Is the arc of history pointing toward a dissolution of authority?

Is the arc of history pointing toward a dissolution of authority?

In the middle ages you had the catholic church, the entire framework of the world was backed by the authority of the church, in the ultimate personage of the pope. the only potential vector  to challenge that came from the local aristocracy, backed by the king, who was at least nominally backed by the clergy. Within this system people were largely corralled and kept from wondering too far from the view put forth by the church.

Into this world come four forces. The printing press, which opens the potential of individual learning or independent study and the mass distribution of the views of literate individuals in a manner that can reach far wider an individual traveler can ever hope to do with his voice.  The revival of interest in classical thought, both literary and philosophical, which validates and invests with authority ideas from outside of the church. Machiavelli's 'the Prince' which decouples the idea of secular authority from virtue by suggesting that power is maintained not by any superior spiritual position or innate nobility but rather by manipulation and favour. And the reformation, which divests spiritual authority from the structural authority of the church and instead places it the hands of those who can correctly interpret scripture.

This then becomes a tale of the decline of the monarchy, first the autocractic and reactionary Charles II being overthrown and beheaded by the military when he attempts to institute the idea of divine rule, overturning centuries of constitutional monarchy (and we could talk here about the desacralisation of monarchy and the end of the taboo about lopping off their heads brought about by the execution of Mary queen of scots by Elizabeth I). The American revolution while presenting no direct threat to the monarchies of Europe, provided an example of a state organised on the liberal ideals of the enlightenment to the Revolutionaries of France. Not only did the deposing of the monarchy through revolutionary insurrection (rather than civil war) open a new crisis of legitimacy for monarchs throughout Europe (the facts on the ground support the general with the army at his back, and it is without question that he replaces the king, but through insurrection the question of -what- replaces the king is not easily answered with deferment to the authority of a single man at the head of the conquering army, but through a political process, carried out by those seen as the 'face' of the insurrection, aimed at fulfilling the demands of the insurrectionary populace, without triggering full blown counter revolution among those opposed). The shattering moment that ended the idea of monarch as authority was,(after a century of expansion and conquest for Europe, and the formation of vast overseas empires) the events of the first world war, which was not only attributable in it's outset to the logic of imperial authority, but destroyed the myth of European cultural superiority on which the authority of the imperial exercise was based. This was capped by the deposing of European monarchs in socialist revolutions (Russia and Germany) as well as the creation of nation states from territories formally part of large multi-ethnic empires (the rise of nationalist movements having been fermenting throughout Europe throughout the 19th century).

Though the monarchy and church had began as the locus of authority in the middle ages, from the late 18th century a new idea with claim to the mantel of authority had been forming. The nation state arose from romantic notions of myth and feeling binding together ethnic groups into blocks who would through some irrational means would organise themselves into the best form of government for each group, these were augmented by the ideas of the German idealists to construct a concept of duty and service to the state, and the authority of the state over the lives of it's citizens. A further mythic layer was added with the idea of evolution, which served as a further layer of justification for both aggressive international policy as well as for the suppression of internal dissent. This had its ultimate expression in the fascist government of Nazi Germany, who seized power not through the authority of a king, nor through military force, but through a coup using the mechanisms of state, and who then used the authority of state to suppress all opposition. This claim through action of the authority of the state to have total control over the lives of it's citizenry was refuted by it's total defeat, first on the field of battle, and again economically in Franco's Spain, by the forces of liberalism.

Which  leaves us where we are today, religious authority dissolute, the power of monarchs empty, the state as new locus of authority discredited. The -power- today resides in the hands of the rich. But power is not the same as authority. The rich claim no authority, instead their justification for their de facto power rests on arguments about freedom, and, when their outsized power is an obvious imposition of the ability of other to exercise their freedom and agency, on the idea that their authority to impose their will on society is due to their merit. A meritocracy both arbitrary and post hoc, resting on the idea that a persons ability to accumulate money correlates to their authority to wield power, and this claim of meritocratic authority stands in direct contradiction to the ideals of freedom they martial to justify their unconstrained accumulation of wealth.