license and registration. You comply either because out of fear for your safety or out of some twisted delusional idea that you have a moral duty to do so. You may be told that refusing can result in arrest. You comply, of course. You are told that resisting arrest can result in physical force, sometimes that goes without say because you know this already. At some point, someone may look at your compliance and say, "you chose to obey." Perhaps you did, but that still leaves the question unanswered.
Did you consent?
Those are not the same question and that difference matters because political authority is, supposedly, frequently justified through the "consent of the governed", which is another strangely bizarre phrase that we'll get into later. Authority is and always has been, assumed, enforced and never proven. If consent is to have means of voluntary agreement, then obedience cannot simply be substituted for it by any stretch of the imagination and faith.
Before we can determine whether anyone has legitimately consented to be governed, we have to determine what consent actually requires.
That means asking questions that are far more fundamental than politics:
What is voluntariness?
What makes an agreement voluntary?
What is coercion?
Is the ability to refuse necessary for consent to exist?
And perhaps most importantly:
Can consent exist where refusal is possible only at the price of coercion?
Those questions come before the question of who has the right to rule, because if consent is the foundation upon which authority claims legitimacy, then we should probably establish that consent actually exists before we build an entire political order upon it.
One of the first objections that appears when discussing coercion is deceptively simple:
"But you always have a choice."
Technically, that is true. The person being robbed can refuse to hand over the wallet, a prisoner can refuse an order. Someone being threatened can refuse an arbitrary demand. The driver pulled over by the police can refuse to provide the requested documents, but does the existence of a choice mean that the resulting action is voluntary?
When there is coercion hidden or otherwise obvious, I would probably say absolutely not. If it did, then coercion would become almost impossible to distinguish from voluntary action. Every victim of coercion could simply be told that they were free to choose otherwise. The fact that they chose the less dangerous option would then be used as evidence that they voluntarily accepted the demand. As is oftentimes the case, and absolutely absurd.
Imagine someone points a gun at you and says, "Give me your wallet." You obviously have a choice. You can hand over the wallet. You can refuse. You can attempt to run. You can fight. You can even simply stand there and do nothing. However, the existence of these possibilities does not tell us whether you consented to surrendering your property at all. What matters is the circumstance in which the choice exists, and quite possibly the intent behind it.
Your vast options have been deliberately altered, and confined by another person's threat and your own limited ability to defend yourself. The person holding the gun has introduced a consequence for refusal that did not otherwise exist, "give me your property or I will use force against you."
You still possess a decision, but what you do not necessarily possess is a meaningful ability to refuse without being subjected to the threatened consequence.
Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Slave Market, c. 1866. A historical depiction of coercion and the absence of meaningful choice.
This is inherently important because we often confuse having alternatives with having meaningful alternatives. A prisoner has alternatives. They can obey the guard or refuse the order and accept whatever punishment follows. A robbery victim has alternatives, because they can surrender their wallet or refuse and risk being shot. Someone threatened with violence always has alternatives. They can comply or accept the violence. So yes, in each case, there is technically a choice, but if the existence of a choice were sufficient to establish voluntariness, then the word "coercion" would have almost no useful meaning.
This is why I have become more interested in the question:
Does the person possess a meaningful ability to refuse?
That question does not mean that every undesirable consequence makes an action involuntary. Consequences, whether good or bad, are unavoidable and oftentimes ignored beforehand.
If you refuse to work, you may not receive a paycheck, likewise, if you refuse to buy something, you don't receive the thing you declined to purchase. If you refuse an invitation, the person who invited you may be disappointed.
Nobody else necessarily imposed those consequences upon you for the purpose of obtaining your compliance. There is a difference between reality/life/universe imposing a consequence unto you and another person intentionally imposing a consequence upon you in order to make you comply.
If I offer you 100 dollas to mow my lawn, you are free to accept or refuse. If you refuse, I keep my $100 and you don't mow my lawn. Neither of us has been coerced simply because the offer had consequences, but suppose I tell you that you must mow my lawn and that if you refuse, I will break your windows on your beaten up 1976 Corvette.
The consequence is not merely an unavoidable result of your refusal. I have intentionally introduced it as a means of obtaining your compliance.
Do this, or else.
That "or else" is where the nature of the interaction changes. It is the foundation of all commands laid upon us all from "the authorities". And this is where the question of political authority becomes considerably more difficult, because governments also impose consequences for refusal. The question, then, is not whether laws have consequences, obviously they do, but the question thus becometh, What makes those consequences legitimate?
