Everyone Wants Legitimacy
“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…
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