Montaigne: Selected Essays

La Boétie begins with a warning that any commander or leader can become arbitrary: “[T]he power of a single man once he takes on this title of ‘master’ is harsh and unreasonable” (284). He wonders why so many subject themselves to arbitrary rulers when their tyranny is possible solely because the subjects are willing to put up with it.

One answer is that “we must often obey force: we need to play for time, we cannot always get the upper hand” (285). Another is that we sometimes choose one who has always been good and then “take him away from a place where he did good to put him where he may do ill” (286). The real mystery lies in mass acceptance of arbitrary rule from “a single puny man, and generally the most cowardly” (286).

Two armies of equal size meet in battle. One side wishes to enslave the other; the other side fights for its freedom. The odds should favor the freedom fighters. So much more should the odds favor an entire nation against one tyrant, yet “[i]t is the people who enslave themselves” (287). For the tyrants, meanwhile, “the more they ruin and destroy, the more they are granted, the more they are served, the stronger they grow and they keep on getting stronger and more able to demolish and destroy everything” (288).