Sovereignty... It's all about YOU, not them.

The individual human person (read: YOU) is under attack by those who have every want, need, and desire, to maintain the power of a very simple lie.

This lie, within whose envelope we are born, educated, trained, and thoroughly indoctrinated, is simply the concept that sovereignty is somehow hierarchical...

There are two common ways that this lie is fostered and maintained:

1. Passive Authority- we dazzle and impress others with our brilliance, and those that we impress begin to look to us as somehow superior to them, and soon they revere us and address us as authorities and eventually they begin to yield their sovereignty to ours. This is typically the avenue of Preisthoods and Academia... it relies on bureaucracy and process to maintain the illusion.
2. Aggressive Authority- Individuals or groups leverage the imbalance of some strength to directly impose their super-sovereignty over those who are "weaker" than they.

Over time, sovereignty yields to higher soverignty, until people organize into "sovereign states" and states into nations, and the next thing you know, we have some ass-clown with a teleprompter standing at a podium declaring that he can wage war against another population of people (human beings- each with personal conciousness and free will) without the approval of his own sovereign state; because he is acting as part of a coalition of other states under the "authority" of an even higher super-sovereign...

And while aggressive authority (number 2 above) is certainly more efficient than passive authority, it is also inherently less stable (since you never really know who is going to submit, and who is going to fight back), so the best "uber strategy" is to combine both methods in a hybrid system that completely obscures a singularity of truth that can not be seen, heard, nor discussed...

Sadly, this entire analogy can also be allegorical to another term:
Parenthood.

Without respecting the absolute sovereignty, consciousness, and freewill of other people on an individual level, there can (and will) be no true freedom for our species- ever.

The greatest day any parent should look forward to is the day their offspring say "Take a hike you idiot- I'm taking responsibility for my own life", but instead most parents live with fear and dread of this ever happening...

The nature of the human condition is why we seek affirmation from others, and it is why we so willingly sacrifice our individual sovereignty in the process of searching for some higher meaning.

In other words- the smarter we think we are, the more stupid we prove ourselves to be.