When democracy tends to despotism: voluntary servitude and tyranny of the majority
Just in recent months, in the rage of the pandemic and in the increasingly heavy and pressing pace of restrictions on freedom, the Liberilibri publisher has again published the "Speech on voluntary servitude" by Etienne de La Boétie, French jurist and diplomat of the XVI century which left us this fundamental work on the 'mystery of obedience'.
Originally appeared in 2004, after the first translation outside the French borders made by the Mises Institute of Auburn, United States, and soon arrived here, with the valuable introduction by Murray N. Rothbard and, in the Italian edition, with an afterword by Nicola Iannello and Carlo Lottieri, it is an extremely reduced but very acute text that investigates human nature, the salient result of freedom and that tendency / temptation that emerges in human civilization to voluntarily strip oneself of one's own guarantees, of one's thirst for freedom. and to standardize oneself in the blind pursuit of obedience.
With all due respect to other circulating editions, which symbolically would like to make de La Boétie appear as a sort of proto-anarchist communist forerunner, the conceptual reconstruction offered is that of a robust liberalism eager to investigate, investigate and deconstruct the root of the renunciation of freedom, under the guise of becoming a state: and it is no coincidence that the author finds himself living in the very conceptual, figurative and empirical incarnation of the rising state sovereignty, the homeland of Jean Bodin, which together with Machiavelli and Hobbes would have thrown the fruitful and tremendous roots of the modern state.
De la Boétie, on the contrary, critically examines the logic of the majority and its intrinsic tyranny, according to an idea that would have informed liberal and libertarian thought centuries later that the state saw and sees a form of coercion, both through taxation and through the limitation of freedom, through the fiction of the social pact: the opening of the text is dazzling and seems the epitaph of any form of acceptance of the legitimacy of a democratic state based on the principle of majority.
These are the words of Ulysses, reported by Homer: “No, the command of many is not good: one is the head, one is the King” . And if he had stopped at 'many', says the author, it would have been good, and instead, certainly for strategy given the context of the assertion, Ulysses decided to legitimize, perhaps precisely to legitimize himself, the idea of royal tyranny as a way of consolidating power.
The lesson of this young French thinker is precious because it dispels the rotten myth that the majority are always right. The very essence of democracy is basically the tyranny of the majority to the detriment of the minority, minorities and individuals, who are deprived, by taxation, to promote the political agenda of the majority itself, according to the conceptual line of that cost. rights' evoked by Cass R. Sunstein and Stephen Holmes in their well-known, homonymous book.
As Rothbard keenly notes in the introduction, the salient meaning of the work is the opposition between natural law, which protects and recognizes the freedom of the individual, and voluntary servitude, by consensus, which nationalizes the community.
There is no doubt that the democratic system itself is a form of despotism, precisely because, based on a legal framework, it determines canons of action and recognition based on majority procedures, which will end up expelling problematic minorities and the specificities of individuals. individuals: it is not by chance that democracy tends to hypertrophy, to excessive and often patently irrational public spending, to centralization, to the crumbling of territorial autonomies, and all this to subsidize servitude which is precisely based on a 'voluntary' assumption.
Voluntary, it is specified and specific, because the violence that leads the many to be subjugated is not exhibited, evident, bloody, but on the contrary it is more elliptical, persuasive, liminal: it insinuates itself into the conscience of individuals, it corrodes them, corrupts them, making them believe that the thirst for freedom of the individual is just vulgar selfishness. And for this they end up giving consent to their own enslavement.
The consensus of the majority, which is measured through the electoral rounds, is literally 'purchased' through the mechanisms of redistribution of resources, taken through taxation, and directed to implement certain policies clearly displayed to strengthen one's status quo .
Democracy, in addition to the tyranny of the majority, is also a hymn to conformity: a paean of mediocrity that by distributing resources that are not its own, not produced by free trade or ingenuity, ends up leveling all citizens downwards, thus determining the absolute non-convenience of dissonant hypothesis, of genius, of free initiative.
As Hans-Hermann Hoppe has amply demonstrated, any electoral flow resolved by the logic of the majority will tend by physiological preservation to the exclusive protection of its constituents of reference, therefore of the mass itself.
In the heart of the pandemic, the blind logic of obedience was then tinged with further, disturbing nuances: very often, despite norms, rules and articles with ambiguous wording, from interpretation to the limits of arbitrariness, despite the evanescent correspondence to the system of sources, the mass of citizens bowed down in compliance with the concept of 'public health', a new form of tyrannical fetish raised on the altar of contemporary dogmas, together with 'democracy'.
In this sense, the mystery of obedience has been strengthened by means of a ferocious, painful communication, bordering on pornography, which, drawing on inhuman peaks of authentic moral blackmail, that is, making people believe that anyone who doubts the institutional vulgate was a potential genocidal ally of the virus, has desertified the public debate in addition to individual and even collective freedoms: just as every critic of democracy is immediately, hypocritically, classified under the infamous term of supporter of totalitarianisms, in the same way every critic of the public management of the pandemic has been made disappear from the social, through the forced and hasty insertion into the category of conspiracy theorists or deniers.
And so the lesson of de La Boétie is truly fresh and essential, all the more so in a dangerous and painful historical moment like the present. Always remembering, as the young author writes, that "freedom is a natural right, and in my opinion we must add that we were born not only masters of our freedom but also inclined to defend it" .
The post When democracy tends to despotism: voluntary servitude and tyranny of the majority appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/quando-la-democrazia-tende-al-dispotismo-servitu-volontaria-e-tirannia-della-maggioranza/ on Tue, 01 Jun 2021 03:58:00 +0000.