TikTok resurfaces video of Trump saying US shouldn't have a president with felony conviction Lauren Lane
  • @[email protected]
    14•5 months ago

    Who in the 18th century would have thought a huge chunk of the country would want a known despot?

    Well there is the French 16 th century thinker Etienne de la Boétie who wrote a discourse on voluntary servitude in which he argued that men do tend to simp for tyrants over being free a lot of the time:

    The essay argues that any tyrant remains in power while his subjects grant him that, therefore delegitimizing every form of power. The original freedom of men would be indeed abandoned by society which, once corrupted by the habit, would have preferred the servitude of the courtier to the freedom of the free man, who refuses to be submissive and to obey.

    • swim
      3•5 months ago

      Spinoza asked “why do people fight for their servitude as if it were their salvation?”

      Fear, and superstition; ideology. Under certain circumstances, the masses want fascism.

      When the left buys in to the game of fear, hatred, passivity, and superstition - a game turbocharged by social media - we become complicit.

      "Instead of politics, we engage in chatter. And it is a sad chatter, whose prevailing form is denunciation. The practice of denunciation debases the multitude. In the place of action, it accepts hatred, which merely externalizes the sadness of passivity; in the place of agency, it accepts fear, and pleads for security; in place of the collective democratic subject, it accepts the superstitious mob.

      Superstitious mobs can only serve tyrants, as Spinoza knew well. We now face a new theocracy of our own making, one which through the chatter of social media decomposes our powers and makes politics impossible."

      https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/3844-why-do-people-fight-for-their-servitude-as-if-it-were-their-salvation

      • @[email protected]
        2•5 months ago

        Thanks. I love me some Spinoza. I just wished they put a citation as to where to find this quote.

        • swim
          2•5 months ago

          The Spinoza quote? As far as I understand it, it could actually be Deleuze paraphrasing Spinoza, perhaps Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, or maybe better said as “Deleuze’ translation of Spinoza.”

            • swim
              2•5 months ago

              Yes! Thank you for the interesting look at Étienne de La Boétie. Deleuze wrote Spinoza: Practical Philosophy and it’s pretty cool.