“It is only in our decisions that we are important.”
… Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980) French author and dramatist
A major aspect of my philosophy involves the continuous yet momentary experience of living. Although we have a sense of time as past and future, our moment of experience is a self-creation born of our short-term memory and predictive nature of our brains. This is our sense of the present. However, if we use the analogy of objective time as a continuous stream, we bump into a problem. We can think of the present as a space, but how big is that space – 5 seconds, 10 seconds, 1 second, a millisecond? I argue there is no space and the present is simply a boundary between the past and the future. So, even though we live in a subjective experience of the present, we are always stepping into the future.
My work has largely focused on how people relate to each other. Acknowledging we are always stepping into future, leads to the idea that in our relationships we step into the future together. When we do this, we impact each others’ future. Decisions and actions you take will impact how my future unfolds and vice versa. Of course, I can accept or reject any of your decisions that might impact me and in doing so I assign a level of personal authority to you compared to me. This mutual assigning of authority extends to any assessments and assertions we share with each other. This is the ‘authority dynamic‘. As these interchanges are ever-present in our interactions, this places authority at the heart of how we relate to others.
This is not a trivial matter. Giving authority is pivotal to our future and is generally not an issue when it involves someone we like and trust. However, what happens when feel we have to accept decisions we do not like made by someone we do not trust?
When this occurs, we feel we will lose something more important by rejecting or challenging the decision. We compromise to preserve some other aspect of life. This is very obvious within organisations. Every organisation is based in a hierarchal authority structure of some sort. Some are very rigid, whilst others are less so. Unless someone is at the top of that structure, there are others making decisions that will impact them and they will not like some of those decisions. Yet most of the time, they will accept the decisions. Bearing in mind that these decisions are made by someone they don’t trust, the alternative might be to leave or challenge someone of greater authority with the possibility of negative impact on their future. Yet accepting those unwanted decisions has a clear impact on a person’s relationship with those who make the decisions and also on their story about themselves. Over time, this leads to growing resentment and toxic relationships.
Ultimately, the authority dynamic is an ever-present yet largely unseen aspect of life. The nature of that dynamic in each of our relationships will be found in all of our breakdowns with others. A better understanding of this dynamic provides a space to appreciate the nature of our relationships and the opportunity to create better ones.
Related Concepts
The Basis of Relationships
Collective and Personal Authority
The Paradigm of Control
The Paradigm of Trust
The Trust Spectrum
Roles in Relationships