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Resistance See other Resistance Articles Title: DISCOURSE ON VOLUNTARY SERVITUDE This is an interesting, but long, paper. I have posted only a small part of it, but it is certainly worth a long look. In fact, all of the site that this is from is worth a long look. Enjoy. La Boétie's Discourse of Voluntary Servitude is remarkable, and has been used in a large number of famous works. You will shortly understand why. First written about 1552 or 1553, it fits remarkably well in America given that voluntary servitude is enshrined in federal law by the so-called Thirteenth Amendment. La Boétie also had Rose Wilder Lane's central insight that humans are free by nature. Possibly, the most important lesson we can learn from La Boétie's Discourse is leverage. A student (La Boétie) writes a forty-page essay. An author (Tolstoy) reads the essay and incorporates its main ideas in his Letter to a Hindu. A pacifist rebel (Gandhi) applies the ideas to defeat the British Empire and drive the British out of India. "T[homas?] Smith", the probable translator of the 1735 English edition concluded his preface (edited): "These sentiments, which inspired the heroes of old, and of later times, and were productive of such noble actions, that time shall never obliterate, having inflamed the breast of the translator with an ardor for liberty inferior to no one's, and being conscious to himself that he was not able from his own stores to produce anything worthy of the attention of the public, he was ambitious of contributing at least his mite [small contribution] to this glorious cause, by publishing the labors of others, and in a country of liberty, where so many admirable treatises have been written, for support of it, that this zealous advocate [of liberty] might be brought to take his part, and appear in our language as one of its illustrious defenders." The La Boétie Analysis Grasping the "La Boétie analysis" ia a key to understanding the Terra Libra strategy. La Boétie approached his subject like an outsider observing the strange phenomenon of political behavior. He wrote like someone who had jumped out of the system and viewed it without preconceptions. He somehow unbrainwashed himself so he could adopt a "Martian viewpoint." What is so remarkable is that La Boétie did this in 1552 or 1553 - four-hundred-and-forty years ago! It is also interesting that modern tyrants use the same formula today to subjugate and dominate their victims. Here are the main elements of the La Boétie analysis as I see it: The only power tyrants have is the power relinquished to them by their victims. The tyrant is often a weak little man. He has no special qualities that set him apart from anyone else - yet the gullible idolize him. The victims bring about their own subjection - they "win their enslavement." If without violence the tyrant is simply not obeyed, he becomes "naked and undone and as nothing." Once you resolve to serve no more, you are free. We are all born free and naturally free. Grown-up adults should adopt reason as their guide and never become slaves of anybody. People can be enslaved through either force or deception. When people lose their freedom through deceipt, it is because they mislead themselves. People born into slavery regard it as a natural condition. In general, people are shaped more by their environment than by their natural capacities - if they allow it. Habit and custom are powerful forces that keep people enslaved. There are always some people who cannot be tamed, subjected, or enslaved. Even if freedom were to be entirely extinguished, these people would re-invent it. Lovers of freedom tend to be ineffective because they are not known to one another. People who lose their freedom also lose their valor (strength of mind, bravery). Among free people there is competition to do good for humanity. People seem to be most gullible towards those who deliberately set out to fool them. It is as if people have a need to be deceived. Tyrants stupefy their victims with "pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes." Tyrants parade like "workers of magic." Tyrants can only give back part of what they first took from their victims. Tyrants attain their positions through: (a) Force; (b) Birth; or (c) Election. Tyrants create a power structure, consisting of a multi-layered hierarchy, staffed by a conspiracy of accomplices. Accomplices receive their positions as a favor from the tyrant. The worst dregs of society gather around the tyrant - they are people of weak character who trade servility for unearned wealth. Accomplices can profit greatly from their positions in the hierarchy. If people withdraw their support, the tyrant topples over from his own corrupted weight. The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude (abridged and edited from the Harry Kurz translation) Part I For the present 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, but simply, it would seem, delighted and charmed by the name of one man alone whose power they need not fear, for he is evidently the one person whose qualities they cannot admire because of his inhumanity and brutality toward them. A weakness characteristic of humankind is that we often have to obey force; we have to make concessions; we ourselves cannot always be the stronger. Therefore, when a nation is constrained by the fortune of war to serve as a clique, as happened when the city of Athens served the thirty Tyrants, one should not be amazed that the nation obeys, but simply be grieved by the situation; or rather, instead of being amazed or saddened, consider patiently the evil and look forward hopefully toward a happier future. By all means, enjoy the rest of the material directly at the site. And when you do, please remember back to the post I did some months ago on Leaderless Resistance. The above, and Leaderless Resistance, pretty well describes my life.
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