The Chair Isn't the Person: Why Institutions Deserve Respect Even When Their Occupants Don't
Confusing criticism of behavior in office with personal attacks erodes the distinction between leaders and leadership itself
A Controversy That Reveals Something Larger
The controversy began with what should have been an unremarkable observation: that the Captain’s Chair in Star Trek: Starfleet Academy represents something more than furniture. The chair embodies command authority, institutional responsibility, and the weight of leadership. How someone carries themselves in that chair matters because the chair itself matters. It represents an office, not a personality.
This straightforward argument about institutional symbolism provoked two distinct responses. Some readers understood immediately. They recognized the distinction between critiquing how someone inhabits a role and attacking them as a person. Others responded with hostility—dismissive to vulgar, deploying sexist rhetoric and personal abuse that paradoxically proved the original point.
Before we go further, consider this question: When you criticize how someone performs in a specific role or office, are you necessarily attacking them as a person? Take a moment to think about your own experience. Have you ever thought a teacher was a good person but a poor instructor? A kind neighbour but an ineffective committee chair? A likable colleague who nevertheless handled a project badly?
That distinction—between the person and their performance in a role—is what we’re exploring here. And its collapse is damaging our capacity for civic engagement, professional standards, and cultural coherence.
The Office Transcends Its Occupant
Let’s start with a concrete thought experiment, because abstractions about “institutions” can feel distant from lived experience.
Imagine this scenario: You receive an invitation to the Prime Minister’s Office in Ottawa. You did not vote for the sitting Prime Minister. You oppose their policies. You may find their public persona irritating or their leadership choices disastrous.
Now pause and consider: How would you actually behave when you entered that office?
Would you dress casually or formally? Would you speak with your usual informality or with a certain care? Would you slouch in your chair or sit with awareness of where you are?
Most people, regardless of their political views, would instinctively adjust their behaviour. Not because they respect the individual currently working there, but because the room itself carries meaning. The space represents the executive authority of the Canadian government. It represents continuity of governance across different leaders and parties. It represents an institution that existed before this Prime Minister and will exist after they leave.
This is not deference to the individual. It is recognition of the structure itself.
Let’s apply the same thinking to another example: The Oval Office in the United States. Whether the current President is someone you admire or someone you view as fundamentally unfit—whether that president is Donald Trump, or Joe Biden, or anyone else you oppose—the office itself commands a certain recognition.
Here’s where people often stumble. They think: “But if I show respect for the office while Trump (or Biden, or whoever) is in it, doesn’t that mean I’m endorsing them?”
The answer is no, and understanding why reveals something crucial about how institutions work.
Think about it this way: When you stand for a judge entering a courtroom, are you endorsing that particular judge’s legal philosophy? When you salute a flag, are you endorsing every policy decision ever made under that flag? When you shake hands with a police officer who just gave you a speeding ticket, are you saying you agree with the ticket?
No. In each case, you’re acknowledging that the role carries meaning independent of your personal feelings about the individual or their specific decisions.
When that distinction collapses—when people can no longer separate their feelings about an individual from the office's legitimacy itself—institutions begin to hollow out. What remains is pure partisanship: the office matters only when our preferred person holds it, and becomes merely a stage for mockery when someone we dislike occupies it.
Ask yourself: If you only respect the presidency when your preferred candidate holds it, do you actually respect the presidency at all? Or do you just respect the exercise of power by people you agree with?
That’s not a rhetorical trap. It’s a genuine question about what we mean when we talk about institutional respect.
What the Captain’s Chair Represents
In Star Trek, the Captain’s Chair serves as perhaps the most concentrated symbol of command in popular culture. But to understand why it matters, we need to break down what it actually represents.
The chair is not:
A throne signifying inherent superiority
A comfort feature or casual seating
A prop for looking cool
A reward for the character we like most
The chair is:
The physical manifestation of ultimate responsibility for lives aboard a starship
The position from which mission-critical decisions are made under pressure
The symbolic center of command authority and ethical leadership
A visual representation of accountability
When a character sits in that chair, they inherit a specific set of expectations. Let’s think through what those expectations actually look like in practice.
Consider: When Captain Picard sits in the chair, what does his posture communicate? He sits upright, alert, projecting calm readiness. His hands are often steepled or resting on the armrests—positioned to act, not to relax. His voice remains measured even in crisis. Every element of his physical presence says, "I am ready to make the decisions this role requires."
Now contrast that with a different image: someone sprawled casually in the chair, legs over the armrest, treating it like a lounge seat. What does that communicate?
Before you answer “nothing, it’s just a chair,” ask yourself: Would you interpret a Supreme Court justice putting their feet on the bench the same way you’d interpret them sitting formally in their robes? Would it matter if a military commander conducted a briefing in a bathrobe versus in uniform?
If your answer is that these things would matter, then you already understand that symbolic leadership communicates through physical presentation. The question isn’t whether it matters, but why.
Here’s why it matters: Because humans are symbolic creatures who read meaning into how authority presents itself. We assess whether someone understands the weight of their role partly through how they carry themselves in it. This isn’t superficial. It’s how we evaluate whether someone grasps that their role is bigger than their personality.
