How to Lose Authority

Genuine authority comes to be because human beings are good at critical thinking and sometimes use that skill to judge the advice of particular people.  Political authority lives parasitically off of this tendency, replacing the critical thinking with the (often hollow, useless, and even counterproductive) judgement of other people, also known as voting.  That is ultimately the fault of those adhering to the advice (or, more often, demands, laws, mandates, rules, etc.) of political authorities.  They suffer for it too.

In any case, if you have authority, either kind, you can lose it by making the simple mistake of pretending that you are creating reality with what you say.  This is the opposite of what genuine authority does, and the reason it causes you to lose any authority you may have had.  The most dangerous part of the process for you is not, actually, the loss of your authority.  Lots of people don't have it, and they are doing fine.  Rather, your efforts to "use authority" often boil down to creating fear in those who might defy you.  This is the primary role of legislation and punishment, to create fear.  That is your problem to solve.  Perhaps paying more attention to natural (also known as "free") consequences of the behaviors you require or prohibit, and pointing them out to those who "defy" you is a better way.  It certainly costs less.

I call it a problem for you to solve because what you do when you use fear to create your vision of how things should be, is to motivate people who can see through your error (a demand, for example, to do a thing they realize is counterproductive, like maybe wearing a mask, because it traps exhalations and feeds stuff meant to be out of the body back into it) to start ignoring you.  You rely on the size of the population adhering to your advice for your living.  As that group shrinks, so does your standard of living.  This is why I call it the most dangerous part of the process for you.

For the rest of us, the essential skill is to avoid that replacement of critical thinking with the judgement of others.  People have been doing that for two years right about now, because the COVID-19 thing motivated a lot of authorities to make the mistake I just described.  There are more critical thinkers now than there were before.  I hope this trend continues, but I'd also like to see an increase in genuine authority.  You're in a position to help with that.  It requires you to repudiate all parts of the system that are designed to make people follow your advice (legislation, punishment, policy, etc.).  Just speak the truth, and stop making "laws."

Another way to see this is to consider how you feel when you are threatened.  Every time you create legislation, lots of people are threatened, and they feel it too.  It creates a spirit of defiance, and that spirit will be strongly exhibited in some of us.  Think a lot about this, and whether or not you want to help people by explaining what you see.  This will help inform your choice between making more threats through legislation, or speaking out with the truth so that more people understand and your perceived authority grows.