The Authority You Did Not Choose

There is a voice. It appears when you consider something that would embarrass you, and it does not argue — it forecloses. The consideration simply stops feeling available, the way a road stops at a wall.

Ask where it came from. Almost always it has a specific origin: a parent's tone, a teacher's verdict, the atmosphere of a childhood house. It was installed before you had any capacity to evaluate it, and it has been operating with full authority ever since.

Internalised authority is invisible

External authority can be resisted; you can see it, name it, decide whether to comply. Internalised authority cannot, because it does not present as an instruction. It presents as your own judgement, arriving with the full sensation of being obviously correct.

The three inheritances

• What is decent. A code of acceptable behaviour, absorbed rather than reasoned, that you would struggle to justify but would not violate.
• What is serious. A hierarchy of what counts as worthwhile activity. Notice that yours almost certainly matches your family's, even where you believe you rebelled.
• What is embarrassing. The most powerful and least examined. Shame is a superb enforcement mechanism precisely because it never states its case.

Rebellion is not examination

The obvious response is to do the opposite. But opposition is determined by the thing opposed — a mind organised against its inheritance is still organised by it, and often more rigidly, because the reaction must be maintained.

The rebel and the conformist are reading from the same book. Only the sign has changed.

What is asked for is neither compliance nor reversal, but the far less dramatic act of looking: seeing the instruction arrive, recognising its source, and then deciding — freshly, in this situation — whether it applies.

What remains

Some of it survives examination. A good deal of inherited decency is decent, and there is no merit in discarding something merely because it was given rather than chosen. The point was never to be free of influence, which is impossible.

The point is that a rule you have looked at and kept is an entirely different object from a rule you have never seen. The behaviour may be identical. The person performing it is not.