Author’s Note
This post continues the Tools series—but at this point, pretending that tools are neutral feels willfully naïve. Authority is a tool. So is hierarchy. So is the language we wrap around them to make submission feel like duty, and deference feel like virtue. Like every tool, authority reflects the intent of its wielder—but unlike a hammer or a lathe, its damage is often outsourced, hidden in clean ledgers and closed caskets.
We’ve explored the implements of labor, control, conformity. Today we examine the scepter itself—the myth that power, by existing, justifies itself. In a world increasingly allergic to accountability, remembering that leadership, respect, and authority must be earned—and can be forfeited—is not just philosophy. It’s survival.
Personally, I’ve spent most of my life avoiding titles, preferring contribution over command. But I’ve served as a leader. And I’ve felt the weight I describe below—not as the gravity of a corpse, but as the ache behind questions like: If we fail, can she pay her bills? If I speak up, who pays the price? Is being right worth losing someone’s job?
I tried to lead from the front, blocking distraction, critique, and stress from the people I led. This often meant standing with the people on my team, not the ones above me. That didn’t always make me popular. But it made me accountable, and kept the weight on the shoulders that had volunteered to carry it. And that’s a trade I’ll make every time.
~Dom
There is a forgotten moment in a mostly forgettable film—Annapolis, if memory serves—when a Marine instructor interrupts a routine drill and demands a body-bag be unrolled at the cadets’ feet. One midshipman is ordered to climb inside; another is commanded to zip it closed. The young woman’s breath quickens, pupils dilate, arms twitch against the nylon that has suddenly become a coffin.
Only then does the instructor speak, voice steady as a drumbeat: “Look at that bag. If you become officers, this is where they will put your mistakes.”
Everything else about the movie has slipped into obscurity, but that tableau lingers—because it is a brutal parable of power. Authority can carry life-and-death weight, yet the burden of its errors is almost never felt by the one who wields it; it is carried, instead, by the bodies underneath.
That single scene exposes a truth modern institutions spend fortunes repackaging in pastel slogans: rank does not equal virtue, and position is not proof of wisdom.
We live in a world determined to braid those ideas together anyway—where a job title is expected to substitute for demonstrated competence, and deference is demanded as a perk of promotion. The more that hierarchy is blurred with merit, the easier it becomes for the powerful to claim respect they have not earned and to silence the very people who might expose their inadequacy. The late philosopher Mary Parker Follett warned of this nearly a century ago: “Leadership is not defined by the exercise of power, but by the capacity to increase the sense of power among those led.” Yet her counsel is drowned out daily by bullhorns extolling obedience over insight.
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Authority: Two Masks and a Shadow
Authority, then, wears two masks.
The first is earned authority, the kind Aristotle pointed to when he observed that “we are what we repeatedly do; excellence, therefore, is a habit.” It is born of skill hard-won through repetition, of scars gathered in the service of mastery. The master surgeon who has opened thousands of living bodies understands, in marrow and muscle, that a single careless gesture can condemn a family to grief; her scalpel is steady because her memory is heavy. The veteran teacher who coaxes comprehension from bewilderment year after year commands a classroom not by threat but by trust. This mask is anchored to competence so visible that argument against it feels childish.
The second mask is positional authority: the badge, the uniform, the corner office, the inherited throne. Sometimes the title rightly crowns a life of expertise; often it merely decorates proximity to wealth, birthright, or political calculus. Confucius, whose own career was marred by corrupt ministers, drew the line cleanly: “He who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to the north polar star, which keeps its place and all the stars turn toward it.” Remove virtue, and the constellation collapses into chaos. When unearned authority drapes itself in medals, the weight of the insignia is paid not by the wearer but by the governed; the zipper closes over someone else’s chest.
Between those masks stretches a shadow—the liminal space where the two overlap just enough to confuse onlookers. A competent leader is granted formal rank, and all is well. A charismatic mediocrity then inherits a similar badge, and observers assume competence that is not there. The philosopher Hannah Arendt labeled this the banality of evil: systemic harm can thrive not only through malicious intent but through ordinary people accepting titles as proof of merit and procedure as proof of morality. If the chain of command says it, must it not be right?
Leadership: Obligation Disguised as Ornament
Because we have blurred masks with substance, leadership itself has come to mean being visible—preferably elevated, microphone in hand, consultants arranging the lighting. Yet the Daoist sage Laozi warned that “A leader is best when people barely know he exists; when his work is done, they will say, ‘We did it ourselves.’” Real leadership is fundamentally personal, not positional. It is obligation, not ornament.
Dwight Eisenhower used to illustrate the point with a length of string. “Pull it and it will follow you anywhere. Push it and it will go nowhere at all.” You can issue edicts from a podium and the machinery of bureaucracy may rumble into motion, but the moment you turn your back, the gears grind to a halt because the human beings operating them are disengaged. A leader walks the floor, asks unnerving questions, and shoulders consequences. When Admiral Grace Hopper quipped, “You manage things; you lead people,” she was reminding every would-be admiral that humans are not inventory—they are moral agents who grant or withhold their best effort based on how safe they feel in your wake.