When someone treats the Captain’s Chair casually, they’re making a statement—intentionally or not—about whether the institution of command deserves seriousness. Sometimes that statement is deliberate, a reformist rejection of empty ritual. Sometimes it’s just thoughtlessness. Either way, the message is received by everyone watching: this role is not particularly special, this authority is not particularly weighty, this responsibility is not particularly serious.
The critique of how someone behaves in the chair is not about:
Their identity or personal characteristics
Whether we like them as a character
Their right to sit in the chair
Their technical qualifications
The critique is about:
Whether their behaviour reflects an understanding of what the chair represents
Whether they project the seriousness the role demands
Whether they seem to grasp that the chair is about responsibility, not them
This distinction matters enormously. One is a personal attack. The other is an institutional critique. When we can’t tell the difference, we’ve lost the ability to discuss professional standards at all.
Why Symbolism Still Matters (And Why We Think It Doesn’t)
There’s a persistent modern impulse to dismiss all this as superficial. You’ve probably encountered some version of this argument:
“Who cares how someone sits in a chair? Who cares what they wear? Who cares about formality and tradition? Substance matters, not appearance. Focusing on symbolism is a distraction from real issues like policy and competence.”
This sounds reasonable. It appeals to our democratic instincts, our skepticism of empty ritual, our desire to focus on what “really matters.” But it rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of how human institutions actually function.
Let’s think through this carefully: Is symbolism opposed to substance, or is it one of the ways substance is transmitted and maintained?
Consider how institutions actually preserve themselves across time. A university doesn’t maintain its standards primarily through policy documents that nobody reads. It maintains them through rituals—graduation ceremonies, academic regalia, formal defences, peer review processes—that constantly reinforce what it means to be part of that institution.
A courtroom doesn’t establish its authority through force. It establishes authority through symbols: the elevated bench, the robes, the requirement that everyone stand when the judge enters, and the formal language used in proceedings. Remove all of that, and the same legal rulings would still be valid in theory, but something crucial about the weight and legitimacy of the process would be lost.
Think about it this way: Imagine a wedding where nobody dressed up, there was no ceremony, no vows, no symbolic exchange of rings—just two people signing a legal document in a government office in jeans and t-shirts. The marriage would be equally legal. But would it feel equally significant? Would the community witnessing it perceive it the same way? Would the couple themselves internalize the weight of the commitment identically?
Most people would say no. And that’s not because weddings require fancy clothes to be “real.” It’s because humans mark important transitions and commitments through ritual and symbol. The ritual doesn’t replace the commitment—it reinforces it, makes it visible, creates shared understanding of what’s happening.
Now apply this to institutional authority:
When judges wear robes, they’re signalling that the person on the bench is not acting as an individual but as an embodiment of judicial authority. The robe says: what matters here is not my personal opinion but the law I’m charged with interpreting.
When military officers salute the flag, they’re acknowledging that their service transcends personal loyalty to any individual commander. The salute says: I serve the institution and what it represents, not whoever currently leads it.
When leaders of state engage in ceremonial formalities—the pomp of state dinners, the protocol of diplomatic meetings, the formal language of official addresses—they’re performing the continuity of governance itself. The ceremony says: this office existed before me and will exist after me, and I am its temporary steward.
Here’s the crucial insight: Stripping away these symbolic practices in the name of authenticity or accessibility does not make institutions more democratic or substantial. It makes them more fragile, more dependent on the charisma of individual leaders, and more vulnerable to collapse when an unpopular person takes office.
Institutions that rest only on personal appeal don’t survive transitions of power intact. When all that matters is whether you like the current occupant, the institution becomes worthless the moment someone you dislike takes over.
This is why respecting the Captain’s Chair—or the Oval Office, or the Prime Minister’s residence, or any other symbol of institutional authority—is not about nostalgia or empty formalism. It’s about preserving the idea that these roles have meaning independent of whoever currently holds them.
Without that idea:
We lose the ability to criticize leaders without delegitimizing leadership itself
We lose the capacity to oppose policies without undermining governance
We lose the distinction between accountability and anarchy
Ask yourself this: In your own life, are there roles or positions you’ve seen people treat too casually, and did it undermine your confidence in the institution? A teacher who treated their classroom like a social club? A manager who turned every meeting into stand-up comedy? A coach who never took practice seriously?
When that happens, what gets damaged isn’t just that person’s effectiveness. People believe that the role itself matters.
Restoring the Distinction Between Person and Office
The backlash to commentary on the Captain’s Chair revealed something troubling: a widespread inability to distinguish between institutional critique and personal attack.
Let’s break down what actually happened and what it reveals:
Group One understood the institutional argument. They recognized that critique of on-screen behavior was an assessment of how fictional leadership was being portrayed—about whether the depiction showed appropriate understanding of what command requires. These readers could separate the actor from the character, the character from the role, and the role from its institutional meaning.