If a government says, "Pay this tax or we will seize your property," the fact that you ultimately pay does not by itself establish that you voluntarily agreed to the tax, nor does it establish that the tax was legitimate. If the answer is that you agreed to it by participating in the political system, then we have returned to the original problem.
If the answer is that you agreed by voting, then what exactly did you agree to?
If the answer is that you agreed by remaining within the territory, then when did remaining inside imaginary borders become acceptance?
If the answer is that you agreed because you receive benefits from the system, then when did accepting something that was offered become an agreement to every condition attached to it, and when was anyone properly informed of all the enormous myriad of consequences for such frivolous agreements?
We cannot simply assume the conclusion into existence. If consent requires voluntary agreement, then the existence of compliance cannot be used as proof of consent without first establishing that the compliance itself was voluntary. In the political world, it never was.
If such things are true, then we have created a circular argument: You consent because you obey, and you must obey because you consented. That doesn't establish consent, but merely assumes it.
Solon writing laws for Athens, 1842 wood engraving. Anonymous engraver. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
This brings us to the question underneath all of the questions we have asked so far: Where does "authority" actually come from?
Not where does political power come from, because that question is easy enough to answer. Political power comes from people, institutions, money, weapons, enforcement, bureaucracy, social conditioning, and ultimately the willingness or ability to compel obedience. In other words as Mao Zedong put it, political power comes from the end of the barrel of a gun. Of course, the "gun" doesn't have to be present at all as we have already established since the beginning of this article to to now.
It's not rocket science to figure out that power and authority are not the same thing. Any person can have the power to apply force to anyone else to do something to some degree or another, and all without having any legitimate right to command us to do it. If I point a gun at you and order you to hand over your wallet, certainly none would have been hallucinated to believe I have gained legitimate authority over you, as if only the mere possession of a gun somehow creates a legitimate right to command your own self and your propert over to me. It doesn't. I have power over you in that moment, perhaps enough power to make you comply, but my ability to enforce my demand does not magically transform the demand into a legitimate command.
So what exactly is "authority"?
The usual answers given by the majority of the believers of government simply move the question somewhere else. A police officer has authority because he is a police officer. A judge has authority because he is a judge. A politician has authority because he was elected. A government has authority because it is the government. None of those frivolous circular logical statements actually establish the right being claimed. They merely describe the position occupied by the person making the claim.
The distinction between power and authority becomes inherently unavoidable. Power answers the question, "Can you make me do it?" while as "authority" supposedly answers a completely different question, "Do you have the right to command or rule over me?" Those are not equivalent questions. If authority simply means the ability to successfully impose your will upon another person, then the word has no meaningful moral distinction from force.
Yet here we are constantly told that the same acts which would be recognized as coercive or criminal, when performed by any ordinary individual, somehow become legitimate when performed by a government employee wearing the appropriate uniform, and carrying the appropriate paperwork and titles. If I tell you that you must give me ten percent of your income or I will take your property, you would reasonably describe that as a threat, but if a government institution does substantially the same thing under the name of taxation and government, we are suddenly expected to describe it as a moral obligation to obey it.
The threat, the force, and the possibility of punishment did not disappear, only the story surrounding the person making the demand changed. So where did the authority come from? Was it voted into existence?
Obviously not, if one does the math laid out below, but even if so, how does my vote give another person a right that I do not possess myself? I cannot legitimately vote to acquire the right to control my neighbor's life, property, or choices merely because I have convinced fifty-one percent of the people around me to agree with me. If I do not possess that right individually, I cannot manufacture it by combining my preference with the preferences of other people.
Equate that power to zero for every individual in the world and then add them up. You will see that no matter how any individual makes their individual zero authority emotionally big, the resulting summing of numbers of zeros will always equate to be no bigger than zero. So where did any political party, every politicians, every cop, every agency and agent of "government", suddenly get the right to rule? It didn't. They didn't. It is no other than delusional belief that is far separated from reality. A dangerous superstition nonetheless as Larken Rose has extensively established.
This is the same problem we encountered with consent. No one can consent on behalf of another person. Likewise, no one can manufacture another person's obligation merely by voting for it. A majority can demonstrate that a majority wants something. It cannot demonstrate that the minority consented to it.
