Many men tend to erroneously conflate authority, influence, and power.
Authority is the right to use power, symbolized by the trappings of power — its symbols. The scepter, the orb, and the crown are all such symbols. The eagle is another such symbol. The CEO has formal authority over the company that he’s charged with. The President is commander-in-chief of the military. Authority is not itself power, but the right to use it. It’s the formal expression of who can use it legitimately.
Influence is the capacity to affect the thoughts and behavior of others. Influence can’t compel, but if it can compel reliably enough, it can lead to the gradual accumulation of power and authority.
Attempting to make a run at authority without accumulating sufficient influence before doing so is usually fatal or otherwise damaging, because people who have it are rarely eager to give it up. Influence without authority is temporarily toothless, but authority without influence is pathetic. Trying to grab authority without preparing the scene is either suicidal, revolutionary, or both — which tends to appeal to the left, but not so much to the pro-civilizational types.
Establishing authority is a consolidation and formalization of existing influence. For example, when two men start a company together, formalize their titles, and assign share ownership, they’re just formalizing in law their preexisting relationship with each other, and setting that down contractually to facilitate the venture.
Power is the capacity to act without interference — and can also mean violence or the capacity to use it for certain ends. The mugger uses power against his victim, but it’s illegitimate, and the reigning authority reserves the right to rectify the wrong using its own retaliatory force in order to preserve law and order. In the nonviolent realm, we would say that the boss with the authority to make purchases, sales, hire and fire people, has some form of local power over his environment. If I can terminate your employment contract, I have authority over you.
When people ambitious for influence and power go wrong, they tend to misunderstand how far their influence is likely to go, or whether or not their actual influence maps to their stated authorities. A manager in a corporation will lose prestige if he issues orders which his subordinates flout publicly. If his authority says that he’s in command over the department, but the reality is that it’s actually something else, that manager will become next to useless or worse.
Therefore, if you want to consolidate influence into authority, it’s best not to issue commands. The sergeant can command the private, but men together who have no formal rank don’t know who’s the superior to whom.
The authority to use power within the law confers a special influence all on its own, in the same way that a gun barrel pressing into a man’s back encourages his compliance. So, the lack of authority confers a special disadvantage in the competition of influence, but less so if you can provoke that authority to act in ways that oversteps its own real support.
There’s a particular progression to these developments which can’t be skipped. Putting on a crown and declaring yourself emperor makes yourself like Norton. Norton had no legitimacy, so he was a joke. Going through the antecedent steps makes you more like Napoleon, for better or worse. Napoleon had near universal support of the citizenry upon his coronation, at least so far as could be verified by referendum.
In America, authority matches fairly well with raw power, but it matches poorly to influence. Those with power have little influence, which makes it so that those with influence have a fairly easy time subverting the formal authority — including foreign powers and international capital. This creates an erratic, tyrannical, and unstable politics, especially as most of the serious European competitors have been successfully repressed.
I’ve been puzzled at how we ended up with an elite that hates its own culture. How did the old guard end up ceding control to such a rag bag bunch of nasties?
I mean look at Europe. The cathedrals, the buildings, the monuments. The culture that produced them is gone, obliterated. It’s like a neutron bomb went off, and left all these empty buildings and those who built them are gone.
How did the rabid progressives gain power? How could our ancestors have been so stupid to let that happen?
They gained influence first, and influence, like wealth is not a zero sum game. The old guard retained authority, and quite a bit of influence, while the leftists gained influence. Like a frog in a slowly heating pot, the old guard thought they still retained the elements of control, until, suddenly, they didn’t.
The late 19th to early 20th century was when this transition occurred. The industrial revolution disrupted traditional patterns of life, and new wealth and technology gave enormous influence to previously lower class people.
While the middle classes of the 17th and 18th century admired the culture of the elite and sought to emulate it (this middle class was largely descended from the younger sons of nobility), the new middle class of the 19th and 20th centuries knew they could never join the club. And they resented it. Also, despite new found wealth, or some level of cleverness that brought intellectual influence, these people often were crass and venal.
The new centers of influence were among the migrants to the cities from the countryside or other lands, the labor unions, the machine politics, the new mass education system, and the new mass media. They were entirely colonized by the left. This, while the old guard retained the positions of authority. Because they hadn’t lost influence and authority, they thought that things were fine.
In their new institutions, the left grew in influence until they could wrest power from the hated old guard. And then they set about obliterating everthing the old guard had stood for.
The big shock was WW1, especially in England. All those good dead men left the West to ‘the people.’
“I’ve been puzzled at how we ended up with an elite that hates its own culture. ”
And so did I.
In fact, so puzzled that I spent a couple years researching, analyzing, and writing a book about the results.
This short video provides an overview to the answer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVPH_jCBEvA
Or, a quick overview:
“The hate-America-first payload, designed by the KGB’s master of covert influence, Willi Muenzenberg, was simple and direct:
You claim to be an independent-minded idealist.
You don’t really understand politics, but you think the little guy is getting a lousy break.
You believe in open-mindedness.
You are shocked, frightened by what is going on right here in our own country.
You’re frightened by the racism, by the oppression of the workingman.
You think the Russians are trying a great human experiment, and you hope it works.
You believe in peace.
You yearn for international understanding.
You hate fascism.
You think the capitalist system is corrupt.
Muenzenberg’s efforts developed an in-crowd of Willing Accomplices. The mindset distinguished the Willing Accomplices from the masses of unsophisticated Americans.
The goal of the communist covert influence was to instill a reflexive loathing of the United States and its people as the core value of left-wing enlightenment.
American Willing Accomplices nutured this payload, and, on their own, created the scourge of American culture–Political Correctness. ”
The book:
http://www.willingaccomplices.com
You’ve hit on one of the appeals of informal democracy. The leader lets the men talk about what they want and then he announces his decision, which happens to crystallize their collective desires fairly well. Which makes him look influential and therefore increases his power. There are a number of scenes like that in the Anabasis. The Long Ships is fiction, but it some good, funny scenes about that towards the beginning.