What is Politics about? Power and Authority

Thought experiment: A teacher walks into the classroom and tells the student to jump out of the window. They're on the second floor. Obviously the student laughs, refuses, or becomes angry, but does not jump out. Then the teacher pulls a gun from the desk drawer, fires a couple of times into the ceiling, and orders the student to jump out of the window, which he promptly does, risking the fall rather than facing the lunatic.

On a less extreme day, a teacher walks into another classroom and tells the students to stand up. He pauses for a moment. They all stand. Then he asks them, without explanation, to sit down, and they do so. He then, after a short pause, tells them to stand up again and then, subsequently, to sit down. He repeats this several more times.

Students begin to ask why they're doing it, and he reassures them that he is in charge and knows the reason. Time after time they sit, they stand. At some point they refuse; they stop. They demand an explanation and challenge his authority, which he seems to have exceeded.Why, then, did the students obey the first few times? He couldn't force them to sit or stand; he had no gun and no direct authority to make them comply. Initially, they simply accepted that, by virtue of being a teacher, he had the right to make them sit or stand.They accepted that his authority, but it was  based on their consent, and their consent had limits. When he appeared to be abusing his authority, they stopped sitting and standing.

The gun has power in the sense described by Chairman Mao: power comes from the barrel of a gun. A teacher who asks students to sit and stand has authority. Where does this authority come from?Why do the students consent to it?

Let's imagine that he is persistently questioned about where he gets his authority. The teacher replies first that he is the teacher. A student asks, “Why?” He then replies that he's qualified to be a teacher and employed by the school. The student asks again, “Why and how did this happen?”

The teacher explains that his qualifications were granted by government institutions that define what makes a teacher legally so. The student asks again, “How and why?” The authority to make people teachers comes from the government, which is derived in turn from Parliament, which makes laws and gives governments their authority.

How and why again? Governments get their authority from Parliament, Parliament from the people, and the people have given Parliament this authority to make laws to create teachers that can order students to sit up and sit down, to stand up and sit down, from elections.

Finally we can sum up by saying, “The teacher has the authority to tell you to sit and stand because you consented to it or your parents did through elections.”