These days, Etienne de la Boétie (1530-1563) is mainly known as the best friend of Michel de Montaigne; their friendship was the model for the exalted, perfect friendship that Montaigne extolled in his essays.
But La Boétie had another accomplishment of note, a little tract he wrote and circulated privately called Voluntary Servitude:
The subject of Voluntary Servitude is the ease with which, throughout history, tyrants have dominated the masses, even though their power would evaporate instantly if those masses withdrew their support. There is no need for a revolution: the people need only stop cooperating, and supplying armies of slaves and sycophants to prop the tyrant up. Yet this almost never happens, even to those who maltreat their subjects monstrously. The more they starve and neglect their people, the more the people seem to love them. The Romans mourned Nero when he died, despite his abuses. The same happened on the death of Julius Caesar — whom, unusually La Boétie does not admire. Here was an emperor "who abolished the laws and liberty, a personage in whom there was, it seems to me, nothing of value," yet he was adored out of all measure. The mystery of tyrannical dominance is as profound as that of love itself.
La Boétie believes that tyrants somehow hypnotize their people — though this term had not yet been invented. To put it another way, they fall in love with him. They lose their will in his. It is a terrible spectacle to see "a million men serving miserably with their necks under the yoke, not constrained by a greater force, but somehow (it seems) enchanted and charmed by the mere mention of the name of one, whose power they should not fear, since he is alone, whose qualities they should not love, since he is savage and inhuman towards them." Yet they cannot wake from the dream. La Boétie makes it sound almost like a kind of witchcraft. It it occurred on a smaller scale, someone would probably be burned at the stake, but when betwitchment seizes a whole society, it goes unquestioned. . . .
Tyranny creates a drama of submission and domination. The populace willingly gives itself up, and this only encourages the tyrant to take away everything they have — even their lives, if he sends them to war to fight for him. Something in human beings drives them to a "deep forgetfulness of freedom." Everyone, from the top to the bottom of the system, is mesmerized by the power of habit, since often they have known nothing else. Yet all they need to do is to wake up and withdraw their cooperation.
Whenever a few individuals do break free, adds La Boétie, it is often because their eyes have been opened by the study of history. Learning of similar past tyrannies, they recognize the pattern in their own society. Instead of accepting what they are born into, they acquire the art of slipping out of it and seeing everything from a different angle — a trick Montaigne, in the Essays, would make his characteristic mode of thinking and writing. Alas, there are usually too few of these free spirits to do any good. They do not work together but "live alone in their imaginings."
Sarah Bakewell, How to Live, or A Life of Montaigne (95-96)
1 comment:
I would suggest that one common element is a form of Fatalism - tyrants arise when people feel that the general situation is bad, and that there is nothing they (or any other obvious sources of leadership) is either willing or able to do to fix it. Nero, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, even Trump... they all are the products of unsettled times, discontented masses, and loss of faith in the dominant institutions.
When people are ill at ease, and they don't have faith in other options for leadership, they turn to strongmen who promise to take decisive action, break all the rules, overturn all expectations, and sweep away the old "corrupt" order to replace it with the glory of their new vision. It's the same force that compels a struggling company to elevate a CEO who promises to "move fast and break things". People would rather follow someone who takes the initiative, even into ruin, than sit by and do nothing.
This is why having a major power player in an institution begin actively working to impede the smooth operations of said institution is so insidiously dangerous. They usually are just trying to game the system and gain a leg up on their rivals in the short term, but they fail to recognize that in paralyzing or weakening the system, they are laying the groundwork for a strongman tyrant to try to step in and take over.
This is a massive reason it's so vital to maintain good governance and fix issues before they become intractable. Beyond the obvious detriments of the system not producing desirable outcomes in themselves, the bigger threat is the unrecognized potential for creating the conditions which are necessary to give rise to tyrants.
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