Obediencia

WRC 1013.022
9- September- 2010

Obedience to Authority
Obedience to authority, three simples words that creates a big controversy in all aspects you check, in every place you talk about it, or with everyone you discuses it. Maybe the first time you analyze this small phrase it doesn’t seems too hard to understand or you just simply don’t realize about the complexity of it, but know ifyou just change it to a question as: Do we have to obey authority? Or obeying authority is always right? Things start to change, and the most you analyze it more complex this topic became. Obedience in not just an act or doing or not what other person said, its analyze what they are saying and based on what your think or the appreciation you have about that person, about yourself or the environmentyou will be obeying or disobeying that command, for every command they would be an internal judgment to decide how to act.
Before starting with obedience or disobedience to authority, let’s try to understand that as human being, we will always have an authority, that no matters where we are, how we are rule, or the morality we have, there will be always someone or something that is going to betelling us what to do or haw to do something, and it would be up to each one of us to obey or so that what we were asking for, or disobey and do another thing.
“Why is man so prone to obey and why is it so difficult for him to disobey? As long as I’m obedient to the power of the state, the church, or public opinion, I feel safe and protected” Erich Fromm, Research & composing in thedisciplines. Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem (642). Let’s put both of the words and compare them obedience or disobedience. When you obey an authority than can be political, religion, a group or any kind of authority, you are showing some respect for that order that is understand as a law or norm, so our mind is telling us that we are suppose to do it in order to maintain certaincalm in that group or in that society, if other people are doing it, why would I won’t? “I can’t be making a disorder in the group, if everything is in peace let’s keeping it like that”. But until what point you are supposed it be like that? As many psychologists have been saying, the most you obey the most probably you are to commit suicide, and are very easy to explain. You want to be part in asociety, so you obey the laws, you start acting a way as the society does because if not you are going to be seeing as a rebel, you dress in a way that others won’t criticizes you and at the end you just a tremendous conflict inside yourself with all this laws and norms going around you with the possibility of becoming a person with no feeling or liberty because you have to obey all the laws, normsand folkways that exist. So at what point is time to disobey, or what law can we break without be sanction?
But in the other hand we have to being disobedience, “depending each acting they would be a reaction” Isaac Newton. so depending the size of the disobedience the sanction you get. And this is the part that part that confuses our mind, may be you are thinking in disobey someone orders,but if you do it, you’re going to get a sanction or maybe other people, your friends, the society, would see you a rebel as a bad influence that is braking the harmony and that is just thinking in his/her own so you would be excluded for that in one moment you were part of it. You are broking a role in your society, but instead you are gaining liberty, now you are in peace with yourself knowingthat you did was the best thing and you won’t regret.
Another very important thing that sociologist and psychology tells people is to use conscience and moral at the time to obey authority, that conscience would help our mind and us to determine if we obey or it would be better for us to disobey. And maybe they are correct, but what is conscience? Is just an internal voice inside each one of us...