Why does the idea persist that the average person is in need of an outside authority to structure and direct her life?
This paternalistic notion presupposes that the vast majority of human beings are incapable of organising themselves, that the typical human cannot be trusted to manage herself. She needs to be guarded against her own incapacity to function without governance from above. Bereft of the guidance of her superiors, she is doomed to come to harm, to be subjugated by those stronger than herself in a war of all against all. Furthermore, collectively humans are only prevented from indulging their basest tendencies by the presence and pressure of the Big Other. We not only require an apparatus of authority to oversee our lives that is grounded in the manifestation of tangible and present physical force ensuring compliance (in the words of Max Weber, the state alone has a monopoly on the use of ‘legitimate’ physical force – no act demonstrates this more clearly than a thwack from a police officer’s truncheon), but also must internalize authority. All means of manufacturing consent work to engender a state of total acquiescence on the part of both the individual and society as a whole.
Governance implies rule from above. Government is the network of institutional power through which this rule is executed. While governments are subject to change, governance remains enshrined, an article of allegiance in our present systemic order. We trade off our agency and autonomy to a higher power in exchange for order and security. Few are given to questioning the need for governance. The thought that people might govern themselves, which is no more than the assertion of the will and sense of the individual tempered by his compassion, solidarity and consideration for others, is unpalatable.
How could a community can organize in such a way that no ruling group can dictate to others how to act, and all decisions are made through consensus as a manifestation of the collective will? We are led to believe such thoughts are nothing more than naive dreams, unrealisable in the face of a harsh reality. In fact anthropology suggests many hunter-gatherer societies operated in this way, and thus an integral part of human development was marked by the presence of collective self-management within communities. If this possibility is conceded, nevertheless we are told that these kinds of relations between autonomous individuals could not work in the present day. We are conditioned by the projection of fear onto our lives, the elevation of threat levels to the point at which our unease propels us to concede control to a greater force that claims the ability to protect us against all of the world’s ills.
Governance entails authority. Since we will not submit to any authority, necessarily we must work to erode the hegemonic position of the concept of governance as an essential facet of everyday life. Only with examples that counteract this logic can we illuminate and define the other types of organisation which might enrich our lived experience and empower both the individual and the collective.