Don’t Give the State Consent
The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude by Étienne de La Boétie (1530 - 1563) is a compelling monograph [PDF]. About a week ago I elatedly listened to the audio-book on my portable mp3 player. It contains what economist Jörg Guido Hülsmann calls "Boétie's Law" (see chapter 11 of The Myth of National Defense [PDF].) The great libertarian Murray N. Rothbard, in his luminous introduction to La Boétie's work, wrote:
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.
In essence, government depends on a supportive public to exist; otherwise it would collapse because it is by necessity a minority of the population. Those that reason that the institution called "government" holds society together are in error. No institution by itself holds anything together, not even government. It is this general understanding that reveals how a private law society can develop. If the population engages in nonviolently resisting the government in a mass act of "disobedience," then such an institution----which constantly engages in expropriation and exploitation of private individuals and groups----will fall apart. Using violence is not necessary. The act of killing the king is not required. "For if tyranny really rests on mass consent," La Boétie wrote, "then the obvious means for its overthrow is simply by mass withdrawal of that consent." "Tyrants fall when the people withdraw their support." As a collective whole, men in society are chained because they allow themselves to be chained.
La Boétie:
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.
Indeed, how can the State do anything upon you and other men without first obtaining the power to do such ahead of time? How can this parasite----the State----do anything without first getting revenues from the productive? And how can it obtain such revenues from the productive majority without having a supportive public----a public which outnumbers men of government?
Back to La Boétie:
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.
Clearly enough, the State needs to spread statist ideology for it to maintain its existence.
Rothbard in his brilliant essay "The Anatomy of the State" explains that, basically, there have been two things that have been done to encourage support. The first is simply by redistributing wealth within civil society, after taking some of that wealth for itself, and thus buying support. As a consequence, an enlarging number of men become dependent on the government. This increases man's support for government and further strengthens the position of government in society. The second is the buying of intellectual bodyguards to spread statist ideology. By offering them privileges that only the State has, because it works outside of the voluntary market, they are "handsomely rewarded for the important function they perform for the state rulers."
In earlier times, of course, ideological arguments stated that the rulers were divine or some such thing. Hence, they demanded man's obedience and subjugation. Arguments today, in contrast, often come from the scientific angle. It is claimed that the rulers are "scientifically" running society, and that without their "rationalistic" guidance chaos would ensue.
The apologists for statism, as Rothbard explained in the above essay, also make claims that the State is inevitable ("death and taxes") or that it is part of "tradition" (well, war can be said to be part of "tradition" too, so should we say that it is a blessing to society, etc.?). And those who advocate limiting government and expanding the private sphere are regularly denounced as advocating "selfishness" or "unrestrained greed." (Men of the State, I am sure, could never be said to be greedy, though!) In other words, said Rothbard, these denouncements are used to induce guilt on liberty advocates.
Another main thing that States have done is the creation of fear among the public. Fear of nearby States, for example. It is then claimed that only the given rulers can possibly protect them from these and other enemies.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a student of Rothbard's, has expanded this analysis. As he has written on extensively, government officials have an interest in expanding their position and wealth (like everyone else). But what they need is favorable public opinion. Thus the government tries to mold opinion to its advantage. It engages in the monopolization of education (in certification), it hires intellectuals, it engages in redistribution and regulation to gain public favor, and it democratizes itself.
As far as the last one is concerned, democratization helps to blur the line between the government and civil society. It makes men----who now have some share in decision making (even if it be practically zero from an individual's perspective) and who now have the possibility to run for office (versus monarchical rule)----less resistant to government expansion. Men who desire the power contained in government can now attempt to be a wielder of power under democracy. Whereas before the possibility of a man born outside the family of the monarch would have had practically zero chance in fulfilling his desires for power. Instead of being harmless, these particular men can now become dangerous. Men who would otherwise be resistant to a personal king become tolerant of democratic power. This kind of "open" entry sets the stage for men to become political animals.
Dr. Hoppe writes in A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism [PDF]:
Given an identical population and an identical state policy of the discriminatory provision of goods and services, a democratic state has more opportunities for increasing its own aggressively appropriated income. And mutatis mutandis, an autocracy must settle for a relative lower income. In terms of the classics of political thought, it must rule more wisely, i.e., rule less. Since it does not allow any will other than that of the autocrat, and perhaps his immediate advisors, to gain power or influence policy on a regular basis, its execution of power appears less tolerable to those ruled. Thus, its stability can only be secured if the overall degree of exploitation enacted by the state is relatively reduced.
[Modern dictatorship has always been the mass outgrowth of democracy. It has nothing to do with classical monarchy, as Dr. Hoppe has noted.]
After many years in slavery to the State, men become accustomed to it. Slavery is all man knows. Freedom is a foreign, strange, abstract idea. In The Politics of Obedience Étienne de La Boétie wrote:
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.
Hope is not completely lost, however. There will always be a few elite men, said La Boétie, that will not settle for slavery. Even if they never experienced freedom, "such men would invent it." Albert Jay Nock, a radical gentleman of the Old Right, called this group "the Remnant."
In reply, Rothbard wrote: "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. It becomes, therefore, a prime libertarian task to discover, coalesce, nurture, and advance its cadre----a task of which all too many libertarians remain completely ignorant.
