On La Boétie and Voluntary Servitude

Commonplace Newsletter #76

Étienne de La Boétie, the subject of todays essay. Bring back the Elizabethan ruff, that’s what I say.

It’s been said many times that all philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. Or at least that’s what I recall one of my philosophy lecturers telling me. Whether that particular phrase is true or not, I think it’s fair to say that when it comes to essays, we can consider them as a series of footnotes to Montaigne.

Michel de Montaigne was the originator after all, the creator of the form, the coiner of the very term essay¹. He has also undoubtedly given us some of the greatest and most enduring works within the essay medium. At some point all of us essay writers must go back to Montaigne and attempt to either crawl out from under his long shadow, or reconcile themselves to whatever spot they opted to take within his vast shade. Which, having recently released my first collection of essays, is something that has  been playing on my mind as of late. And so, I dug into his work and his biography- thinking that maybe via writing an essay on the man himself, and on his work that I would be able to achieve just that. To become truly good at something- if not great- you must somehow learn from and study your predecessors without drowning in their influence. You must participate in this conversation across the centuries, rather than simply plagiarising ideas.

But, this essay about Montaigne will have to be tackled some other time. Because you see, while doing my research² I came across a figure and a text which demanded my attention. It called on me to write about it immediately.

Montaigne lived a full life fuelled by endless hours- from childhood on- of learning about and admiring the great writers and heroes of classical antiquity. The key to the good life for him was to live it as virtuously, deliberately and as philosophically as these ancient exemplars did. This was a belief that he shared with his fellow aristocrat, classicist and fellow Bordeaux public official Etienne de La Boétie.³ This was one of the main links which formed the bond of their famous friendship. The two young men met by chance- although Montaigne was certainly aware of the older La Boétie, as La Boétie’s controversial pamphlet Discourse on Voluntary Servitude was at this point in circulation in manuscript form. They remained friends for the following six years until La Boétie’s tragically young age death of at the age of 32.

This tragedy- which stayed with Montaigne for the rest of his days- meant that Discourse on Voluntary Servitude was the only known work that La Boétie ever wrote. The manuscript was circulated locally but it wasn’t even published during La Boétie’s own lifetime. Yet, in spite of this the work has endured. It has endured for well over 450 years now. La Boétie’s entire intellectual and philosophical legacy (outside of the largely footnote role he plays in the life of his renowned friend) rests on a single pamphlet, on a text that you can read in around one hour.

And having now done so, I can understand why it has endured. If anything, it seems more relevant at this point in time than ever. The question posed- why do people consent to tyranny when they are so many and the tyrants are so few- is one that is as pertinent now as it was during the Renaissance time of La Boétie. So let’s consider what the man has to say on the matter...

II

It’s a simple observation but one which went largely unremarked upon before La Boétie picked up his quill. He wondered:

“For the present I should 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!”

Indeed it is.

Since the dawn of history certain men have seized power and ruled tyrannically over others. In fact being a classicist (and perhaps striving to make his text both universal and timeless), La Boétie only offers the reader Greek and Roman examples of such tyrants, of which there are an abundance. Nero’s rule was terrifying, as was Caesar’s, and though both were eventually murdered (almost a third of Roman Emperors were killed by their own guards), all of the vast population of people under their dominion seemingly tolerated and often collaborated with this tyranny. In fact, in spite of all the plundering and the atrocities that these tyrants committed, a good amount of the populace mourned them once they were gone, and lamented their deaths (how this seemingly impossible posthumous feat was achieved is something we will get to in due course).

So not only did the masses not overthrow there rulers, they appeared to actively consent to being ruled over and exploited in this way. Given the numbers- whole empires of slaves and workers and citizens versus a single emperor and his retinue and guards- this lack of action seems to go beyond mere lack of courage, beyond mere cowardice. This puzzled La Boétie as it must puzzle any inquirer when they truly stop and think about it:

“Two, possibly ten, may fear one; but 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 valour 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 that 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?”

La Boétie, it seems, is a little disappointed in a population who so willingly allow themselves to be ruled over by a tyrant.⁴

III

Now, it is one of those things that is seemingly so obvious, so self-evident that it can actually be quite difficult to articulate. Why does freedom matter? Why is liberty important and thus why is the removal of it by a tyrant such an affront, such an evil?

La Boétie argues, from simple observation that liberty for all living creatures is natural. For humans it follows on from our ability to reason. When we are children, we obey our parents while we are growing, specifically while we are developing our faculties and our ability to reason. But once we are grown we are thus able to follow our own reason, and so we should. We therefore grow into becoming free individuals. This is natural as:

“If we led our lives according to the way 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.”

As all of us have the ability to freely communicate given to us by nature and so anything that would trammel this ability is unnatural and therefore wrong. It cannot be said that “nature has placed some of us in slavery”.

