Étienne De La Boétie [pronounced Et-ee-in De La Bwettie] was born in 1530 in southwest France and is at one time one of the least well known philosophers of liberty and one of its most important ones. Dead by thirty-four, Étienne had written a great deal and published very little during his lifetime. But what did spread was vitally important, laden with incredible insights into the nature of man, society, and the state. His most influential work, and the one we will explore in this article, The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, was written by Étienne between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two and is concerned with answering a seminal question in human history and psychology: “If a tyrant is one man and his subjects are many, why do they consent to their own enslavement?” In other words, why do so many people allow themselves to be ruled by a small group of government bureaucrats and politicians, even when those people are obviously corrupt and their edicts obviously oppressive, destructive, or both? Étienne’s answer(s) to this question were so radical that his work wasn’t even published during his lifetime and instead spread secretly through the intellectual underground of the day. In the French world of absolutist kings, Étienne’s revelations about about the origin, function, true nature, and frailty of the king’s power could have cost Étienne more than his job; they could have cost him his head.
The clarity of Étienne’s arguments and the truths he arrives at aren’t restricted in application merely to a society ruled over by a monarch though. In trying to understand why people submit to wicked and corrupt rulers, Étienne also clearly explains why people obey tyrannical governments in all its various forms – from dictatorships to democracies. Why do people elect and support obviously corrupt, abusive, oppressive, and wicked people? Why do people support the government when it murders hundreds of thousands of people across the world? How do such idiots always managed to get elected? Why do so many people with such bad ideas always seem to get into the most powerful positions? Why do people follow their political parties and vote for who they’re told to vote for even when the person in question is obviously the worst possible choice? Why do free people reduce themselves to servitude?
All these questions we can find the answers in Étienne’s Discourse. Below I will share some of Étienne’s most revelatory insights, though this article is obviously only the tip of a much larger and more enlightening iceberg, which I encourage everyone to read in full. Though Étienne is lesser known today, his wisdom is something society could use now more than ever.
The Failure at the Heart of Democracy
The basis of democracy is the idea that people of sound judgment, wisdom, and morality should be chosen to lead the government, make decisions for the masses, and direct the force of the state/government. The fans of democracy will tell you that such great leaders will putdown the bad elements of society, promote the good, and thereby create a better world for everyone. This belief, Étienne rightly explains, is nonsense:
It is reasonable to love virtue, to esteem good deeds, to be grateful for good from whatever source we may receive it, and, often, to give up some of our comfort in order to increase the honor and advantage of some man whom we love and who deserves it. Therefore, if the inhabitants of a country have found some great personage who has shown rare foresight in protecting them in an emergency, rare boldness in defending them, rare solicitude in governing them, and if, from that point on, they contract the habit of obeying him and depending on him to such an extent that they grant him certain prerogatives, I fear that such a procedure is not prudent, inasmuch as they remove him from a position in which he was doing good and advance him to a dignity in which he may do evil.
It is not the seeking after good leaders that is the problem with democracy. The problem at the heart of democracy is that it removes an individual from where he or she is doing the most good for society and the individual’s ability to harm society is extremely limited to put the individual in a position that limits the individual’s ability to actually help people while magnifying the individual’s ability to do the most harm imaginable. If you’re looking to develop a better society where the gifts of liberty, equality, and prosperity belong to all the last thing you should do is elevate some to the degree that they have more power than others, have the power to compel people to obey them, and can enrich themselves on the wealth of others extorted by threat of legalized violence. The very nature and function of democratic government is in direct opposition to the ideas of liberty, equality, and prosperity; all democracy does is limit the ability of people to do good while magnifying their ability to do great harm and evil to everyone else. Democracy, from its very start, is therefore a failure and elected officials are, as Étienne later notes, one of the three classes of tyrant, the others being monarchs and conquerors.