This is why the phrase "consent of the governed" contains a problem that cannot be solved simply by changing the voting system, writing a better constitution, or electing better politicians.
The County Election, 1854, by George Caleb Bingham. A contemporary depiction of the electoral process in Missouri. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
The problem exists before any of those things. The phrase assumes that some people possess a legitimate right to govern other people and then asks whether the people being governed agreed to it. Zero authority plus zero authority is zero authority. Always will be. Yet the voting cattle believe it to be otherwise. After all, they performed the cult ritual and did the enchantments, slapped on their "I voted" badges on and went on to gloat about their heroic adventures to the world on fedbook, twatter and instascam.
Why does any one human is believed to being in possession of having legitimate right to command another human being?
It certainly is not because he is stronger, because there is always someone stronger than next guy in some way. We already discussed this as that establishing power. Not because he was elected because that only establishes selection, and it's definitely not because he "holds office". Nor is it because "the law" simply says so. That merely establishes that another group of people made the same claim.
It's certainly not because most people believe it. Popular belief does not turn an unsupported claim into a legitimate one, but it does make the one believed to have it that much more dangerous. It most certainly is not because the person being commanded was born within some geographic boundary or has been born with blue blood. Birth is not agreement. It is not something the individual chose, negotiated, or voluntarily entered into. Whatever circumstances produced that birth, they cannot be transformed into the individual's agreement to be governed.
An early birth-registration record documenting the existence of a child and not the child's consent to anything. Historical civil registration document.
Nor can the argument be rescued by pointing to a birth certificate and pretending that some form of consent or contractual relationship was established there. A newborn is obviously incapable of understanding, negotiating, agreeing to, or even remembering the creation of such an arrangement. The child did not sign anything, did not participate in any discussion concerning political authority, did not comprehend the obligations supposedly being created, and could not possibly have given informed and voluntary agreement to be governed.
Perhaps the obvious response to that is that a parent or legal guardian acted on the child's behalf, but that creates another problem: a guardian cannot simply manufacture another person's consent to an arrangement that gives a third party authority over that person's life. A parent may make countless legitimate decisions for a child because children necessarily require guardianship, but that does not mean a parent can voluntarily transfer the child's future will, property, or fundamental right to refuse political commands to an institution merely by filling out paperwork.
The child's inability to exercise or defend his rights does not mean that he possesses no rights. A child remains a human being with his own life, his own interests, and his own rights regardless of whether he is physically or intellectually capable of defending them himself. That is precisely why adults have a moral responsibility to protect children who cannot yet protect themselves. The child needs a guardian because he is vulnerable, not because he has ceased to be an individual.
Prussian decree of September 28, 1717, ordering parents to send their children to school. Public-domain historical document.
Yet how quickly that responsibility can be transformed into an excuse for handing the child's supposed rights over to the State. The parent is told that someone else must register, identify, classify, educate, regulate, and ultimately determine what may or may not be done with the child. The child has no say in any of it, because he cannot yet meaningfully participate. Somehow that inability is then treated as though it were an opportunity for everyone else to decide his relationship with political authority for him. Stupid babies should have spoken up and rejected in time, eh?
The child eventually grows into an independent individual capable of making his own agreements.
Where is the agreement?
Where did this individual voluntarily agree to grant anyone a legitimate right to rule over him?
If the answer is that he agreed when he was born, the answer is obviously nonsense. If the answer is that his parents agreed on his behalf, then the agreement was theirs, not his. And if the answer is that he implicitly agreed by continuing to live within the jurisdiction after reaching adulthood, then we have simply returned to the mythology of implied consent that we already examined.
A document recording that something happened is not itself evidence that the person recorded on it consented to everything later attached to that record.
Registration is not agreement. Compliance is not agreement. Birth is not agreement. And the existence of a government-issued document does not manufacture an agreement where none was ever made!
At some point the explanation has to reach something more fundamental than another assertion of authority. Otherwise we have built the entire structure upon a circular argument: government has authority because government says it has authority, and government is legitimate because it has authority.
That is not a proof but is an illusionary declaration. The problem becomes even more profound when we consider free will. Whatever else may be said about free will, there is an obvious distinction between a person's own will and someone else's will. I can choose what I do. You can choose what you do. I may persuade you, negotiate with you, offer you something, warn you about a consequence, or ask you to cooperate with me, but none of those things inherently gives me ownership of your will. I cannot simply announce, "Your will is now subordinate to mine," and make it true. It just doesn't work like that.
