My experience of authority is that its a failure.
Almost every authority I've met has failed to live up to my expectation of what their role and responsibilities are, the worst sorts are half way aware of it or suspect it and are by turns on the offensive or on the defensive as a cover for it, there's lots of sorts in between that and the best sorts, which generally try to apply some sort "first do no harm" practice but fail at that even.
I wouldnt say that I have any issues of the traditional anti-authoritarian, no one is telling me what to do, your not the boss a me kind, in fact I get pissed off when I see that or experience it from others, whether I'm the authority figure in question or not, the real affective, emotional over reacting kind, the sort which would be the worst kind to ever actually prevail over the authority it opposed, if that was even its goal, because it would be a worse authority than the one it sought to supplant (most of the time that's not what its about, most of the time there's no intent of that, its just a matter of "situation is all fucked, I'm not following your orders, this is all your problem" opposition).
The issues I have are more complex.
I dont like authorities which dont want to be authorities, which reject authoritarianism but dont see authoritarianism as something different from being an authority per se or authoritative, they're marked with indecision, delegation, prevarication, ambivalence and side stepping, side stepping bothers me the most probably because you could question what are they there for or what value are the adding and how are they earning their money or how are they worth it?
Its a performance issue, most authorities dont perform as they should. Its a neglect, competence or even disinterest issue as much as its anything else. Sometimes the expectations are too high of them, maybe their hands are tied or they lack resources but more often its all convenient excuses and a lack of resourcefulness.
That's before you get into questions of corruption or outright wickedness or tyrannising, which are all consequences of different sorts of authority fails, possibly even epic fails. I don really see any of the great dictatorships in history as consequence of a triumph of authority but rather epic failures of authority and their aftermaths.
A lot of the epic, and not so epic and much more mundane, authority fails are a result of people who're barely competent being able to gather enough like minded and like skills challenged people around them and convincing them of an us vs. them myth because as long as people believe they are part of an us and threatened by a them then they are unlikely to look at the faults of failings of any of the us and more likely to believe that the them is a source of concentrated malice any time they have had to challenge how things are done.
That's not to say that there's plenty of people on the other end doing precisely the same thing without being prepared to exercise any kind of reponsibility or authority in turn but you know.
