1, 2. (a) How is the common view of authority illustrated? (b) Why is it important to us to examine our own view of authority?

ONE morning in October 1969, the city police in Montreal, Canada, instead of reporting for duty, went to an arena to discuss strike tactics. How would the people of the city react to this sudden absence of police authority? As anticipated, rioting and looting broke out at the hand of thugs, militant students and other opportunists. But what about the ordinary citizen, the person who might be one’s next-door neighbor? An eyewitness reported:

“I don’t mean hoodlums and habitual lawbreakers, I mean just plain people committed offenses they would not dream of trying if there was a policeman standing on the corner. I saw cars driven through red lights. Drivers shot up the wrong side of the street because they realized no one would catch them.”​—The New York Times, Friday, October 10, 1969, page 2.

3. How do prominent persons speak of the current trends with regard to respect for authority?

³ Dr. Amitai Etzioni, chairman of Columbia University’s Department of Sociology, commented on the “blatant disrespect for authority, any kind of authority, that he sees in many college students,” saying:

“After World War II, something broke down in child-rearing . . . There was a widespread reaction against authoritarianism​—an overreaction it seems. . . . Now we have all these children born in the 1940s, grown up, who cannot accept authority in any way​—from a teacher, a cop, a judge, even from one another. . . . I also see a danger to the civil order, the very fabric of society.”​—The National Observer, Monday, February 2, 1970, page 20.

United States Senator John L. McClellan, during an interview on reasons why crime keeps rising in the land, spoke in a similar vein:

“Another is the general climate in this nation​—of civil disobedience, of nonconformity and of disrespect for authority—​this so-called philosophy of each ‘doing his own thing’ irrespective of its relation to or impact upon others. A great deal of it is in the nature of rebellion against constituted authority.”— U.S. News & World Report, March 16, 1970, page 18.

An American philosopher of the last century, Henry Thoreau, in his essay “Civil Disobedience,” put it this way:

“I heartily accept the motto,​—‘That government is best which governs least;’ . . . Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,​—‘That government is best which governs not at all.”’​—Man & The State: The Political Philosophers, page 301.

A modern teen-age film star expressed the same feeling in the vernacular of today: “It’s rotten to take orders from anyone. . . . there are dads who think they have the divine right to rule their offspring simply because they have engendered them.” (New York Sunday News, November 17, 1968) With this kind of thinking becoming the norm rather than the exception, is it any wonder that “the very fabric of society” is in danger?