Everyone Wants Legitimacy


In his book, David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell makes this point:
“When the law is applied in the absence of legitimacy, it does not produce obedience. It produces the opposite. It leads to backlash.”

Most systems of power have understood the need to establish legitimacy as the basis for their rule. That’s why kings were considered the descendants of the Gods in many civilizations. But that led to the question as to who could confirm the legitimacy? Most kings gave that power to the priests, and that’s why priests became so powerful in those very civilizations.

In the Game of Thrones series, legitimacy is why Cersei goes to the priests called the Sparrows: to get them to declare her son, Tommen, the “true king” when there were so many contenders for the throne. But the high priest, the High Sparrow, asks for his pound of flesh in return for any such declaration:
“The realm is full of kings. For the Faith to exalt one above the rest we must be certain.”
And so Cersei agrees to pay the price: she allows the Sparrows to arm themselves, supposedly to protect themselves during the ongoing civil war amongst the different kings. But allowing a religious group to arm itself, to be beyond the authority of the state is very dangerous as Cersei realizes later. But this dance between kings and priests is just history repeating itself, curses Jamie Lannister:
“One of the early Targaryen kings had fought for years to suppress the two military orders… why would the Iron Throne allow that (again)?”

And no, legitimacy is not just restricted to kings and presidents and prime ministers, points out Tim Harford in Fifty Things that Made the Modern Economy. As Europeans moved into America, even the “common” European wanted some form of “legitimate” reason to justify why it was OK for him to take the lands in America from the natives. To try and find a justification for that question, John Locke was called in:
“How had nature’s bounty become privately owned? Was that inevitably the result of a guy with a bunch of goons grabbing whatever he could? If so, all civilization was built on violent theft. That wasn’t a welcome conclusion to Locke – or to this wealthy patrons.”
Locke came up with this answer to provide legitimacy:
“Locke argued that we all own our own labour. And if you mix your labour with the land that nature provides – for example, by ploughing the soil – then you’ve blended something you definitely own with something that nobody owns. By working the land, he said, you’ve come to own it… (But because) the indigenous tribes hadn’t ‘improved’ the land, they had no right to it.”

Legitimacy. It sounds like a great idea, but the problem lies in the fact that we define what’s legitimate…

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more