“If I wanted to talk to idiots, I’d talk to my own people.
I wouldn’t waste my time talking to you.”
(Palmiro Cangini, Councillor of Roncofritto — a fictional character played by Paolo Cevoli in the Italian comedy show “Zelig”)
The joke is funny.
In fact, it is hilarious.
Because none of us imagines that we are the target.
The “idiots” are always someone else.
Or at least that is what we like to believe.
Yet there is a far more dangerous form of stupidity than the one we are so quick to recognise in others.
That is precisely what Étienne de La Boétie wrote about almost five centuries ago, in a small book composed when he was only twenty-two years old.
Suddenly, the laughter fades.
Because this time, the target is us.
In The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, published clandestinely in 1576, De La Boétie asks a question that ought to keep every free citizen awake at night.
Why do millions obey one man?
The obvious answer comes immediately.
Because the tyrant is stronger.
De La Boétie answers: no.
One man alone could never dominate an entire people through force alone.
He does not possess enough swords, enough soldiers, or enough eyes to watch everyone.
His real power comes from elsewhere.
From consent.
From habit.
From convenience.
From that slow surrender of freedom that gradually persuades people that obedience is easier than thought.
Tyranny, writes De La Boétie, is not a building erected by the tyrant.
It is a building constructed by his subjects.
They hand power to him.
They keep it standing.
They become, often without realising it, the machinery that oppresses them.
It is a profoundly unsettling idea.
We instinctively believe that freedom is taken from us.
According to De La Boétie, it is far more often handed away.
Through ignorance.
Through laziness.
Through fear.
Through convenience.
Or simply because “that is the way things have always been done.”
Perhaps this is the most modern insight in the entire book.
Today, freedom is seldom taken by force.
Far more often, it is surrendered willingly.
In exchange for the comfort of not having to choose.
For belonging.
For the approval of those who hold power.
For the reassurance that comes from repeating what others wish to hear.
The mechanism has not changed.
Only the actors have.
The story remains exactly the same.
Whenever we hear about the circles surrounding politicians, industrial leaders, religious figures or the heads of large organisations, we instinctively dismiss their closest collaborators as mere opportunists.
And certainly many of them are.
But stopping there means missing the most interesting part.
The courtier does not merely abandon the truth.
He abandons his own freedom.
At first, he chooses to say what the powerful wish to hear.
Then he loses the ability to distinguish what is true from what is useful.
Eventually, he forgets that there was ever a difference.
At that point, he is no longer a free man.
He is a goldfinch in a cage.
He sings.
He is fed.
In time, he forgets that he has wings.
Each day, the cage door looks a little less like a prison and a little more like protection.
Until he watches the birds flying freely across the sky and comes to believe that they are the ones living dangerously.
The cage no longer feels like a sacrifice.
It feels normal.
That is voluntary servitude.
And that is precisely where the book becomes disturbing.
Because it is not merely about tyrants.
It is about us.
Every organisation, every state, every company, every political party and every association inevitably develops its own little court.
Sometimes without the leader even realising it.
Because someone always discovers that pleasing is more profitable than contradicting.
It is made up of people who seek favour rather than truth.
Who strive to please rather than understand.
Who no longer ask, “Is it right?”
They ask only, “Is it worth it?”
These are De La Boétie’s courtiers.
It is impossible to read these pages without thinking about our own age.
About fashions nobody dares question.
About opinions endlessly repeated but never examined.
About social media, where conformity travels at the speed of fibre optics.
About algorithms that reward consensus more readily than truth.
About companies where nobody tells the chief executive what they genuinely think.
About institutions where dissent is treated as betrayal rather than as a valuable resource.
De La Boétie leaves us with an uncomfortable question.
How many of our convictions are truly our own?
And how many are merely the price we pay for acceptance?
His final message is astonishingly simple.
“Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once free.”
He does not call for revolution.
He does not preach violence.
He does not propose barricades.
He invites us to undertake something infinitely more difficult.
To think.
Because every tyranny fears weapons.
But it fears even more the man who has learned to think with his own mind.
Perhaps that is the least amusing part of the joke with which we began.
Because, in the end, an idiot is not someone who lacks intelligence.
It is someone who has chosen not to use it.
Someone who prefers approval to truth.
Someone who hands over to others the right to think.
That is voluntary servitude.
Perhaps that is the deepest meaning hidden within the opening joke.
We laughed because we were convinced that the idiots were always somebody else.
De La Boétie leaves us with a far more unsettling thought.
Tyranny does not begin when someone seizes power.
It begins when somebody else stops exercising their freedom.