Voluntary Slavery

Doctors advise against treating incurable wounds; and I fear that I am acting foolishly in wishing to give advice to a people that has long lost all understanding and that, by no longer even noticing its disease, shows that its disease is fatal.

First of all, this is beyond doubt: that if we lived by those rules and teachings that nature has given us, we would be obedient to our parents, would submit to reason, and would be no one’s slaves. About obedience to father and mother all people bear witness—each in himself and for himself. As for reason, I think it is a natural property of the soul, and if people support it in themselves, it blossoms into virtue.

But what cannot be doubted and what is completely clear and obvious is that nature has made us all the same—as if cast in one mold—so that we might consider one another comrades or, rather, brothers; and if in the distribution of our capacities she gave some bodily and spiritual advantages, she nevertheless did not wish to sow enmity among us, did not wish that the stronger and cleverer, like robbers in a forest, should attack the weak; but rather, we must think, that by endowing some with greater abilities in comparison with others, she thereby created the possibility of brotherly love, by virtue of which the stronger would help those who need their help.

And if this good mother nature has given us all the same outward form so that each might see and recognize himself in another; if she has given us all the great gift of speech so that, making a habit of mutual exchange of thoughts and communion of our wills, we might know one another and grow ever closer; if she has striven by every means to unite and bind together our society, tying it through communication as if into a strong knot; and since, finally, this striving of hers toward union is confirmed also by the nature of all things in the world—then there is no doubt that we must be comrades and that no one can think that nature destined some to be slaves and others to be masters.

And truly it is superfluous to consider whether freedom is natural, since no one can fail to feel suffering when in slavery, and there is nothing in the world so unbearable as degradation. Therefore, it must be acknowledged that freedom is natural and that not only freedom is inborn in us but also the need to defend it. But if it happened that we doubted this or became so coarsened that we lost the capacity to recognize our own good and our natural inclinations, we would deserve the honor of learning this from the brute animals. If people are not too deaf, the animals will cry out to them: “Long live freedom!” Indeed, many of them die as soon as they are deprived of freedom. Others—both large and small—when caught, fight back with all their strength: with beak, and claws, and horns, showing thereby how they treasure what they are losing; and when they are caught, they show quite unambiguously how conscious they are of their misfortune, and continue their life more to grieve for what is lost than to content themselves with their slavery. We train a horse to service from almost the moment of its birth; but no matter how much we caress it, when it comes to breaking it, it will bite the bit and rear as if to show that it serves not by its own will but by our compulsion. So all beings that have feelings recognize the evil of subjection and strive for freedom. Animals, which are lower than man, cannot accustom themselves to submission except against their will. What a strange phenomenon it is then that man alone has so changed his nature that, born to live free, he has lost even the memory of freedom and the desire to regain it!

There are three kinds of tyrants (I speak of wicked rulers): some rule by the people’s choice, others by force of arms, and others by inheritance. Those who rule by right of war behave so that it is evident they rule by right of conquest. Those who are born rulers are no better than the first: being raised in the traditions of tyranny, they suck in the nature of tyrants with their mother’s milk, use the peoples subject to them as inherited slaves; and according to their disposition—whether they are greedy or extravagant—they manage the state as their inheritance. But the one who received his right from the people would seem to be more capable; and I think he would be, if he did not feel himself raised above others, if he were not surrounded by flattery and what is called grandeur, from which he does not wish to part, if he did not use his power to pass it on to his children. And strange to say, these very rulers who govern by the people’s choice surpass all other tyrants in vices of every kind and even in cruelty. Besides increasing servitude—curtailing the freedom of their subjects, of which so little remains to them as it is—they see no other means of establishing their power. So that, speaking truly, though I see some difference between the three kinds of tyrants I have indicated, in essence they are all the same, and though they attain power by different paths, their manner of ruling is always one and the same. As for conquerors, they consider that they have the same right over those they have conquered as over their spoils. And their heirs treat their subjects as their natural slaves.

But if in our time people were born entirely new, accustomed neither to subjection nor to freedom—people who knew neither the one nor the other—and if these people were offered one of two things: either to be subjects or to live free—what would they choose? It is not difficult to conclude that they would prefer to obey reason alone rather than to serve one man. But this is only on the condition that they were not like those Israelites who without compulsion or any necessity created a tyrant for themselves. The history of this people I never read without a feeling of vexation that brings me to the point of becoming inhuman and rejoicing at the misfortunes that the Israelites brought upon themselves. As for all people, to the extent that they are people, one of two things is needed to subjugate them—either force or deception.