Group Two could not make these distinctions. They perceived any criticism of their conduct in office as an assault on their identity, as evidence of bias or prejudice, and as fundamentally illegitimate. For them, the critique could only be personal because they’d collapsed all the layers into one: if you criticize how someone performs in a role, you must be attacking them as a person.
Here’s why this matters beyond Star Trek: This exact confusion permeates our civic discourse.
Consider these parallel examples:
When criticism of presidential conduct is automatically dismissed as “partisan hatred,” regardless of the specific behaviour being critiqued
When objections to how a Prime Minister handles their office are treated as a rejection of democratic outcomes rather than asa policy disagreement
When professional standards in any field are abandoned because enforcing them might seem “judgmental.”
In each case, we’re abandoning the architecture that makes accountability possible.
Think about what accountability actually requires:
To hold someone accountable, you must be able to say: “The office demands certain standards, and the current occupant is not meeting them.”
That sentence is only coherent if the office and the occupant remain conceptually distinct. If they’ve merged completely—if the office is indistinguishable from whoever holds it—then what can you actually say?
You can’t say “they’re failing to meet the standards of the office” because there are no standards apart from whatever they do
You can’t say “the office deserves better” because the office simply is whoever occupies it
You can’t critique performance without attacking legitimacy itself
Let’s trace what happens when this distinction collapses:
Criticism becomes impossible without delegitimization: If the presidency is Trump (or Biden, or whoever), then criticizing presidential conduct means rejecting the presidency itself
Support becomes impossible without blanket endorsement: If you respect the office, you must defend everything the person does, because they are the office
The middle ground disappears: There’s no space for “loyal opposition”—for respecting institutions while opposing policies, for acknowledging legitimate authority while demanding better performance
Everything becomes zero-sum partisan warfare: The only question is whether your team or their team holds power
Now consider what’s required to restore this distinction:
You must be able to hold two thoughts simultaneously:
“I believe the current President is making disastrous choices”
AND “The presidency as an institution deserves respect”
Or:
“I oppose everything this Prime Minister stands for”
AND “I will conduct myself appropriately in their office”
Or:
“I think this captain’s behaviour is inappropriate for command”
AND “The Captain’s Chair represents something worth preserving”
This is not:
Moral relativism (pretending all positions are equally valid)
Both-sidesism (refusing to make judgments)
Weakness (failing to take stands)
Compromise of principles (abandoning your values)
This is:
The bare minimum requirement for institutions to function across transitions of power
The foundation for professional standards to survive changes in leadership
The precondition for civic culture to remain coherent when political preferences shift
Here’s a question to test your own thinking: Can you name a political leader you strongly oppose, and then articulate what aspects of their office you would still respect if you met them in their official capacity?
If you can’t—if every aspect of the office is contaminated by your dislike of the person—then you don’t actually believe in that institution. You believe in power exercised by people you like.
And that’s the problem. Because when you only respect institutions under friendly occupation, you’re not defending institutions. You’re defending temporary partisan advantage while demolishing the structures that outlast any single administration.
The hard truth: When we forget that the Chair isn’t the person, that the Oval Office isn’t the President, that the Prime Minister’s residence isn’t the Prime Minister, we don’t strike a blow against leaders we dislike.
We simply ensure that no institution will survive our disapproval intact. And when leaders we do support eventually take office, they’ll inherit nothing but wreckage and contempt.
Conclusion: What We Preserve When We Preserve the Distinction
Respecting institutions is not about defending the powerful. It’s about preserving the structures that make accountability, professionalism, and civic engagement possible.
The chair deserves respect not because of who sits in it, but because:
Without respect for what it represents, we have no shared language for leadership. We have no common ground for criticism. We have no foundation for anything beyond the raw exercise of power by whoever currently holds it.
This applies whether we’re talking about:
A fictional starship captain’s chair
The Oval Office during an administration you despise
The Prime Minister’s residence when your party is out of power
Any symbolic office or role that carries weight beyond its current occupant
The principle is simple but not easy: You don’t have to respect the person to respect the institution.
Not easy, because it requires us to:
Set aside our immediate emotional reactions
Distinguish between multiple layers of meaning (person, character, role, institution)
Maintain standards even when applied to people we like
Acknowledge legitimacy even for offices held by people we oppose
But necessary, because without this distinction, we’re left with a world where nothing means anything beyond who we like and who we hate. And that world has no room for institutions at all.
The question we each face: Will we preserve that distinction, whether the response is thoughtful engagement or hostile noise?
Because the alternative isn’t winning arguments against people we disagree with. The alternative is living in a society where institutional authority only exists when our preferred people wield it, where professional standards only matter when they benefit our side, and where the only principle is power.
That’s not a world with better institutions. It’s a world without them.
The choice to maintain the distinction between the chair and the person sitting in it—that choice is what keeps institutions alive across generations, across political transitions, across all the changes in who holds power.
It’s worth defending. In fiction and in reality. Whether people understand it immediately or need time to see it. Because once that distinction is gone, we won’t get it back by winning the next election. We’ll only get it back by rebuilding from scratch what we should never have let collapse.