What I have learned from such friends however is that the nominal structure of authority in the world in general (what we might call ‘arbitrary authority’) is very loosely aligned with meaningful authority—that is the power to actually impose on your personal freedom of action. Some people seem to have a natural ability to largely disregard the nominal rules and arbitrary authorities and focus entirely on the reality of what you can get away with. It turns out that this is quite a lot.
I think I know exactly what you mean. I also know some people who regularly do things that look like nonchalant recklessness, and yet never suffer the consequences you might expect. They seem to have an extraordinary instinct for distinguishing meaningful from nominal authority. In concrete situations, this can be thanks to technical knowledge (for example, knowing that a punishment you’re threatened with is an enormous hassle to execute in practice, so the threat is effectively empty), or thanks to sheer people skills (e.g. inferring that a threat is not serious just from the way it was delivered).
Another important point is that when you interact with authority figures in practice, a lot of the time they don’t stick to a stern and reserved officialist attitude, but instead lapse into the normal human mental state where they want the interaction to be nice, friendly, and conflict-free, and where it’s possible to establish rapport where they’re effectively treating you as an equal. Individuals with good people skills can reap amazing advantages from such situations. Of course, a wrong step may snap them back into the official mode, possibly with bad consequences.
mattnewport:
I think I know exactly what you mean. I also know some people who regularly do things that look like nonchalant recklessness, and yet never suffer the consequences you might expect. They seem to have an extraordinary instinct for distinguishing meaningful from nominal authority. In concrete situations, this can be thanks to technical knowledge (for example, knowing that a punishment you’re threatened with is an enormous hassle to execute in practice, so the threat is effectively empty), or thanks to sheer people skills (e.g. inferring that a threat is not serious just from the way it was delivered).
Another important point is that when you interact with authority figures in practice, a lot of the time they don’t stick to a stern and reserved officialist attitude, but instead lapse into the normal human mental state where they want the interaction to be nice, friendly, and conflict-free, and where it’s possible to establish rapport where they’re effectively treating you as an equal. Individuals with good people skills can reap amazing advantages from such situations. Of course, a wrong step may snap them back into the official mode, possibly with bad consequences.