Appealing to authority

It’s a paradox. On the one hand, I detect a strong anti-authority bias in this community.  Aurovilians don’t like to be told what to do by working groups or anybody else, and behind the present movement to revive the Residents Assembly there seems to be a strong egalitarian bias, a feeling that we are all as important as each other.

On the other hand, some of us are very ready to appeal to authorities like the Secretary and/or the Governing Board for help when they think they have been wronged or they perceive some injustice in the community needs to be righted.

Of course, sometimes they do this because they believe they have exhausted all possible avenues for resolution in the community or because they believe that certain points of view important for community development are being suppressed or ignored by our official bodies. This is perfectly understandable and appealing in such cases must remain a basic right.  Others argue that the Governing Board, as ‘family’, has a right to know everything that is going on and to make recommendations because, ultimately, they are responsible to the Indian Parliament for what happens here. Granted, and it has to be admitted that in our past dealings with them we haven’t always been as open to them, as welcoming, as we might have been. Moreover, there should be no question of hiding our faults and failings. 

But in some cases, the motivation for an appeal to a higher authority like the Governing Board seems to be to exert pressure upon working groups, or individual Aurovilians, to act in a certain way even though the appellant is aware that the larger community may not support this. 

Our collective process is very far from perfect. But I can see two big problems with Aurovilians appealing too easily to other authorities:

Firstly, it puts members of the Governing Board or the Secretary in an invidious position. Doubtless they have our best interests at heart but they have no way of knowing, without extensive research, the veracity of the ‘facts’ that are being put before them or the wisdom of the action they are being asked to take by individual appellants. And even if they decide to act, they are likely to be criticized by others for ‘interfering’ in our internal process. In other words, they can’t win.

Secondly, as this appeal to authority often bypasses or short-cuts our community deliberations, it effectively undercuts, emasculates, that process.  In effect, these people are saying not only that they distrust our working groups, but also that they distrust our larger collective process to come up with solutions to particular challenges. At times, this may be the case. Nevertheless, it is difficult to see how we can improve this and strengthen the Residents Assembly, which is a particular concern of many at present, if this ‘parallel process’ of readily appealing to other authorities, however well meaning those authorities may be, continues.

Perhaps, at root, the need of some people to appeal to authority figures reflects a fundamental lack of trust not only in our collective process – which, after all, is understandable at times – but also in The Mother’s protection and in the efficacy of the inner guide on charting our individual and collective journeys.

But we are also dealing here with power issues. As long as certain people feel disenfranchised, rendered powerless, by working groups, there will be a tendency for them to seek redress in approaching other ‘power bodies’. No doubt, individuals need to work on their own issues with power, but this may also indicate a larger issue, which is the perception of how power is exercised in Auroville.  For, in spite of the fact that numerous Working Committees and Councils have asserted that they have no effective power to enforce decisions and that the Residents Assembly is the final authority for decision-making in the community, there’s a persistent belief in some quarters that the major working groups are ‘power’ bodies which sometimes act independently of the knowledge or wishes of the other residents. 

Here, better communication leading to increased trust between the working groups and the community is a must, but the key to changing this perception may be for all of us to stop viewing Auroville’s evolutionary process in terms of the need for ‘governance’, which implies some form of power hierarchy, and to begin focussing more on ‘organization’; on helping each individual to find his or her right place in the larger whole. As one Aurovilian put it, “It is for us to organize ourselves so that Auroville can be, and not try to govern each other. Let us leave that to the Divine”.

However, as Mother pointed out, the ability to organize in this way requires a very different temperament and consciousness from that of the classic, power-driven leader:

The conditions to organize – to be an organizer (it’s not “to govern,” it’s to ORGANIZE) – the conditions to be an organizer should be these: no more desires, no more preferences, no more attractions, no more repulsions – a perfect equality for all things. Sincerity, of course, but that goes without saying: wherever insincerity enters, poison enters at the same time. And then, only those who are themselves in that condition can discern whether another is in it or not.