Authority seems invisible to us because it is so pervasive in our world. In fact, pretty much the entire discipline of sociology is built on this puzzle. How is it, sociologists ask, that human society, which is so profoundly complex, essentially involving the voluntary consent and synchronization of so many millions, and now billions, of people—how is it that society works so smoothly? (Sociologists spend a good bit of their time studying deviance, but that’s really an avoidance mechanism for them; the real mystery at the heart of sociology is not that there are some people who break the rules, but that there are so very many who do not.) Clearly, society works as well as it does because people obey. They order their lives according to some fairly sophisticated, if rarely articulated, rules. […]
Humanity today, for all our talk about individuality, is a remarkably docile, obedient, and rule-bound species. Authority is all the more powerful for being so thoroughly imperceptible. Its ultimate triumph lies in how it is embedded in our psyches: we obey authority when we think we ought to do something. The sociological discussion of authority begins from the fact of the pervasiveness of obedience and conformity.