Is Authority Anything More Than Collective Belief?

One of the strangest things about authority is that most people never actually examine its legitimacy at the root. They simply inherit belief in it from birth and spend their lives assuming some humans naturally possess the moral right to rule over others.

The deeper I dig into it, the more it seems to rest entirely on belief, rituals, legal papers and social conditioning.

But if no individual possesses an inherent legitimate right to rule another human being, then how does that right magically appear through uniforms, voting, institutions, legal documents, rituals or majority agreement?

At what point does fiction become morally binding reality?

That is the question this post explores.

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