Fredkc
26th August 2010, 03:52
I've had this laying around for awhile now, looking for some clear time to post this, and extract the good points from an excellent article on Tyranny vs. Freedom.
This is an essay by Murray Rothbard written on the thoughts of Étienne de La Boétie, 1530 - 1563. La Boétie's great contribution to political thought was written while he was a law student at the University of Orléans, where he imbibed the spirit of free inquiry that prevailed there. In this period of questing and religious ferment, the University of Orléans was a noted center of free and untrammeled discussion. La Boétie's main teacher there was the fiery Anne du Bourg, later to become a Huguenot martyr, and burned at the stake for heresy in 1559.
Truly groundbreaking stuff. Seriously. This is Gandhi's way of non-violence, and David Icke's "Mankind get off your knees!" all wrapped into one, written 500 years before either one was born.
Ending Tyranny Without Violence (http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard78.html)
by Murray N. Rothbard
The "Discourse of Voluntary Servitude" is lucidly and coherently structured around a single axiom, a single percipient insight into the nature not only of tyranny, but implicitly of the State apparatus itself. Many medieval writers had attacked tyranny, but La Boétie delves especially deeply into its nature, and into the nature of State rule itself.
This fundamental insight was that every tyranny must necessarily be grounded upon general popular acceptance. In short, the bulk of the people themselves, for whatever reason, acquiesce in their own subjection.
If this were not the case, no tyranny, indeed no governmental rule, could long endure. Hence, a government does not have to be popularly elected to enjoy general public support; for general public support is in the very nature of all governments that endure, including the most oppressive of tyrannies.
The tyrant is but one person, and could scarcely command the obedience of another person, much less of an entire country, if most of the subjects did not grant their obedience by their own consent.[9]
This, then, becomes for La Boétie the central problem of political theory: why in the world do people consent to their own enslavement? La Boétie cuts to the heart of what is, or rather should be, the central problem of political philosophy: the mystery of civil obedience. Why do people, in all times and places, obey the commands of the government, which always constitutes a small minority of the society? To La Boétie the spectacle of general consent to despotism is puzzling and appalling:
I should like merely to understand how it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him; who is able to harm them only to the extent to which they have the willingness to bear with him; who could do them absolutely no injury unless they preferred to put up with him rather than contradict him. Surely a striking situation! Yet it is so common that one must grieve the more and wonder the less at the spectacle of a million men serving in wretchedness, their necks under the yoke, not constrained by a greater multitude than they...
And this mass submission must be out of consent rather than simply out of fear:
Shall we call subjection to such a leader cowardice? ... If a hundred, if a thousand endure the caprice of a single man, should we not rather say that they lack not the courage but the desire to rise against him, and that such an attitude indicates indifference rather than cowardice? When not a hundred, not a thousand men, but a hundred provinces, a thousand cities, a million men, refuse to assail a single man from whom the kindest treatment received is the infliction of serfdom and slavery, what shall we call that? Is it cowardice? ... When a thousand, a million men, a thousand cities, fail to protect themselves against the domination of one man, this cannot be called cowardly, for cowardice does not sink to such a depth... What monstrous vice, then, is this which does not even deserve to be called cowardice, a vice for which no term can be found vile enough ... ?
As La Boétie puts it: "If we led our lives according to the ways intended by nature and the lessons taught by her, we should be intuitively obedient to our parents; later we should adopt reason as our guide and become slaves to nobody."
Reason is our guide to the facts and laws of nature and to humanity's proper path, and each of us has "in our souls some native seed of reason, which, if nourished by good counsel and training, flowers into virtue, but which, on the other hand, if unable to resist the vices surrounding it, is stifled and blighted."
And reason, La Boétie adds, teaches us the justice of equal liberty for all. For reason shows us that nature has, among other things, granted us the common gift of voice and speech. Therefore, "there can be no further doubt that we are all naturally free," and hence it cannot be asserted that "nature has placed some of us in slavery."
Even animals, he points out, display a natural instinct to be free. But then, what in the world "has so, denatured man that he, the only creature really born to be free, lacks the memory of his original condition and the desire to return to it?"
La Boétie's celebrated and creatively original call for civil disobedience, for mass non-violent resistance as a method for the overthrow of tyranny, stems directly from these two premises: The fact that all rule rests on the consent of the subject masses,
And the great value of natural liberty.
For if tyranny really rests on mass consent, then the obvious means for its overthrow is simply by mass withdrawal of that consent.
Thus, after concluding that all tyranny rests on popular consent, La Boétie eloquently concludes that "obviously there is no need of fighting to overcome this single tyrant, for he is automatically defeated if the country refuses consent to its own enslavement."
Tyrants need not be expropriated by force; they need only be deprived of the public's continuing supply of funds and resources.
La Boétie concludes his exhortation by assuring the masses that to overthrow the tyrant they need not act, nor shed their blood. They can do so "merely by willing to be free." In short,
Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.
"The prime task of education, then, is not simply abstract insight into governmental "errors" in advancing the general welfare, but debamboozling the public on the entire nature and procedures of the despotic State.
