Authority is a choice and my choice is my authority. When I choose someone else’s choice, I defer to their authority. I can make my own choices or I can defer to a higher authority.
I choose to defer to the higher authority of my higher Self and follow my Soul’s path for its Self through life. Following the wise path of my Soul, I intuitively know that I will never get mad, angry, insane or demented. Unawakened to the destiny of my personal vision for my life, I am subjected to my fate.
It is my fate to follow other people’s authority. Traditionally, it has been a woman’s fate to follow the authority & choice of her husband. It is the fate of all religious followers to follow the doctrine & dogma of their chosen religion’s moral code of ethics. From birth, we are raised to follow the principle standards of our families creed & culture.
It may be wrong to say that we lose our authority when we get dementia because very few normal people actually stand in their own authority and choose an authentic life for their Self. We are all free to make every life choice our own choice in life but most defer their choice to the higher external authority of their church or their government.
To an unawakened mind, higher authority means a higher status in society. Traditionally, the church & the crown fought for the divine authority to make people’s choices for them. Today, we defer authority by giving leadership status to an elected elite group of authoritarian politicians & governors.
Allowing other people the authority to make our choices for us, whilst believing that this is our choice, is the status quo of modern society. As a society, we have never had free choice, only a choice of options that we are legally & morally allowed to opt for. Free choice has been substituted with an inexhaustible range of options, which makes choice in life more & more difficult to make.
What really makes choice difficult is the belief that being selfish and choosing for one’s Self is not good and being unselfish and deferring to what other people want is good. We are taught to be unselfish and defer to what people in authority tell us is best for ourself and we are told to not be selfish by always choosing what we think is best for ourself.
It is more accurate to say that we get demented when we lose our authority. Being given a range of options by those in authority is not freedom of choice It is deferring to the authority of people in society, on whom we have conferred status. The role of politicians is to govern people with authority, although whose authority is unclear, whilst allowing them to believe that they live in a free and democratic society.
Dementia is a loss of authority that becomes evident. In modern society, it is not evident that only a very few ever had authority because we appear to be exercising our choice by right in a free & democratically un-authoritarian society.
The irony is that when we believe that we all have a choice, we are quite happy to let other people choose for us. It is only when we are deprived of our choice, and other people make our choices by default, that we offer any actual rebellion.
Dementia is a case in point. It is not unusual for a very mild, pleasant & humble person to become insanely angry & rebellious when diagnosed with dementia and put into care.
Whereas, we may condescend to give our authority away to others for most of our life, when someone actually decides to take our authority away from us, it can become a very traumatic issue indeed.
The problem that dementia causes is that it is no longer possible to live without supervision. Supervision means that there is always someone there to control you, manage you and make choices for you. Independence is the ability to exercise one’s own authority through choice. When I lose my independence, I am dependent on someone else and subject to their authority. Independent people resent being told what to do. There is a big difference between being offered help or assistance and being supervised.
A Supervisor oversees everything to ensure that everything is under control. The control that I am under is the authority to which I conform. Accepting supervision is conforming to a supervisor’s way of seeing things. Without a higher vision for my life, super vision is an external form of control that overrides my own authority. With dementia, this may be deemed as necessary but it is never deemed to be preferable.
The last thing that a caring person prefers to do is to take away someone else’s independent authority. The question is: How do you make choices for someone who has lost the ability to make choices for themselves and how can you not take authority when you are responsible for someone else’s welfare?
Dementia is a loss of authority because someone in authority has decided that you are no longer capable of making sane decisions for yourself. Someone in authority, with a professional status, has chosen for someone else to take responsibility for making your choices for you.
In the absence of my ability to give away my authority to someone who I believe cares for me, I am forced to allow my authority to be taken away by someone who is authorised to take care of me.
The real irony of dementia is that nobody really has the authority to diagnose dementia. Dementia is only accurately diagnosed through autopsy, which is not an authorised practice on living people.
The General Practitioner’s test for dementia is only a guide for referral to a specialist practitioner to do further tests. Tests for dementia involve brain scans, which as yet have no proven relevance to an incapacity of the mind. This means that any diagnosis of dementia is just an educated guess based on circumstantial evidence and the perspective of people in authority.
Nobody truly has the authority to diagnose someone as demented. Like choice itself, any diagnosis is based on a matter of the personal opinion of an authorised individual who may or may not have your authority to act in your best interests.
Dementia may be viewed as the loss of authority of someone who never really exercised their authority in their life anyway. The old adage that what we do not use, we tend to lose may turn out to be very true in the case of dementia.