Michael Huemer on the human tendency to obey authority figures and to justify their authority

The whole chapter is interesting because it ties things like the Milgram experiment and Stockholm Syndrome (that we all know about) to form a reasonable explanation for why people not only obey governments, but convince themselves that governments must be good (e.g. why would I let someone who's not good control me?).

"The widespread acceptance of political authority has been cited as evidence of the existence of (legitimate) political authority. The psychological and historical evidence undermines this appeal. The Nazis, the American soldiers at My Lai, and Milgram's subjects were clearly under no obligation of obedience - quite the contrary - and the orders they were given were clearly illegitimate. From outside these situations, we can see that. Yet when actually confronted by the demands of the authority figures, the individuals in these situations felt the need to obey. This tendency is very widespread among human beings. Now suppose, hypothetically, that all governments were illegitimate and that no one was obligated to obey their commands (except where the commands line up with preexisting moral requirements). The psychological and historical evidence cannot show whether this radical ethical hypothesis is true. But what the evidence does suggest is that if that hypothesis were true, it is quite likely that we would still by and large feel bound to obey our governments. That is likely, because even people who are subjected to the clearest examples of illegitimate power still typically feel bound to obey. And if we felt this requirement to obey, it is likely that this would lead us to think and say that we were obliged to obey and then - in the case of the more philosophically minded among us - to devise theories to explain why we have this obligation. Thus, the widespread belief in political authority does not provide strong evidence for the reality of political authority, since that belief can be explained as the product of systematic bias."

~Michael Huemer. The Problem of Political Authority. Chapter 6