Good Authourity and Bad

Instinctively, and we all have the same instinct, I fell in love with the message of the Occupy Movement. The over-accumulation of wealth by the greediest motherfuckers in the history of our doomed planet is cutting too deeply into the health, welfare and, most importantly, the Freedom of those who do not have a membership in the chummy club I know as the Filthy Rich Motherfuckers of the World.

My instincts were thus reassured by the words of Kiki, an insider behind the invisible walls of Occupy Vancouver, who said, in response to orders, and the implied threat of sanctions behind the orders, of the Vancouver Fire Chief, to clean up and re-order the Occupation to the stately order of his expectations, "We don't recognize the authourity of police, firefighters or city officials," within the Occupation. (I use quotation marks here uneasily as I heard Kiki's words on the radio, as I swerved through traffic, and have not yet found her words quoted in print by a reliable source.)

Fuck the police, fuck the firefighters and fuck the city.

Damn straight. This is an Occupation, not a church picnic.

That said, I think it might have better conveyed the Occupation's position if Kiki had said something like, "While we respect the natural authourity of well trained and skilled firefighters to advise our Occupation of dangers we may have unwittingly placed ourselves in unnecessarily, our Free society is a young and learning one, we do not respect the unnatural authourity, authourity backed by the guns and prisons of the state, to force us into obeying the rules they apply to the 99%, but do not apply to the 1%, whom they allow to do whatever the fuck they want to us and our environment. Therefore, we will, of course, do everything we can to make our Occupation a safer place as soon as possible."

My restatement of Kiki's statement is based upon these words of William Godwin, who knew a thing or two about creating a Free world, "It is a violation of political justice to confound the authority which depends upon force, with the authority which arises from reverence and esteem; the modification of conduct which might be due in the case of a wild beast, with the modification which is due to superior wisdom. These two kinds of authority may happen to vest in the same person; but they are altogether distinct and independent of each other." (p. 243, 1985 Penguin printing of  "Enquiry Concerning Political Justice")