Even animals, who do not have such gifts readily display a natural preference, an instinct towards freedom. And yet it is “... man... the only creature really born to be free [who] lacks the memory of his original condition and the desire to return to it.”

Freedom is natural, in La Boétie‘s conception, the instinct for it is universally seen in animals and yet most of us seemingly shun even the possibility of it, and willingly consent to be ruled over.

IV

So this leads us to two questions- why do subjects consent to this rule, and to the closely related question of how the tyrants illicit this voluntary servitude? These are important questions and in La Boétie’s time, as in today, they are pretty radical ones. Indeed, when it comes to considering power and freedom you could argue that Discourse on Voluntary Servitude is the antithesis to Machiavelli’s roughly contemporary treatise The Prince. This fact in and of itself makes La Boétie’s work worth reading in my opinion.

Perhaps I have been made cynical by seeing the online championing of what you might call a Machiavellian Prince mentality in certain circles, but I find it disheartening that young males in particular would rather read books that help them to LARP⁵ as a sociopath, than learn how to get closer to some sort of actual personal liberty. Being a would-be prince and practicing the 48 Laws of Power is a trap, it is a paradox where the more you succeed at it, the more you fail in life. In fact, as La Boétie notes, one of the tragic ironies of tyranny is that no one is less free than the tyrant himself, as he is always on edge, always fearful and always paranoid of being usurped, because the dominion he has over his subjects is unjust and exploitative. And this paranoia is not without reason- again, consider the Roman Emperors death-by-guard statistic.

Hence why such manuals of tyranny as The Prince⁶ were needed, to cloak the populace from the reality that they could easily shrug off their yolk whenever they wanted. All that is needed to end any rule- whether tyrannical or seemingly more benign and democratic is the mass withdrawal of consent.

Yet the deception that this is neither possible or desirable remains. And the two major ways that this deception is maintained and thus consent and civil obedience are secured is through entertaining diversions and acts of largesse- which is to say though circuses and through bread. It is worth considering each in turn.

V

“Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures and other such opiates were for ancient people the bait towards 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,”

~ La Boétie

These then are the circuses, whose modern day equivalents are largely delivered to us via ubiquitous screens. A cynic might say that this is why social media is free and why the monthly subscription fees for streaming services are trivially cheap.

There’s no need to get into the overtly propagandist potential of either of these mediums (bots, censorship and the algorithmic biases of social media or the implicit and explicit world views disseminated via documentaries and entertainments on Netflix, say) the very fact they exist is enough. The fact that they distract us and replace reality is enough.

Now, this is not to say that any such thing should be banned or even policed. I am not against media consumption or entertainment categorically. But let’s be honest with ourselves here- how many people, ourselves included, use and overuse these things as a means of escapism, as a part of their anaesthetic regimes⁷ (to use the British psychologist James Davies’ memorable term). Yes, myriad means of anaesthetising ourselves are freely available, but still it is the people who choose to take them. And the reason we do so is because we want to escape something. And when you really introspect (something which requires attention and also quiet- two things that the modern world appears to be in confederacy against) the thing that we want to escape is that we are on some fundamental level, not really free.   

And that we choose this state, this gilded cage because it is familiar and comfortable. It is all we have ever known.

VI

Perhaps I overstate my case, as La Boétie may be said to have done when he spoke of the stupefied peoples being lulled into taking up the yoke. Indeed, one might argue that those who rule over us, rather than being tyrannical and exploitative are in fact noble and caring. They look out for us, they guide us, and they oversee the economy and so lead us to our prosperity.

‘But they give us bread!’ A Roman subject might say.

Which is true enough today as it was back in the time of the Caesars.

But this act of largesse, this purchasing of the peoples’ support is cunning, a very Machiavellian manoeuvre. Because where does this bounty, this proverbial bread come from? It comes from us, the people. And we get far less back in return than what was filched from us in the first place.

As La Boétie puts is:

“Roman tyrants... provided the city wards with feasts to cajole the rabble... Tyrants would distribute largesse, a bushel of wheat, a gallon of wine, and a sesterce: and then everyone would shamelessly cry, ‘Long live the king!’ The fools did not realise 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.”

In our more scientific age we call this ‘trickle-down economics’ and this is what keeps the wheels of power turning.

The tyrant, upon seizing power also seizes the state treasury. Before doing anything else this is used to pay off those who helped the tyrant to usurp power or those in the inner circle of the old regime who the tyrant wishes to retain. With this base secured, the tyrant then levies taxes against the population. A savvy despot will calibrate the rate of such taxes and tributes so that they garner maximum gains without tipping over into becoming so onerous that they demoralise the work force. In democracies (it’s always tempting to put that word in inverted commas), the taxes are set as high as possible without crossing the threshold of losing votes. Give just enough to just enough.

Democracy and autocracy, we are led to believe, are different in kind but for La Boétie and others it is really only a matter of degree. Money from the people is used to pay off the people and thus keep the leader in power, starting with the essential advisors and flunkies at the court and then working its way down to the rabble who are in reality the source of the wealth.

