It has always happened that tyrants, in order to strengthen their power, have made every effort to train their people not only in obedience and servility toward themselves, but also in adoration.
Interpretation
The quote illustrates how tyrants manipulate their subjects into obedience and worship.
Etienne De La Boetie highlights the tactics employed by tyrants to consolidate power. They not only enforce obedience but seek to instill a sense of devotion among their people, fostering an environment where the citizens adore their oppressors rather than resist them. This dynamic serves to strengthen the tyrant's control, as blind adoration minimizes dissent and reinforces authority.
In practice
In a speech about government control, one might say, 'As Etienne De La Boetie pointed out, tyrants create a culture of adoration to maintain their regime.'
It is incredible how as soon as a people become subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and willingly that one is led to say that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement.
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We cling to our own point of view, as though everything depended on it. Yet our opinions have no permanence; like autumn and winter, they gradually pass away.
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