Intent is the litmus test. A bad leader wields positional authority like a cudgel—an implement designed primarily to keep subordinates afraid of failing him. A good leader wields it like a chisel—applied with restraint, angled to reveal the shape of a joint endeavor. Marcus Aurelius, an emperor who commanded armies yet wrote private reminders about humility, recorded one of history’s shortest job descriptions: “Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.” A leader who must remind everyone he is the leader has already failed that imperative.
Respect: The Word Wrapped in Wires
If authority is the rod and leadership the craft, respect is the crown—and crowns can be forged from pure gold or electro-plated brass. We often conflate three entirely different phenomena under one syllable: common dignity (the baseline owed to any human being), professional credibility (earned through skill and reliability), and deferential reverence (demanded by hierarchies to maintain control). Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative insists on the first: treat every person as an end in themselves, never merely as a means. The second must be painstakingly earned; the third can be imposed overnight by ceremony.
The trouble begins when those in power hijack the ambiguity. A manager who belittles your insight yet insists you “respect the chain of command” is not defending respect—he is conscripting it. A politician who calls critics traitors is not safeguarding dignity—she is weaponizing it. Nelson Mandela, who endured twenty-seven years of incarceration yet emerged committed to dialogue, understood the distinction keenly: “Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.” When leaders demand veneration as a salve for their insecurity, they pass the poison, cup to cup, until obedience becomes the taste of loyalty—and dissent, a betrayal of the communal delusion.
The result is a transactional counterfeit: you bow, they grant crumbs of consideration. Refuse, and you are branded subversive. Yet true respect—like true love—cannot be coerced. It flowers in the presence of integrity, humility, and the willingness to be changed by dialogue. It dies the instant one party treats the other as disposable. In that death, hierarchy may survive, but civilization retreats.
When Language Becomes a Barracks
George Orwell warned that political language is designed “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” The calculus has not changed; only the bandwidth has. Today a corporation can flood inboxes with value-statements about “leading with empathy” while quietly blacklisting employees who raise safety concerns. A police union can rebrand calls for accountability as “attacks on morale.” A ruling party can slap the label “patriot” on laws that criminalize dissent. Each maneuver relies on collapsing distinctions between authority, leadership, and respect until obedience looks indistinguishable from virtue.
Wittgenstein argued that the limits of our language are the limits of our world. Manipulating language, therefore, manipulates perception. Conflate leadership with visibility, and the loudest voice becomes the wisest. Conflate respect with deference, and critique becomes treason. Conflate authority with morality, and policy failure converts instantly to public sin—of the people, never the policymakers.
The zipper slides a little farther every time a term is bent to serve control.
The Weight of the Zipper
Why harp on one movie scene? Because the body-bag is not metaphor alone. It is a ledger entry in every field where authority without competence intersects flesh and blood: the soldier ordered to storm a hill for a photo opportunity, the patient killed by a cost-saving protocol, the commuter buried under a bridge inspection waived for political expedience. Each tragedy is a signature in red ink: responsibility deferred upward until it evaporates.
Chernobyl’s night-shift engineers were scapegoated while party officials responsible for impossible production targets retained their medals. The 2008 financial collapse erased whole pension funds while executives departed with golden parachutes. In both cases the zipper sealed around lives far removed from the conference room where reckless directives were signed.
Good leaders feel that weight before the bag appears. They rehearse failure in their minds the way pilots rehearse stall-recovery—again and again until instinct aligns with accountability. They do not offload blame; they metabolize it, transmute it into safer processes, clearer briefings, and humbler decision-making. They understand the brutal calculus captured by Colin Powell: “When the soldiers stop bringing you their problems, you have stopped leading them.” Silence is not respect; it is the sound of people protecting themselves from you.
Reckoning
Strip away the rhetoric and three principles remain, bright as forge-steel:
- Authority can be granted in a moment. A signature, a badge, a ceremony.
- Leadership must be proven over time. Every hour, every decision, every scar borne and lesson applied.
- Respect must be earned—and can be forfeited in an instant.
Ignore any one of these, and you tilt toward tyranny with excellent PR. Feed them in balance, and you cultivate institutions capable of self-correction, innovation, and collective courage. The historian Thucydides saw it clearly amid the Peloponnesian War: states fall not merely to enemy spears but to the rot that spreads when hubris persuades leaders that their titles are shields against consequence.
So if you occupy a position of power—manager, parent, platoon leader, elected official—ask daily how heavy the burden feels in your hands.
If it is weightless, you have already delegated your mistakes to someone else’s coffin.
Step back. Relearn the craft. Open your ears before your mouth.
And if you serve beneath a paper crown that demands reverence while offering no reciprocal humanity, you are not disloyal for refusing the charade. You are participating in the oldest moral audit our species possesses: the insistence that power justify itself in deeds, not laurels.
Bad leaders appear in the credits, good ones hold the line.
The world does not lack for people shouting about respect; it lacks for people worthy of it. Remember the bag. Remember the zipper’s final click. Remember that every title—no matter how gilded—will one day hang silent in a museum’s glass case, stripped of breath and alibi. What endures is the ledger of lives changed for the better or sealed inside figurative body-bags because someone found it easier to command than to lead.
Choose which side of that ledger you will stand on. Then act—as Marcus Aurelius would urge—without further delay.
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