Bruce De Mesquita and Alistair Smith make the following observation in their fascinating study of power The Dictators Handbook⁸

“The general rule is that the larger the group of essentials, the lower the tax rate.”

As I said, autocracy and democracy are a question of degree, not of kind.

And so, with the people being essentially bribed with a small amount of what was initially taken from them, they come to value, if not outright love, their rulers.

Though they were both victims of the death-by-guard statistic both Nero and Julius Caesar were publicly and genuinely mourned by the rabble- because of their supposed generosity. Take from the poor, give to the rich (the advisors, the Praetorian Guardmen, the necessary bureaucrats) and trickle some of the remainder down to the poor in grand gestures of generosity and they will revere you. Everyone will believe they gain from the regime whereas in fact only a very small number actually do. Such is the power of bread.

VII

It’s easy to see why Discourse on Voluntary Servitude has endured, and it is easy to see how it has shaped the direction of political thought whether it be anarchist, pacifist or liberalist. You can hear its echoes in the writings of Tolstoy and Thoreau- you can see how it coloured the actions of Gandhi and his non-violent actions in search of freedom. No bloodshed, no storming of the castle, just the mass withdrawal of the consent for allowing someone to rule over you.

Now some may say that such idealism is naive, juvenile. Indeed, to help spare his friends’ reputation when the radical Huguenots posthumously published La Boétie’s manuscript and claimed it as their own, Montaigne upheld the lie that La Boétie had written it at the age of 18 (and later 16). Such radicalism being more excusable in a youth, but not in the grown, educated 22 year old man, a man who was on the precipice of marriage and a career as a member of the Bordeaux parliament.

But having recently read this pamphlet for the first time as a 35 year old man, the work struck me as neither juvenile nor as that brand of compliant defeatism that is so often labelled as being ‘sensible’ or ‘grown up.’ It simply points out that the emperor, indeed all emperors have no clothes and that we go along with the fiction that they present in the mistaken belief that such compliance confers some sort of benefit to us.

As much as anything else, such compliance is habitual. Being ruled over is something we are familiar with and so it can seem alien to imagine an alternative. But- and this is where La Boétie strikes an especially optimistic, perhaps even naive note- this being the case then if a truly free society were to ever be established it would be very difficult to ever convince anyone to go back to voluntary servitude again.

There is a freedom in realising that your (relative) lack of freedom is largely a question of simply changing your perspective and making a decision to be free. If the manacles are mind forg’d then that same mind can remove them by simply withdrawing consent to be ruled over.

This perspective is what drove Gandhi and Tolstoy and Thoreau and all of those others who followed in La Boétie’s wake.

And the question that all of those men asked- what is freedom and how does one go about attaining it- is one that refuses to go away, however inconvenient that might be.

Until next time,

Live well,

Tom.

1. Essayer in French means to attempt or to try, with an essay being an attempt to tackle a particular object, argument or point of view. Roughly speaking.

2. ‘Research’ in my case being lying on the sofa and leafing through a book or two based on whim. When the weather’s good I might do this same task while lying on the grass or under the shade of a tree.

3. I am led to believe that the correct pronunciation is La Bwettie- with a hard t, not La Bo-Ay-See.

4. I almost wrote ‘La Boétie, it seems, is a little disappointed in us.’ Which would have given the game away as to why I felt compelled to tackle this topic today. But I didn’t write that, as I would rather you read between the lines, or more specifically, read the footnotes.

5. I have a tendency to assume that readers innately understand my more online derived terminology. I’m trying to correct this. So, in case you don’t know, LARP stands for Live Action Role-Playing, I.e. a game where people play as a character in costume in a fictional setting represented by real world environments. However over time the term LARP has also come to describe someone who takes on a fictional identify/persona online of which The Prince/48 Laws quoting ‘alpha male’ is a popular subset of keyboard warrior.

6. I have heard it argued that both The Prince and it’s latter day successor the 48 Laws of Power are either satirical or that they exists as playbooks to help people defend themselves against sociopathic overreachers. This may be so. But I’m convinced that many who read them would like to be tyrants if given the chance. Fortunately, being the type of person who is drawn to such books largely precludes this from happening, in the same way that those drawn to tomes on how to get rich quickly almost invariably remain broke.

7. The concept of ‘Anaesthetic Regimes’ is from Davies book ‘The Importance of Suffering: The Value and Meaning of Emotional Discontent. It’s a short volume and worth reading, even though at times it veers towards being for more of a clinical than lay audience.

8. Though toying with the same ‘here’s how to be a tyrant’ genre as The Prince and The 48 Laws of Power, The Dictators Handbook is a far better read than either. It’s exhaustively researched and data backed and it will leave you with a far clearer, if not more cynical, conception of how politics in both autocratic and democratic regimes actually works.