It is astonishing how a people, as soon as it is subjected, immediately falls into such forgetfulness of freedom that it is hard for it to awaken to regain it. It serves so willingly that, looking at it, one thinks it has lost not its freedom but its slavery. True, at first people are compelled and conquered by force; but the next generation, which has never seen freedom and does not know what it is, already serves without regret and voluntarily does what its predecessors did under compulsion. Hence people born under the yoke and therefore raised in slavery accept as their natural condition the one in which they were born, accept it without looking ahead, and content themselves with living in the situation in which they were born, without thinking to attain either other rights or other goods than those they find. For however wasteful and careless an heir may be, sooner or later he looks over his deeds of inheritance to find out whether he is enjoying all his rights and whether anything has been taken from him or his predecessor. But habit, which generally has great power over us, has in nothing such power as in teaching us to be slaves and accustoming us to swallow easily the bitter poison of slavery, like Mithridates, who gradually accustomed himself to self-poisoning.

… …

In all countries and in every climate, slavery is repugnant and freedom is pleasing, and therefore we must pity those who are born with a yoke on their necks. But we must also excuse such people, since they have never even seen a shadow of freedom and therefore do not notice all the evil of slavery. After all, no one regrets what he never had, and regret comes only after lost pleasure.

It is natural for man to be free and to wish to be so; but at the same time his nature is such that he becomes accustomed to everything.

So we shall say that (all things to which man becomes accustomed are natural to him. Thus) the first cause of voluntary slavery is habit—that habit by which the best horses at first gnaw their bits and then play with them, at first strain under the saddle and in the end prance as if with pride in their harness. People say they have always been subjects, that their fathers lived as such—they think they must bear captivity, make themselves believe it, and on the basis of long standing justify the power of those who tyrannize them. But among such submissive people there are also noble ones who, feeling the weight of the yoke, wish to throw it off and never become accustomed to subjection. These people, like Ulysses who on sea and land longed to see the smoke of his native hearth, remember their natural rights and their free ancestors; possessing clear understanding and penetrating minds, they are not content, like the crude mob, only with what is under their feet, but have heads on their shoulders—heads trained by education and learning. And these people, if freedom entirely abandoned the world, if it were forever lost to humanity, would still feel it in their spirits and love it, for slavery is always repugnant to them, however it may be dressed up.

The Turkish sultan guessed this. He decided that books and learning more than anything else awaken in people consciousness of themselves and hatred of tyranny. They say that in his domains there are only such scholars as he needs. And because of this, however numerous may be those who have preserved in themselves, in spite of everything, devotion to freedom, for all their desire and zeal they have no influence; and this is because, in the complete absence of freedom to speak and even to think, they cannot know one another.

So the main reason why people voluntarily give themselves into slavery is that they are born and raised in this condition. From this cause follows another: that under the rule of tyrants people easily become cowardly and effeminate. A tyrant never thinks his power is secure and therefore strives to ensure that under his rule there is not one worthy person.

This cunning by which tyrants stupefy their subjects is nowhere so clearly revealed as in what Cyrus did with the Lydians after he took possession of their capital city Lydia and took captive Croesus, that wealthy king, and carried him off. When it was announced to him that the Lydians had revolted, he soon conquered them again; but not wishing to destroy such a beautiful city and constantly keep an army there to hold it, he devised another means: he set up places of entertainment there, taverns, public houses, spectacles, and issued a decree that all inhabitants should use all these. And this method proved so effective that after this he no longer needed to wage war against the Lydians. These wretched people amused themselves by inventing various new games; so that the Romans borrowed from them the word by which we call pastime: ludi.

Tyrants do not openly admit that they want to corrupt their subjects, but what Cyrus frankly applied, all do in reality, for it is the nature of the common people in cities to be suspicious only toward those who love them and trusting and yielding toward those who deceive them. I do not think there is any bird that is better caught with bait or any fish that takes the hook better than all peoples fall into slavery for the smallest feather with which, as they say, their lips are smeared (so that one must marvel how easily they yield as soon as they are tickled). Theaters, games, performances, buffoonery, gladiators, exotic animals, pictures, and other such follies constituted for the ancients the bait of slavery, the price of their freedom, and the weapon of tyranny. Such were the methods of the baits of ancient tyrants, used by them to lull their subjects under their yoke. Thus, stupefied by these amusements, entertained by empty spectacles arranged before their eyes, peoples became accustomed to slavery no worse than little children who learn to read only in order to know the contents of the shiny pictures in their books.

