▶ Your Answer :
Well-being of a group as a whole can be maximized when there are no feasible, sounder alternatives in the long run. Questioning authority means challenging established system or those in power. On the surface, since history seems to have advanced with rulers relinquishing authority, the proposition superficially sounds correct. Yet, challenging authority by itself is a mere necessary condition for society's enhancement, since questioning those in charge has no impact on the general utility of society in the long run. Rather, questioning fundamental problems of organization and suggesting a healthy guideline brings about profound changes for long period of time.
Most importantly, in order to increase welfare of a society in the long term, questioning should focus on general structure, rather than specific human beings. Just change of those in power has little implication for total utility as a whole. From this perspective, replacing deficient high-ranked ones with fit people is a myopic solution: eventually, faults in system will leave the room for high positions to be taken by less qualified successors. In contrast, if the rule of the game governing the general society can be altered to benefit great majority, such change can surely maximize the society's happiness, since time cannot attribute value. To exemplify, the French Revolution is remembered as a great change, not because the revolutionaries beheaded lavish monarchs and aristocrats. It is commemorated because the bourgeois, new in power, bestowed political and economic freedom upon the suppressed majority, instead of crowning themselves.
What's more, questioning authority should extend beyond merely perceiving the structural deficiency to constructive criticism with realistic alternative. As words without action are void, even if significant, attacks without feasible options are futile. To further illustrate, take anarchists as an example. Anarchists opposed monolithic, authoritarian societies from Fascism to communism to capitalism. Anarchists' analysis and accusation of existing societies were sensible enough to let many intellects, including Tolstoy and Picasso, empathize their ideas. Anarchists were too radical to have any realistic alternative; their decentralized power structure and downright rejection of machinery were just too extreme. Inevitably, anarchism lost its ground. With both conditions, criticism becomes genuinely meaningful. These criteria make increasing social welfare no easy task for questioning authority. Perhaps since humans are never content with what they have, it is easy, even trivial, to grunt about those in power and envy them. The significant challenge is to direct suspicion toward organization and structure of the society that permanently produces problems, and creatively come up with new solution. |