The Power to Overthrow Governments
Étienne asks us to consider why people obey tyrannical leaders. Why do we obey bad leaders and do the bad things they tell us to do? Why do we sit back and allow them to do things we know to be evil without stopping them? Whether he be a king, a President, or a Prime Minister, why do the people willingly “suffer plundering, wantonness, cruelty, not from an army, not from a barbarian horde, on account of whom they must shed their blood and sacrifice their lives, but from a single man; not from a Hercules nor from a Samson, but from a single little man?” If we were only talking about a small group of people obeying such a person you could argue that those serving such a leader are cowards and it is their cowardice that prevents them from acting to free themselves. But how do you explain that an entire society does this, “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, any more than valor can be termed the effort of one individual to scale a fortress, to attack an army, or to conquer a kingdom. 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, which nature herself disavows and our tongues refuse to name?”
Étienne continues, explaining how easy it is to get rid of such a wicked leader and why people don’t do so:
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: it is not necessary to deprive him of anything, but simply to give him nothing; there is no need that the country make an effort to do anything for itself provided it does nothing against itself. It is therefore the inhabitants themselves who permit, or, rather, bring about, their own subjection, since by ceasing to submit they would put an end to their servitude. A people enslaves itself, cuts its 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.
…Everyone knows that the fire from a little spark will increase and blaze ever higher as long as it finds wood to burn; yet without being quenched by water, but merely by finding no more fuel to feed on, it consumes itself, dies down, and is no longer a flame. Similarly, the more tyrants pillage, the more they crave, the more they ruin and destroy; the more one yields to them, and obeys them, by that much do they become mightier and more formidable, the readier to annihilate and destroy. But if not one thing is yielded to them, if, without any violence they are simply not obeyed, they become naked and undone and as nothing, just as, when the root receives no nourishment, the branch withers and dies.
It is no wonder that men such as Mahatma Gandhi and Leo Tolstoy read Étienne with such joy. He understood both the true origins of the state’s power and the way to overthrow the state. You don’t have to give your obedience, your liberty, your wealth, or your life in order to overthrow those in power. Indeed, you have to actively give them all those things for them to even have a hope of obtaining and maintaining their power. It order to get rid of them all you have to do is give them nothing. Refuse to obey their edicts, refuse to give them your wealth, refuse to give them your obedience. And they will fall. It really is that simple. There is no need to field large armies or spend large sums of wealth, simply refuse to comply. Engage in civil disobedience and non-compliance, deny the state the things it needs to survive, and like flowers in the desert without water and shade the government will wither up, burn up, and turn into dust.
Why We Obey Tyrants
But for Étienne this all begs the question of why then do people obey the state as it oppresses and robs them? If it isn’t cowardice and the power to get rid of the state with ease is constantly within the power of the people, then why don’t they? Why, to paraphrase Jefferson, are people willing to suffer such evils while such evils seem sufferable? Would it not be better to refuse to suffer such evil at all? Étienne eloquently and forcefully names all the evils of the state and demands to know why people support it:
Poor, wretched, and stupid peoples, nations determined on your own misfortune and blind to your own good! You let yourselves be deprived before your own eyes of the best part of your revenues; your fields are plundered, your homes robbed, your family heirlooms taken away. You live in such a way that you cannot claim a single thing as your own; and it would seem that you consider yourselves lucky to be loaned your property, your families, and your very lives. All this havoc, this misfortune, this ruin, descends upon you not from alien foes, but from the one enemy whom you yourselves render as powerful as he is, for whom you go bravely to war, for whose greatness you do not refuse to offer your own bodies unto death.
He who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, no more than is possessed by the least man among the infinite numbers dwelling in your cities; he has indeed nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you. Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he have any power over you except through you? How would he dare assail you if he had no cooperation from you? What could he do to you if you yourselves did not connive with the thief who plunders you, if you were not accomplices of the murderer who kills you, if you were not traitors to yourselves?
