The basic principle I would like to see communicated to people is the idea that every form of authority and domination and hierarchy has to prove that its justified – it has no prior justification. For instance, when you stop your five year old kid from trying to cross the street, that’s an authoritarian situation: it’s got to be justified. Well, in that case you can give a justification. But the burden of proof for any exercise of authority is always on the person exercising it – invariably. And when you look, most of the time those authority structures have no justification: they have no moral justification, they have no justification in the interests of the person lower in the hierarchy, or in the interests of other people, or the environment, or the future, or the society, or anything else – they are just there in order to preserve certain structures of power and domination, and the people at the top.

Author : Noam Chomsky
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