Thread re: "tie-breaker submission"

Imagine you're becoming the citizen of a new country. You go to take the pledge but there's one line that gets your attention.

"In the event that there is a disagreement between me and my new government, I will be the one to submit."

You look for more information. It goes on to say, "Of course, the government will try to come to an agreement with me but if we just can't agree the government gets to decide and I understand that it will decide in my best interest."

You're not sure you want to sign up for this, so you find someone and try to get more clarification. What sort of decision are we talking about here? "Oh, don't worry," you're assured, "if it's something like, illegal, you don't have to do it."

"Ok," you say, "but I still don't know if I want to sign up for this not knowing what I might be asked to submit to." They shrug their shoulders. "How do I know what might come up? What are you, some kind of radical? Why don't you want to submit to your government?"

No one in their right mind would say a pledge like that to their government, because we recognize that there are things that the government properly has jurisdiction over, and things that it does not.

No authority is a carte blanche affair. Authority doesn't exist unto itself, it is always established for the purpose of ministering to the community in some way.

Authority, and our obligation to it, is a complicated topic (as we are learning with the various responses to, for instance, COVID regulations). Simplistic approaches like "tie breaker submission" don't help.

I'm not going to try to parse out these complexities in a twitter thread, but I think we need to ask questions like,

1. What is the actual purpose of this, particular authority?
2. What are the rights of the person under authority, and how do we make sure they are maintained?