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Video Description
Four centuries ago, a young Frenchman made a terrifying claim: every tyranny runs on the people’s own consent. This lecture from Academy of Ideas revives Etienne de la Boétie’s The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. Rulers are always outnumbered, so their power depends on us agreeing to be ruled. The video shows how custom, spectacles, bread-and-circuses bribes, and sacred theater all manufacture that agreement — and why a stubborn few have always refused the yoke. Its closing image: pull away the base, and the statue of servitude falls all at once.
Full Video Transcript
Since the birth of civilization, tyrannical rulers have plagued mankind.
Driven by an insatiable appetite for power, such individuals have done their best to control both the minds and bodies of their subjects.
Seen in this light, the history of civilization is very much a history of varying degrees of human enslavement.
Especially in the case of more authoritarian regimes, it has been common to assume that the masses are purely victims in their enslavement.
Unable to mount any form of resistance due to the threat of force wielded by those in power.
In the 16th century, the French philosopher Etienne de la Boétie challenged this view in his essay The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude.
All governments, he argued, including the most tyrannical, can only rule for extended durations if they have the general support of the populace.
Not only are those in power vastly outnumbered by those over whom they rule,
but governments rely on the subjugated populations to provide them with a continual supply of resources and manpower.
If one day enough people refused to obey and stopped surrendering their wealth and property,
their oppressors would, in the words of Lubwedi,
“…become naked and undone and as nothing, just as, when the root receives no nourishment, the branch withers and dies.”
Hence, mass submission to even the most oppressive political regimes is always a voluntary servitude,
one based on popular consent, as Labuetti explains,
own throat when, having a choice between being vassals and being free men, it deserts its
liberties and takes on the yoke, gives consent to its own misery, or rather, apparently welcomes
it.
In this video, we’ll explore Labuetti’s insights as to why people throughout history
and into the modern day have acted against their best interests and consented to their
enslavement.
Most animals display a natural instinct to be free.
When an attempt is made to capture an animal, it flees in terror or else reacts with fierce
aggression. When taken from its natural habitat and placed in captivity, its innate vigor atrophies
and is replaced by lethargy and despondency. The successful domestication of a species, therefore,
usually requires numerous generations of selective breeding in order to eradicate the animal’s
instinct to roam and live free. Labuetti asserts that in human beings this instinct for freedom
is especially pronounced. Various social factors, however, have atrophied this natural instinct over
time to the point where now the very love of liberty no longer seems natural.
One of these factors, according to Labuetti, is the powerful influence of custom, or in
other words, our tendency to become habituated to the social and political conditions we
were born into.
Just as an animal born in captivity knows nothing of the freedom it lacks and hence
does not resist its chains, so too those born into state slavery lack the knowledge of what
means to be free, and thus tend to accept their servitude as if it were natural. When one spends
their formative years observing those around them not resisting their oppressors, but accepting them
and even adoring them, the effects of custom tend to override the natural instinct for freedom
and submission becomes habitual. This socialization into state slavery is analogous to the story of
the ancient king Mithridates, who was said to have habituated himself to poison by drinking small
amounts over a long period of time. Like him, writes Labuetti, we learn to swallow and not
to find bitter the venom of servitude. Or as he further explains,
and considering as quite natural the conditions into which they were born.
But custom alone does not account for the readiness with which people consent to their servitude.
As ruling classes have long known that to maintain power, they must play an active role in engineering consent.
Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, metals, pictures, writes Labouetti, and other such opiates,
these were for ancient peoples the bait towards slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny.
In the modern day, these instruments of tyranny have changed form, but their essence remains the same.
The endless supply of mindless diversions provided by the mass media and entertainment industry,
the numbing effects of pharmaceutical drugs, and the dramatic farce of political elections,
all serve to distract the attention of the populace away from the reality of their enslavement.
Another tactic for engineering consent used by ancient tyrants was analogous to what we call the welfare state today.
Labuetti notes that on select days of the year, ruling classes used to distribute bread, wine, and a little bit of money to their subjects.
And soon after, those who were content and satiated would cry out,
Long live the king!
The fools did not realize, Labuetti writes, that they were merely recovering a portion of their own property,
and that their ruler could not have given them what they were receiving without having first taken it from them.
But the proverbial bread and circuses are not the only instruments of tyranny.
For ruling classes have long attempted to evoke not only the consent, but the adoration and reverence of their subjects, by co-opting techniques used by religions to make their authority appear sacred.
Myths, rituals, the use of religious and cult symbolism, and the construction of buildings symbolizing power and authority, and resembling places of worship, have long been used by ruling classes to borrow, in the words of Labuetti, a stray bit of divinity to bolster up their evil ways.
Despite the fact that voluntary servitude to a political ruling class has been the norm throughout history,
Labuetti does not consider it inevitable that this situation will continue indefinitely.
For just as there have always existed those who seek to rule and exploit others,
so too in all ages there exist individuals who instinctively rebel against any form of servitude
and thus are tortured by the chains which others appear not to notice.
Even if liberty had entirely perished from the earth, Labuetti writes,
Such men would have to invent it. For them, slavery has no satisfactions, no matter how well disguised.
Those who comprise this elite vanguard of freedom, devote much of their time to educating themselves and developing their critical capacities for the sake of awakening others to the nefarious and deceptive nature of political rule.
This work is done in the realization that if a critical mass becomes aware of their enslavement and of the true value of freedom,
Voluntary servitude, on a mass scale, will end quite abruptly, for as Labuetti explains,
has been pulled away, fall of his own weight, and break into pieces.
Source: Academy of Ideas