The Assyrian kings and after them the Medes showed themselves to the people as rarely as possible, so that the people would think they were something extraordinarily great and would remain in this delusion, for it is natural for people to exaggerate in their imagination what they cannot see. Thus the peoples under Assyrian rule were trained to slavery by means of this mystery and slaved all the more willingly the less they knew their master; and sometimes did not even know whether he existed, and everyone on trust feared someone whom no one had seen. The first kings of Egypt showed themselves only with sometimes a branch and sometimes fire on their head, and went out in masks, and thereby aroused respect and wonder in their subjects; whereas people who were not too servile and stupid would, it seems to me, have considered them merely amusing and ridiculous. How pitiful and insignificant are those devices that tyrants of antiquity used for the sake of establishing their tyranny over a people so susceptible to their deceptions! There was no net into which the people did not fall; and never did tyrants deceive the people more easily, never did they subjugate it more easily, than when they themselves laughed at it. So was there ever a time when tyrants, for the sake of establishing their power, did not accustom the people not only to obedience and slavery but also to worship?

All that I have said so far about how tyrants teach people to obey them concerns the simple and crude people.

But now I come to the question that constitutes the secret and main weapon of tyranny. He who thinks that tyrants guard themselves with arms of guards and weapons of fortresses is greatly mistaken; true, they use these, but more for form and for show than because they really rely on them. Bodyguards do not keep out of palaces those people who are dangerous but only those insignificant people who cannot cause the tyrant any harm.

If we count the number of Roman emperors killed, we shall see that their bodyguards did not so much deliver them from dangers as kill them. It is not weapons and not armed men—mounted or on foot—that protect tyrants, but, hard as it is to believe, three or four men support the tyrant and hold the whole country in slavery for him. Always the circle of those close to the tyrant has consisted of five or six people; these people either insinuated themselves into his confidence or were brought close by him to be accomplices in his cruelties, companions in his pleasures, purveyors of his enjoyments, and partners in his plundering. These six make their chief evil not only by his own evil but also by theirs. These six have six hundred under their power who relate to the six as the six relate to the tyrant. The six hundred in turn have under them six thousand whom they have elevated, to whom they have given the management of provinces or financial affairs—so that they may serve their greed and cruelty and do evil that can continue only under them and is protected from lawful punishment only by them. After these comes an even larger retinue. And whoever cares to amuse himself—unraveling this net—will see that not just six thousand but hundreds of thousands, millions are bound by this chain to the tyrant. For this purpose offices are multiplied, all of which are supports of tyranny, and all who occupy these offices have their profits in it, and by these profits they are bound to the tyrants, and the people to whom tyranny is profitable are so numerous that there are almost as many of them as of those for whom freedom would be a joy. And as doctors say that if there is something rotten in our body, all the bad humors immediately flow to that diseased place, so too with the sovereign: as soon as he becomes a tyrant, all that is bad—all the dregs of the state, a heap of thieves and scoundrels incapable of anything but greedy and rapacious—gathers to participate in the spoils, to be little tyrants under the great tyrant. So do great robbers and famous corsairs. Some do reconnaissance, others stop travelers; some keep watch, others are in ambush; some kill, others rob, and—though there is a difference among them, for some are servants and others are chiefs—all share in the spoils.

So the tyrant subjugates some subjects by means of others and is guarded by those whom, if they were not scoundrels, he would have to fear. But, as they say, “to split wood, wedges are made from the same wood”—so too his bodyguards are the same as he. It happens that they too suffer from him; but these God-forsaken, lost people are ready to bear evil if only they may be able to do it—not to the one who does evil to them, but to those who bear it and cannot do otherwise.

—La Boétie

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Translator’s Notes:

• Étienne de La Boétie (1530–1563) was a French judge, writer, and close friend of Michel de Montaigne. His Discours de la servitude volontaire (Discourse on Voluntary Servitude), written around 1548, is a foundational text in the theory of nonviolent resistance and anarchism.
• Tolstoy was deeply influenced by La Boétie’s analysis. In his own works like The Kingdom of God Is Within You, Tolstoy developed similar arguments about how state power depends on the complicity of the governed and how withdrawal of that cooperation could end tyranny.
• The story of Cyrus and the Lydians (with the establishment of entertainment venues to pacify a rebellious population) anticipates modern analyses of how “bread and circuses” maintain political control.
• The reference to the Israelites creating a tyrant “without compulsion” alludes to 1 Samuel 8, where the Israelites demand a king despite the prophet Samuel’s warnings about what a king will do to them.
• Mithridates VI of Pontus (135–63 BCE) famously made himself immune to poisons by taking small doses over time—hence the term “mithridatism.”
• The Latin word ludi (games, shows, spectacles) is said to derive from the Lydians’ devotion to amusements.
• The pyramid of complicity that La Boétie describes—where “six have six hundred who have six thousand”—anticipates modern analyses of how authoritarian systems function through hierarchies of benefit rather than pure coercion.
• The ellipsis in the text (marked with dots) indicates where Tolstoy’s version omits material from the original essay.