You sow your crops in order that he may ravage them, you install and furnish your homes to give him goods to pillage; you rear your daughters that he may gratify his lust; you bring up your children in order that he may confer upon them the greatest privilege he knows — to be led into his battles, to be delivered to butchery, to be made the servants of his greed and the instruments of his vengeance; you yield your bodies unto hard labor in order that he may indulge in his delights and wallow in his filthy pleasures; you weaken yourselves in order to make him the stronger and the mightier to hold you in check. From all these indignities, such as the very beasts of the field would not endure, you can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free. 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.
Note: The above excerpt was originally a single paragraph. I divided it into smaller ones for readability.
Similar to the warning that God gave to the prophet Samuel about the foolishness and dangers of the Israelite desire to be ruled by men, here Étienne lays out in stark reality the corrupt, brutal, larcenous, oppressive nature of the state. The government reduces men to such living conditions that even the dumb animals of the field resist living in them and yet men continue wallowing in their own filth, confinement, and oppression as if it were the common good. On this idea he further elaborates saying:
The very beasts, God help me! if men are not too deaf, cry out to them, “Long live Liberty!” Many among them die as soon as captured: just as the fish loses life as soon as he leaves the water, so do these creatures close their eyes upon the light and have no desire to survive the loss of their natural freedom. If the animals were to constitute their kingdom by rank, their nobility would be chosen from this type. Others, from the largest to the smallest, when captured put up such a strong resistance by means of claws, horns, beak, and paws, that they show clearly enough how they cling to what they are losing; afterwards in captivity they manifest by so many evident signs their awareness of their misfortune, that it is easy to see they are languishing rather than living, and continue their existence more in lamentation of their lost freedom than in enjoyment of their servitude.
If even the beasts of the field recognize their need of and fight for their own liberty, if they would rather die than be brought into subjugation to humanity, how is that man, the one being out of them all born to be free and with the power to ensure that liberty has become so castrated that he (or she) willingly, even joyfully, submits to being reduced to servitude, serfdom, and slavery to the state?
One never pines for what he has never known; longing comes only after enjoyment and constitutes, amidst the experience of sorrow, the memory of past joy. It is truly the nature of man to be free and to wish to be so, yet his character is such that he instinctively follows the tendencies that his training gives him.
Let us therefore admit that all those things to which he is trained and accustomed seem natural to man and that only that is truly native to him which he receives with his primitive, untrained individuality. Thus custom becomes the first reason for voluntary servitude. Men are like handsome race horses who first bite the bit and later like it, and rearing under the saddle a while soon learn to enjoy displaying their harness and prance proudly beneath their trappings. Similarly men will grow accustomed to the idea that they have always been in subjection, that their fathers lived in the same way; they will think they are obliged to suffer this evil, and will persuade themselves by example and imitation of others, finally investing those who order them around with proprietary rights, based on the idea that it has always been that way
…The essential reason why men take orders willingly is that they are born serfs and are reared as such. From this cause there follows another result, namely that people easily become cowardly and submissive under tyrants.
Why do men and women become serfs and slaves to those in power? Why do do people surrender their liberty for servitude? Because that is the way it has always been. Custom and tradition tell people they they ought to serve those in power, so the people do. We are indoctrinated into believing submission to the state is right and are fed propaganda until we believe that the ritual human sacrifice known as war is just. Subjugation becomes normalized and finally, because liberty is the natural desire of the human spirit and thus we must justify disobeying it, people come to believe that their subjugation is good. It isn’t merely that servitude has always been part of how society functions, but people believe it is the only way society can function, therefore subjugation is moral and those who oppose it are mad, evil, or both. We are indoctrinated into obedience to the state from the cradle and serve it until we fall dead into our graves.
