The Politics of Obedience

The situation requires that people talk to other people, you know, in person. You have to be the bearer of bad news. You have to try to explain some piece of what is happening and then encourage them to "look it up." I had a conversation like this the other night. A relative thinks I'm crazy, but she's not sure, because I've never been known to be crazy before. So she is going to look it up; and she thinks she will prove me wrong. She was angry with me for what I was telling her.

Recommended sites for beginners: Ifamericansknew.org, wanttoknow.info. If you have suggestions for sites that can present information in a calm way, please leave them in the comments. Thanks - Ed.

by Murray N. Rothbard

I should like merely to understand how it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him; who is able to harm them only to the extent to which they have the willingness to bear with him; who could do them absolutely no injury unless they preferred to put up with him rather than contradict him. Surely a striking situation! Yet it is so common that one must grieve the more and wonder the less at the spectacle of a million men serving in wretchedness, their necks under the yoke, not constrained by a greater multitude than they… [10]

And this mass submission must be out of consent rather than simply out of fear:

Shall we call subjection to such a leader cowardice? … If a hundred, if a thousand endure the caprice of a single man, should we not rather say that they lack not the courage but the desire to rise against him, and that such an attitude indicates indifference rather than cowardice?

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