In that task, La Boétie also speaks to us in his stress on the importance of a perceptive, vanguard elite of libertarian and anti-statist intellectuals. The role of this "cadre" – to grasp the essence of statism and to desanctify the State in the eyes and minds of the rest of the population – is crucial to the potential success of any movement to bring about a free society." - Murray Rothbard
Anyway, Rothbard's essay Ending Tyranny Without Violence (http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard78.html) goes on quite a bit from there. Well worth the read as something to hang your thoughts on. So I'm tossing it in,
Fred
PS: Coming soon! A great essay by Gary North on the nature of Conspiracies, and anti-C mentality. (scary stuff) ;)
This is an essay by Murray Rothbard written on the thoughts of Étienne de La Boétie, 1530 - 1563. La Boétie's great contribution to political thought was written while he was a law student at the University of Orléans, where he imbibed the spirit of free inquiry that prevailed there. In this period of questing and religious ferment, the University of Orléans was a noted center of free and untrammeled discussion. La Boétie's main teacher there was the fiery Anne du Bourg, later to become a Huguenot martyr, and burned at the stake for heresy in 1559.
Truly groundbreaking stuff. Seriously. This is Gandhi's way of non-violence, and David Icke's "Mankind get off your knees!" all wrapped into one, written 500 years before either one was born.
Ending Tyranny Without Violence (http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard78.html)
by Murray N. Rothbard
The "Discourse of Voluntary Servitude" is lucidly and coherently structured around a single axiom, a single percipient insight into the nature not only of tyranny, but implicitly of the State apparatus itself. Many medieval writers had attacked tyranny, but La Boétie delves especially deeply into its nature, and into the nature of State rule itself.
This fundamental insight was that every tyranny must necessarily be grounded upon general popular acceptance. In short, the bulk of the people themselves, for whatever reason, acquiesce in their own subjection.
If this were not the case, no tyranny, indeed no governmental rule, could long endure. Hence, a government does not have to be popularly elected to enjoy general public support; for general public support is in the very nature of all governments that endure, including the most oppressive of tyrannies.
The tyrant is but one person, and could scarcely command the obedience of another person, much less of an entire country, if most of the subjects did not grant their obedience by their own consent.[9]
This, then, becomes for La Boétie the central problem of political theory: why in the world do people consent to their own enslavement? La Boétie cuts to the heart of what is, or rather should be, the central problem of political philosophy: the mystery of civil obedience. Why do people, in all times and places, obey the commands of the government, which always constitutes a small minority of the society? To La Boétie the spectacle of general consent to despotism is puzzling and appalling:
I should like merely to understand how it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him; who is able to harm them only to the extent to which they have the willingness to bear with him; who could do them absolutely no injury unless they preferred to put up with him rather than contradict him. Surely a striking situation! Yet it is so common that one must grieve the more and wonder the less at the spectacle of a million men serving in wretchedness, their necks under the yoke, not constrained by a greater multitude than they...
And this mass submission must be out of consent rather than simply out of fear:
Shall we call subjection to such a leader cowardice? ... If a hundred, if a thousand endure the caprice of a single man, should we not rather say that they lack not the courage but the desire to rise against him, and that such an attitude indicates indifference rather than cowardice? When not a hundred, not a thousand men, but a hundred provinces, a thousand cities, a million men, refuse to assail a single man from whom the kindest treatment received is the infliction of serfdom and slavery, what shall we call that? Is it cowardice? ... When a thousand, a million men, a thousand cities, fail to protect themselves against the domination of one man, this cannot be called cowardly, for cowardice does not sink to such a depth... What monstrous vice, then, is this which does not even deserve to be called cowardice, a vice for which no term can be found vile enough ... ?
As La Boétie puts it: "If we led our lives according to the ways intended by nature and the lessons taught by her, we should be intuitively obedient to our parents; later we should adopt reason as our guide and become slaves to nobody."
Reason is our guide to the facts and laws of nature and to humanity's proper path, and each of us has "in our souls some native seed of reason, which, if nourished by good counsel and training, flowers into virtue, but which, on the other hand, if unable to resist the vices surrounding it, is stifled and blighted."
And reason, La Boétie adds, teaches us the justice of equal liberty for all. For reason shows us that nature has, among other things, granted us the common gift of voice and speech. Therefore, "there can be no further doubt that we are all naturally free," and hence it cannot be asserted that "nature has placed some of us in slavery."
Even animals, he points out, display a natural instinct to be free. But then, what in the world "has so, denatured man that he, the only creature really born to be free, lacks the memory of his original condition and the desire to return to it?"
La Boétie's celebrated and creatively original call for civil disobedience, for mass non-violent resistance as a method for the overthrow of tyranny, stems directly from these two premises: The fact that all rule rests on the consent of the subject masses,
And the great value of natural liberty.
For if tyranny really rests on mass consent, then the obvious means for its overthrow is simply by mass withdrawal of that consent.
Thus, after concluding that all tyranny rests on popular consent, La Boétie eloquently concludes that "obviously there is no need of fighting to overcome this single tyrant, for he is automatically defeated if the country refuses consent to its own enslavement."
Tyrants need not be expropriated by force; they need only be deprived of the public's continuing supply of funds and resources.
La Boétie concludes his exhortation by assuring the masses that to overthrow the tyrant they need not act, nor shed their blood. They can do so "merely by willing to be free." In short,
Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.
"The prime task of education, then, is not simply abstract insight into governmental "errors" in advancing the general welfare, but debamboozling the public on the entire nature and procedures of the despotic State.
In that task, La Boétie also speaks to us in his stress on the importance of a perceptive, vanguard elite of libertarian and anti-statist intellectuals. The role of this "cadre" – to grasp the essence of statism and to desanctify the State in the eyes and minds of the rest of the population – is crucial to the potential success of any movement to bring about a free society." - Murray Rothbard
Anyway, Rothbard's essay Ending Tyranny Without Violence (http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard78.html) goes on quite a bit from there. Well worth the read as something to hang your thoughts on. So I'm tossing it in,
Fred
PS: Coming soon! A great essay by Gary North on the nature of Conspiracies, and anti-C mentality. (scary stuff) ;)