Breaking the Spirit of Man
This ultimately crushes the human spirit which Étienne notes is the exact desire of those in power because it makes ruling the masses easier in every way. Thus degraded and incapable of doing any great deeds on their own the people become submissive and dependent on those in power for protection, provision, and providence. Unable to understand the power liberty gives them to transform the world, submissive people can only imagine that those in power have the ability and intelligence to accomplish some great good for society. Losing their liberty, being degraded in spirit, in thus becomes no great difficulty to degrade the morals of the people and through pleasure mollify their natural urge for liberty through carnality. Étienne demonstrates this by telling the story of Persian emperor Cyrus the Great’s conquering on Lydia. Once militarily defeated, Cyrus did not establish a large military barracks to constantly monitor the Lydians because of the cost in men and wealth it would take to do so. Instead Cyrus established brothels, taverns, and public games for the Lydians to waste their time and life enjoying. In this way they were lulled away into carnal security and never again rose up against Persian rule. Étienne sums it up thusly:
Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naively, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books.
After this story Étienne explains public welfare also becomes a hook by which the people learn subservient to the state:
Roman tyrants invented a further refinement. They often provided the city wards with feasts to cajole the rabble, always more readily tempted by the pleasure of eating than by anything else. The most intelligent and understanding amongst them would not have quit his soup bowl to recover the liberty of the Republic of Plato. Tyrants would distribute largess, a bushel of wheat, a gallon of wine, and a sesterce: and then everybody would shamelessly cry, “Long live the King!” The fools did not realize 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.
Does this not sound startlingly familiar? It very much sounds to me as if Étienne were describing modern society wherein the bait of Socialism is used to reduce the public to serfdom. How else to explain the idiocy people display when proclaiming their belief in free, state-paid for education or healthcare? Do not these fools understand that the state pays for things through taxes and those taxes are taken from the public, from them their selves? Do they not understand that it is actually more expensive to have money taken from you every paycheck in order to pay endlessly for something than it is to only pay for it when you need it?
Just look at the simple math. Assuming you have $1,000 extorted from you through taxes per paycheck that is $24,000 a month and $1,200,000 over the course of your lifetime that goes to pay for Socialist medicine. Yet today, the average American will only spend about $317,000 on healthcare over their lifetime. State sponsored medicine isn’t cheaper, it is destructively more expensive. But people love it because of the fantasy that it is the government taking care of them when in reality the government is robbing them blind in order to benefit the politicians and the politically connected corporate elites. Yet people call for it ever more loudly. Why? Because when you think your healthcare, or your food, depends on the state and that it’ll take care of you, then you’ll always support it and those who rule it even as they oppress and destroy you. And this is to say nothing of the hedonism in alcohol, sex, and drugs that has become normalized with so many today who, having had their liberty degraded away have suffered their persons to be degraded, too. They have turned to pleasure to fill the hole where liberty must needs be in soul of man.
The Supporters of Tyranny
Just as the public becomes ideologically convinced of the necessity of the state’s oppression and economically dependent on the welfare spending it gives to them (though what they truly receive is truly just a portion of their stolen wealth returned), so too do the political and military classes become dependent on those in power. Étienne explains how and why this works:
Even so, whenever a ruler makes himself a dictator, all the wicked dregs of the nation — I do not mean the pack of petty thieves and earless ruffians who, in a republic, are unimportant in evil or good — but all those who are corrupted by burning ambition or extraordinary avarice, these gather round him and support him in order to have a share in the booty and to constitute themselves petty chiefs under the big tyrant. This is the practice among notorious robbers and famous pirates: some scour the country, others pursue voyagers; some lie in ambush, others keep a lookout; some commit murder, others robbery; and although there are among them differences in rank, some being only underlings while others are chieftains of gangs, yet is there not a single one among them who does not feel himself to be a sharer, if not of the main booty, at least in the pursuit of it.
…Such are his archers, his guards, his halberdiers; not that they themselves do not suffer occasionally at his hands, but this riff-raff, abandoned alike by God and man, can be led to endure evil if permitted to commit it, not against him who exploits them, but against those who like themselves submit, but are helpless. Nevertheless, observing those men who painfully serve the tyrant in order to win some profit from his tyranny and from the subjection of the populace, I am often overcome with amazement at their wickedness and sometimes by pity for their folly. For, in all honesty, can it be in any way except in folly that you approach a tyrant, withdrawing further from your liberty and, so to speak, embracing with both hands your servitude
In a very real sense state spending, whether it be on public works programs or the military, is really just welfare spending. It is welfare spending that bribes into compliance those who would normally threaten the rule of those in power at the center. It allows them to become partakers in the stolen and extorted wealth, enriching themselves at the cost of others. This is obviously so with the military, which is the largest socialist program in any nation, but it is just as surely true for all state sponsored programs. When the doctors, scientists, engineers, technicians, farmers, and educators of society are brought into the system of oppression, such that they seemingly benefit from the state’s rapaciousness to even a small degree then they become the biggest supporters and justifiers of the state’s robbing and plundering the public.