If I could, then the distinction between voluntary cooperation and domination would disappear completely. Every command backed by sufficient force could be reclassified as legitimate authority, because the person issuing the command would simply claim that the other person's will had become subordinate to his own, and that brings us back to consent.
If you voluntarily agree to something, I do not need authority over you. Your agreement is sufficient for the arrangement. If you do not agree, then I need something else to make you comply. That something else is force, threat, compulsion, or the credible possibility of consequences imposed upon you for refusing. Calling the person imposing those consequences an "authority" does not change what is happening. It merely gives the relationship a more socially acceptable name for comfortableness.
This is why I have come to view authority itself as a claim requiring justification, not as a fact that can simply be assumed. The burden is not on the individual to prove why he should be free from another person's commands. The burden is on the person claiming the right to command him to explain where that right came from. And if the answer ultimately reduces to "because I have the authority," we have gone nowhere.
The claim is being used as its own evidence. That is superstition dressed up as political philosophy.
There is another distinction that needs to be made here because someone could reasonably object: "But surely some laws are legitimate. Murder is illegal, theft is illegal, assault is illegal. Are you seriously arguing that those laws are illegitimate too?"
Yes, but perhaps not for the reason you might initially think. The fact that a law happens to prohibit something that is already ethically wrong does not establish the legitimacy of the law itself, nor does it establish the authority of the people who created it.
Do not murder, steal and assault another person or their property are ethical principles, and these principles do not become true simply because a legislature writes them into a legal code, and they do not become more true because the State attaches a punishment to violating them. Likewise, the existence of a law prohibiting murder does not somehow prove that the people who wrote the law acquired a legitimate right to command everyone else. It merely demonstrates that the law happens to correspond with an ethical principle. Those are two entirely different claims.
If I tell you, "Do not murder your neighbor," and you already understand that murdering your neighbor is wrong, my statement does not give me authority over you. I have expressed an ethical principle that you may already recognize. I have not acquired ownership of your will merely by saying it out loud.
The same principle applies when the statement comes from a government, *"Murder is illegal." *Fine, but what follows from that? The ethical wrongness of murder existed before the statute, independently of the statute, and would continue to exist if the statute disappeared tomorrow or contradicted that principal y voting it so. The law did not create the moral principle. It merely declared a prohibition and attached consequences to violating it. How many votes would it take to make raping legal? Think about that question hard. Think about the requirements needed to make it legitimate regardless of how outrageous and absurd it may sound or how much it may be aligned with ethical principles.
This brings us back to the question we have been asking throughout this investigation:
Where did the authority come from?
If authority does not exist, then there is no legitimate authority from which a government can derive the power to transform its commands into moral obligations simply by calling them "laws." This also explains why I do not need government to tell me what is right and wrong. I don't refrain from murdering people because a politician told me not to. I don't refrain from stealing because a statute told me that theft is illegal. I don't refrain from assaulting someone because a government employee wrote a prohibition against it.
I refrain from doing those things because I recognize ethical principles that exist independently of legal fiction.
If a government creates a law that conflicts with an ethical principle, the fact that it is written in a statute does not magically make the immoral act moral. A legal command does not acquire moral legitimacy simply because it was printed on paper, passed through a legislative process, signed by an official, or enforced by someone wearing a uniform. The same is true when a law happens to correspond with something ethical.
**A legitimate ethical principle does not make the law legitimate. **For a law to be legitimate in the sense of creating a genuine obligation to obey it, there would first have to be some legitimate authority behind it, but that brings us right back to the problem we have already encountered.
If the answer is simply that the command was enacted as law, then we have returned to the circular argument: The law is legitimate because the government has authority, and the government has authority because it makes legitimate laws.
That proves absolutely nothing. So perhaps the question we should have been asking all along is not which laws are legitimate but rather, what makes any law legitimate in the first place?
Everything I write comes from years of self-education, research, observation, and lived experience outside institutional instruction.
If this work adds value to you, you can support it in the following ways:
86fXjLUF7W9SwGSjTtsbqq4t1LKzzypEZa1t77S5c68WF3yK9SmEfzPTtRyjUhDSk9Zn7p1ahFJT4PcKW8MN4h3QRpjx2Q5
Your support helps me continue dedicating time to writing, studying, and sharing these explorations with everyone.
Thank you for reading.
Technical Document Translation Service
