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Liberation Requires Disobedience

Tue, 06/26/2012 - 20:29 — Dave Culver
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We are complicit with our own repression. Our own stubborn allegiance to modernity that outsources all the pain and suffering to other peoples and the planet is a kind of mental illness of pathological narcissism and delusions of grandeur. It is a kind of suicide/ecocide.

S. Brian Willson

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In 1553 or there abouts, a young French lawyer wrote an amazing essay, The Politics of Obedience: Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, in which his study of the history of tyranny revealed that no matter how power is derived – kings, dictators or elections – men create their own tyrants. Whether domestic or foreign, tyrants rule as the people give obedience to them, usually from hopes of personal gain. Once this obedience is withheld, tyranny quickly collpases. Power is dependent upon massive obedience. It depends upon “voluntary servitude.”

Nearly 250 years later, William Godwin (1756-1836), the first to offer a clear statement of anarchist principles, commented in An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), that if men are subject to tyranny it is because the great mass agree to be tyrannically ruled.

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