Those in the center may get more, but as long as you think you get some then you don’t want to give up that source of wealth and power, no matter how minor. This is perhaps the greatest genius of the welfare state. While it destroys the wealth of the public it returns to the people just enough money through a variety of ways to give them the illusion of profiting from the state, and therefore winning their submissiveness to it, while the only ones actually increasing in wealth are the politicians and their corporate friends. In his understanding and explanation of how taxes really function and what this reveals about the true nature of the state, Étienne anticipated by centuries another great French political philosopher, Frédéric Bastiat, who once wrote that, “The state is the great fiction by which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else.”
Étienne also realizes that because of how this wealth was obtained, through the power of the state to seize wealth as it desires and redistribute it based on its whims (as manifest by “law”) this stolen wealth is largely illusionary:
Still men accept servility in order to acquire wealth; as if they could acquire anything of their own when they cannot even assert that they belong to themselves, or as if anyone could possess under a tyrant a single thing in his own name. Yet they act as if their wealth really belonged to them, and forget that it is they themselves who give the ruler the power to deprive everybody of everything, leaving nothing that anyone can identify as belonging to somebody. They notice that nothing makes men so subservient to a tyrant’s cruelty as property; that the possession of wealth is the worst of crimes against him, punishable even by death; that he loves nothing quite so much as money and ruins only the rich, who come before him as before a butcher, offering themselves so stuffed and bulging that they make his mouth water. These favorites should not recall so much the memory of those who have won great wealth from tyrants as of those who, after they had for some time amassed it, have lost to him their property as well as their lives; they should consider not how many others have gained a fortune, but rather how few of them have kept it.
If the state can seize your wealth through income taxes, if it can make you pay for the privilege of buying and selling things through sales taxes, if it can force you to pay rent for “owning” land, if it can force you to pay it for the privilege of exercising your basic rights, then there is no way that you can be said to actually own any wealth. Ownership of something means that the person who owns the thing or service gets to decide how it is or is not used and doesn’t owe anyone else anything for it. But in a statist (“state-ist”) society all property, whether money or some other good or service, is controlled, regulated, fined, and taken by those in political power. They decide who gets to keep what, what you can or cannot buy, how much you can or cannot charge for it, who you can or cannot buy or sell your goods and services to, and under what conditions you may use it and the process by which they will take it.
In the state the only true landowners are those who hold political power enough to make themselves exempt from the state itself, everyone else is subject to quasi-serfdom and subjugation. Of course those in power always say this is for the good of the public, accusing those who oppose them of greedy, but in truth they are the greediest of all. Greed is not wanting to keep what you have, greed is believing that you have to right to take the property of others. Personal property and liberty are not greedy. Socialism and Statism are greedy, taxation and state controlled wealth redistribution through government agencies are greedy.
The Effects of The State on Civil Society
At the end of his letter, Étienne says a few final words about loyalty, friendship, and God which bear reading by all.
The fact is that the tyrant is never truly loved, nor does he love. Friendship is a sacred word, a holy thing; it is never developed except between persons of character, and never takes root except through mutual respect; it flourishes not so much by kindnesses as by sincerity. What makes one friend sure of another is the knowledge of his integrity: as guarantees he has his friend’s fine nature, his honor, and his constancy. There can be no friendship where there is cruelty, where there is disloyalty, where there is injustice. And in places where the wicked gather there is conspiracy only, not companionship: these have no affection for one another; fear alone holds them together; they are not friends, they are merely accomplices.
