A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth, a quote by Albert Einstein.

If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.

A Kowon by Zen Master Linji.

Understanding Authority, The Deep Problem of Authority What is a the deep problem of authority.

What is authority?

Most people have never seriously thought about what authority is or how it comes to be. And actually authority is a much trickier notion than many people assume.

Notice that you rely on authority all the time but you don't actually understand how it works. But you will, by the end of this episode,

as long as you keep an open mind and really, really accept some of the radical things I'm going to say here because the true origin of authority

is so radical that you're not going to want to believe it. But before we get to that,

let's sort of frame the question or the issue. What do we mean by authority here?

Authority simply is the power or trust that you place into other people or things in society and you rely on these things

or people in whom you place this trust to be a source of

truth or knowledge or reality for you. In fact what you're doing, not knowing

really what you're doing is that you're you're placing or rather you're using

these people and things as anchors to ground your own sense of reality without which you'd be completely lost. But how do you know who to trust?

Should you trust the Bible? Should you trust the Quran? Should you trust scientists?

Which scientists should you trust?

Should you trust the biologists, the chemists, the physicists, the astrophysicists, the quantum

physicist?

Which quantum physicists should you trust?

There's a lot of them, they disagree with each other.

Should you trust your elementary school teachers or your middle school teachers

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