Thread: The Authority to Govern

By what virtue is the authority to govern granted? Origionally people just stated that it was because they had the power, the strength, but then it became clear that this was an ineffective justification and another one was invented: people govern by the authority of the gods, this was much more successful, and some dictators even claimed to be themselves gods, but there was a problem with this as well, when a nation conquered another, that nation would have different gods and therefore their authority wouldn't be recognized, on top of this, some people started disbelieving in these gods, clearly another solution needed to be found. The next plan was an even more effective one, that the right to govern is derived from a majority of people choosing to be governed by the governor or governing body. And that government would be carried out by a consensus of a small committe, with it's members being selected by more of certain sections of the populace than those others who were competing with them, perhaps a single leader would be selected by a greater number of the entire populace.

Of course this system had some problems as well, first of all, there was the problem of those who voted for other people not getting their way, and so they drafted constitiutions to protect these minorities from usurpations which would cause them to revolt. Second of all, there were those who did not want to be governed at all, who did not vote for anyone, and who are having all sorts of oppression pushed upon them without their consent.

There is also the question of correctness. In the old dictatorships leaders were usually trained for their tasks by a family system and were generally decent rulers(in effectiveness), but the number of people holding a belief to be true has no effect on it's truth, nor does it even suggest it to be true. To solve this problem there arose a permanent political class of reporters, lawyers, lawmakers, and high-level bureaucrats and their children, as potent and priveledged as any royal court in medievil Europe, from which are drawn the official public representatives and who are constantly in a position of power, public or private. These people not only carry out the wishes of the people, but they shape them to meet their own ends.

So the question still stands, what really grants mere men the authority to govern? Perhaps after all these thousands of years, our first answer was the most honest.