Healthy authority existed within this structure, just as love survives totalitarianism. Most people, however, confuse authoritarianism with authority. Authority has yet to find its true voice. Our struggle in the interim is to recover our authority, our capacity to author our own lives. The obsolescence of hierarchical housing has not invalidated the purposes of great institutions.
Truth remains, as does faith, art and law.
But these stabilizing and identifying entities have not yet found new housing for themselves in this vastly transformed period. That is why everything seems to lack direction. Standards and morals have not disappeared, but their authoritarian modes have peeled away. The first step in securing our identity is to understand that we are living in a wilderness in which the old signs do not work anymore. We are reenacting the biblical myth that is also a mystery, that of being exiled from Eden.