Is There a Higher Authority to Guarantee Legitimacy?

When you don't have a higher authority guaranteeing the legitimacy and authority of an institution, you're living in an anarchic world. You've got to look out for yourself as if there is nobody up there looking after you. So these institutions are something that ar kind of swimming upstream against reality. In a way, they're pretending that there's something there that isn't really there. It's not necessarily bad or wrong that it's swimming up stream against the facts on the ground.