Recommended read – it’s short and costs nothing to read, but the mind is enriched by its content.
From the Amazon description: States are more vulnerable than people think. They can collapse in an instant—when consent is withdrawn. This is the thesis of this thrilling book. Murray Rothbard writes a classic introduction to one of the great political essays in the history of ideas.In times when dictators the world over are falling from pressure from their own people, this book, written nearly 500 years ago, is truly the prophetic tract of our times.
https://www.mises.ch/library/Boetie_Politics_of_Obedience.pdf
2 replies on “The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, the 16th century treatise on tyranny and obedience by Étienne de La Boétie.”
Thanks, that looks very interesting!
Thank you for the timely recommendation, Lynda! This piece looks highly relevant to one of the main questions that has fascinated, puzzled, and troubled me: why so many people will go so willingly into their own subservience, and will even work (or vote) to make it happen. I have never intuitively understood the appeal of collectivizing ideologies given the willful surrender to group or state-centralized authority they ultimately and seemingly inevitably demand. I’ve underestimated the powerful driving force of this human tendency as a result, and am striving to understand it better to determine how to work around it. Maybe in understanding the draw of this kind of thinking on some deeper level there is hope of the insight needed to work around it.