In 1553, or thereabouts, a young French lawyer, Etienne De La Boetie, wrote an amazing essay, The Politics of Obedience: Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, in which his study of the history of tyranny revealed that no matter how hierarchical power is derived – kings, dictators or elections – men inevitably enable their own tyrants. Whether domestic or foreign, tyrants rule as the people give obedience to them, usually in hopes of assuring personal gain, no matter how small. Once this obedience is withheld, however, tyranny quickly collapses. Power is dependent upon massive obedience – it depends upon “voluntary servitude.”
Nearly 250 years later, William Godwin (1756-1836), the first to offer a clear statement of anarchist principles, commented in An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), that if men are subject to tyranny it is because the great mass agree to be tyrannically ruled.
More than 50 years after Godwin, Henry David Thoreau wrote Civil Disobedience (1849) in which he sadly concluded that [T]he mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, etc.” And, as he adds later, the taxpayer who would “enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.”
But he describes the disgrace associated with obeying lawless government. Instead, “All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable….When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished.”
Thus, a simple shift in beliefs – rooted in conscience, not the state, as the final authority – can lead to choices to withhold complicity, causing the state to collapse.
Strangely, we become complicit with our own repression. Our own stubborn allegiance to modernity, necessarily preserved by lawless government in cahoots with corporations, is enabled by our denial of the consequential outsourcing of unspeakable pain and suffering to other peoples and the planet. This behavior is comparable to a severe mental illness – criminal insanity in the form of sociopathic narcissism suffering from delusions of “exceptionalism.” Literally, this leads to suicide/ecocide.
We simply need to make a choice to stop cooperating with the corporatocracy, and instead re-discover cooperating with one another as we relocalize into sustainable food sufficient bioregions, extricating ourselves from insidious dependency upon the corporate-provided external inputs. This offers a path for recovering our ancient humanity begging to be accessed once again. The stakes are very high – our survival with dignity.
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I certainly “get” your point and largely agree with you. Unfortunately, we have moved so far from the agrarian past and such a large portion of our people (talking ’bout U.S. of A. here) live isolated from the land, that if this becomes a necessity there will be much suffering before an equilibrium is reestablished. I have my homestead with clean water and rich garden but this is just not, nor can it be, the norm.
I’m afraid that climate change, resource wars (oil and water)and the collapse of the world economic order will bring tremendous suffering in the coming century. Only a profound recognition of these inevitabilities and a global effort, necessarily lead by the USA, to mitigate the dangers, will avoid such calamity. I don’t see the present corporatocracy allowing it’s own demise. Civilization, as we have known it, is fucked.
Of course the present political economy is not interested in its own demise. But its perpetuation depends upon our cooperation and complicity with it. However, it is very vulnerable once people grasp that it needs us to remain in power.
And industrial civilization deserves to collapse – it is long overdue since it is on a collision course with life itself on the Planet.
In the end it is up to human beings to re-configure models for local, sustainable living in cooperation with one another, especially around food culture. It doesn’t mean we will choose to re-configure – which means noncooperation with the system, even resistance, while rebuilding something new from below – but if we do not even make the effort, our extinction or near so seems assured.
So, collapse and extinction themselves are corrections. There is no guarantee that any species continues forever, especially when a species lives beyond and in contradiction to the carrying capacity of nature. Nature bats last.
Yes, Civilization is doomed. That is a good thing in my books. The thought that it might go on forever is my nightmare.
It is in the encounters I have on a day-to-day basis throughout the year with the thousands of Members of Veterans For Peace that I find hope and respite. This essay, for example, contains some of the most poignant prose I can recall regarding the spiritual costs we each pay in our everyday acts of submission and compliance. These visions and dreams are being shared widely now with the Veterans For Peace community, especially since the Portland, Oregon Convention. Many go on to share even further. A single Awakening can become a boulder tossed into a pool.
You Asheville veterans, Kenneth, also give me cause to rejoice. Having visited but once, I have nevertheless kept my eye on you all and on the alternative ideas being embodied by Asheville counter-culture. Kim, in particular, has informed and challenged me to live a better life. I gotta make it back up there one day … with a U-Haul.
Stan Goff, about whom I was reminded this morning from another place on SBW’s FB page, is another source of inspiration for me. Having spent decades, his entire adult life, deeply engaged in the US Army, the instrument most representative of patriarchal hyper-masculinity, Stan has escaped and joined us in the Forest. He lives reverently now, close to the ground, smelling the good soil and celebrating Life and Love and Interconnectedness.
There is no end to this list of VFP escapees who give me hope. We represent an ever-evolving mosaic of thoughts, dreams and activities spread across the Land. We are virtually everywhere. here today, there tomorrow. We are Gaia.
Great post, except that I don’t understand the mention of food at the end:
“We simply need to make a choice to stop cooperating with the corporatocracy, and instead re-discover cooperating with one another as we relocalize into sustainable food sufficient bioregions, extricating ourselves from insidious dependency upon the corporate-provided external inputs.”
Locally produced food in each bioregion is the most important factor in achieving sustainability and authentic autonomy from corporations and central power.