Feb 10
21
How We Give Up Our Freedoms
The following is a quote from an essay written in the
1500’s by Etienne de Boetie.
The perspective from now is not dissimilar when you
think about it, is it?
We are lulled into quietude by entertainments provided
on all fronts, and when we are given back some small amount of what is taken
from us in taxes, we applaud gratefully…
“Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts,
medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the
bait toward 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
naïvely, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at
bright picture books. Roman tyrants invented a further refinement. They often
provided the city wards with feasts to cajole the rabble, always more readily
tempted by the pleasure of eating than by anything else. The most intelligent
and understanding amongst them would not have quit his soup bowl to recover the
liberty of the Republic of Plato. Tyrants would distribute largess, a bushel of
wheat, a gallon of wine, and a sesterce: and then everybody would shamelessly
cry, “Long live the King!” The fools did not realize 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. A
man might one day be presented with a sesterce and gorge himself at the public
feast, lauding Tiberius and Nero for handsome liberality, who on the morrow,
would be forced to abandon his property to their avarice, his children to their
lust, his very blood to the cruelty of these magnificent emperors, without
offering any more resistance than a stone or a tree stump. The mob has always
behaved in this way—eagerly open to bribes that cannot be honorably accepted,
and dissolutely callous to degradation and insult that cannot be honorably
endured. Nowadays I do not meet anyone who, on hearing mention of Nero, does
not shudder at the very name of that hideous monster, that disgusting and vile
pestilence. Yet when he died—when this incendiary, this executioner, this
savage beast, died as vilely as he had lived—the noble Roman people, mindful of
his games and his festivals, were saddened to the point of wearing mourning for
him.”