Étienne’s insights here into the nature of friendship apply well to democracy and help explain why people so rarely love politicians. There is no way to love someone who you know is responsible for your oppression, even if you would others obey and even support him or her in his or her cruelty. Whatever emotions we profess openly, deep down we know the members of the political class are all brutal and violent beasts and no one loves such monsters. This is also why politics are so divisive and toxic. Voters recognize, at least subconsciously, that what they want to do is oppress and control others and that those others want to oppress and control them in return. Friendship can never last when those who disagree with you want to use the violence and power of the state to rob you, beat you, kidnap you, sexually assault you, and cage you until you either obey their desires and live according to their beliefs or you are killed by the state “law” enforcers. And if there is no friendship than animosity is sure to come. The end result is the vitriolic and caustic society we have today where politics are destroying not only friendships, but families and marriages as well. This too is something politicians desire as a divided people are easier to rule.
Final Thoughts
In this article I have tried to hit the major ideas that Étienne De La Boétie explored in his phenomenal work The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude. Many of the problems we see in society today which are either misunderstood or wrongly ascribed to a demonized political other are rooted in the very nature of statist politics itself. Democracy cannot work, the very foundation upon which it is based is complete nonsense. Through social and political indoctrination we are conditioned to think that the servitude we are subjected to by those in power is, if not absolutely moral, then absolutely necessary for the common good. This is a lie fed to us by those in power to make us if not active participants in our own subjugation and the subjugation of others then at least complacent in it. Humans denied their liberty are degraded, reduced to a status lower than mere beasts because at least they instinctually struggle for their liberty. So degraded we seek to fill the hole in our soul created by the lack of liberty with pleasure, thus degrading not only our status as free men and women but weakening our minds and bodies through hedonism.
At the same time the state acts in multiple ways to seduce us into its service. For the masses this is done through the illusion of welfare and public spending in which the state first robs us through taxation and then bribes us into supporting it by giving us a percentage of the stolen funds back in the forms of government welfare programs. The elites are made the beneficiaries of mass state contracts and funding programs where they are given lesser positions of power and fortunes in extorted tax funds to be the machinery through which and by which the state enacts its will. This gives them a monetary reason to support the regime and further its goals. By doing so they profit phenomenally and the masses are deceived into thinking they benefit as well. This whole process sets the different religious, economic, social, religious, ethnic, etc. groups in society against one another in an effort to be the group that most benefits from the process of rampant theft and abuse that makes up the foundation of the state. This turns friends, families, spouses, siblings, and communities against one another, destroying them in the name of political righteousness and power.
The way we resist this is by taking back the one thing the rulers need from us – our obedience. By refusing to submit, by disobeying unjust orders, by breaking unjust laws, by engaging in noncompliance and civil disobedience, we take back from those in power the ability to subjugate us. Without our consent and willingness to do what we are told they have no power and their ravings and edicts amount to nothing more than the rantings of a mad man on a street corner. Liberty is summed up and achieved when we utter but one word -“No!” It doesn’t even take effort. We have to give our obedience, which requires work and sacrifice from us. Refusing to comply requires that we do literally nothing, allowing us to do whatever we want and live however we choose. Restoring our liberty and the ending of tyranny is that easy.
After laying out all these incredible truths and providing numerous examples from history to support his arguments, Étienne finally closes up with an appeal to Almighty God and his fellowmen worth remembering today:
Let us therefore learn while there is yet time, let us learn to do good. Let us raise our eyes to Heaven for the sake of our honor, for the very love of virtue, or, to speak wisely, for the love and praise of God Almighty, who is the infallible witness of our deeds and the just judge of our faults. As for me, I truly believe I am right, since there is nothing so contrary to a generous and loving God as dictatorship — I believe He has reserved, in a separate spot in Hell, some very special punishment for tyrants and their accomplices.
Thus may it always be to tyrants and the systems of oppression they use to control the people to deny us our liberty.
Amen.