Voluntary Servitude Not Just From Fear, But Also From Lazy Self Hypnosis Denying One’s Own Culpability

Why does propaganda works? Because People want to be propagandized, they want to belong and be owned. As long as they ask to be guided by what’s “in”, they are out as independent minds… And that’s exactly what they want. And the way to get there is collective hypnosis.

“In a democracy, everything depends upon the consent of the people” (Thomas Jefferson, 3rd president)… Well, even more so in a dictatorship:

Free, domineering, bold, happy alive:”The Woman Of My Dreams“, Nazi movie, August 1944. (the date is important).. Nazism was exactly about the opposite: caged, subjugated, scared, very sad to be still alive and gnawing on an obsession with death. The other contradiction: this movie was made just as the Great Reich was in full collapse, most of its great cities, smoking rubble, and flying armadas of thousands of Allied bombers bombing Germany while ruling German skies. Thus that movie depicts the world as the opposite of what it was. Nearly all healthy German women who got in touch with a vengeful Soviet army, got to serve hundreds of time a day, come 1945…

What’s the subconscious of a collective? That is the question. However I talked of the support of US plutocracy for fascism in the 1930s with all too many US citizens with world consciousness and they were EXTREMELY HOSTILE to this general approach. Like totally enraged.

[Esteemed reader] Kathleen Hawes Watkins: Maybe it comes down to attribution of conspiracy vs. exploitation. I suspect people are less hostile re opportunistic actions (fate/luck) than conspiring acts (intended/evil). So until they see evidence of full-scale conspiracy they are falling into default judgement – – they assume the pluts are catching all the breaks but are not really evil?

Dear Kathleen: you make an excellent point, and it’s probably true. We The People prefer to believe they are not victim of a conspiracy of evil. We The People wants to believe they are subject to the hand of fate, not the hand of man… hence, and here is an example: the “me too” problem: victims of rape, literal or effective (through career denial) and victims of gender discrimination don’t want to believe they were predated upon… and not just because they fear for their careers or places  in society, should they dare to complain.

“Woman of my Dreams” Dream On! 1944…

First, one has to realize society holds together with collective hypnosis. Apparently, cerebral imaging, and other tests, show that hypnosis is a real effect, and politics is its “terrain de prédilection”, its favourite ground. Two-thirds of the population are highly susceptible to hypnosis (and 10% not at all, including probably all genuine philosophers). Hypnosis is very comfortable: one does need one’s brain anymore.

Second, realizing that they were ruled by an evil conspiracy would be a letdown to the subjugated ones: that would show they aren’t living in the best of all possible worlds… and that they were dumb not to have noticed before. 

Third, that would entail that common people have been accomplice of the system, by refusing to see the obvious, and have been accomplices to their own subjugation, hence that they are themselves evil: if they subjugate themselves to submit t evil, who else do they subjugate?

At the time when “Woman of my Dreams” hits Reich theaters, here is August 1944 stark reality: The Nazi governor of Paris, Von Choltitz (on the table), surrenders to General Leclerc his 17,000 soldiers (Leclerc is the 3 star mustachioed general turned towards camera on the left of the Nazi in the picture above). General Leclerc had warned the Nazi he would be arrested as a war criminal, should he obey Hitler’s orders to “burn” Paris. Leclerc commander of the French Second Armored Division, next informed fanatical SS formations which had refused to obey Von Choltitz’s order to surrender that they would be charged of crimes against humanity, if they didn’t surrender. Suddenly getting smart, the SS surrendered to Leclerc. So the SS didn’t obey Hitler’s own commander, but they obeyed the French general! Notice the WC sign behind. The soldier with the armband is from the FFI (French Forces Interior).

Behind the Discours de la servitude volontaire d’Estienne de La Boétie lays a much more troubling fact: the implied discourse on servile criminality by the multitude, accomplice in its own criminal subjugation… 

Indeed, here is a little recapitulation of Estienne de La Boétie’s arguments of the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude:

– The power of tyrants is based only on the abandonment of power, by the people.

– The tyrant is often a weak man, like any other. Only the gullible can idolize him.

– Free spirits will be oppressed.

– The people are the cause of their submission to the tyrant.

– The use of reason will disappear among the people so they can be deceived and dominated.

– Tyrants create very elaborate power structures, consisting of a multi-level hierarchy empowered by conspiracies of accomplices.

To sum up La Boétie: political regimes [of the Renaissance] are based on fear, which is used to conceal the lack of legitimacy of the government. Thus, the people subjected to the self-government in place by simple habit, historical inertia, imprinting.

Gustave Le Bon (1843-1931) disagreed a bit: he thought crowds incapable of reason: “An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will“.  Being incapable of reason, only emotion worked with crowds. He saw the likes of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, or Obama and Trump for that matter: “The leaders we speak of, are usually men of action rather than of words. They are not gifted with keen foresight… They are especially recruited from the ranks of those morbidly nervous excitable half-deranged persons who are bordering on madness.”

I said one needs more than fear to explain why people love voluntary servitude: hypnotism, intellectual laziness, comfort zone as a religion, and the fact that, by denying they are victims of an atrocious dictatorship, people in their deepest recesses, can then deny that the’re suspects and perpetrators of said dictatorship (as there is no dictatorship, they insist).

Hypnosis seems to be real, according to neuro-imaging. It impacts collectives best. This is, even more than fear and greed, is what brings “servitude volontaire“

An example of this, the denial of dictatorship, is the French, and not just the French, attitude to Napoleon… to this day. Napoleon, on the face of it, is one of the most abominable tyrants, ever. Moreover, he stole the Revolution to enrich and endow himself and his gang… all this for his futile pursuit of “power” (which he admitted to be completely hypnotized with. Nap called George Washington the “greatest man, ever” for renouncing power on his own…)

Napoleon is the dictator who sent to Haiti 600 huge dogs specially trained to eat black people (the escaped slaves, the “Marrons” resistants in the mountains [1]). Napoleon also organized his dictatorship so well, that it functions perfectly well to this day (with disastrous consequences for France, hence Europe, hence the world: consider the unelected “prefect” system, straight out of the decaying Late Roman empire). Napoleon, an enslaver, war criminal & criminal against humanity, is the world’s most admired Frenchman. When will the world grow up? His conquests exploited the Revolution: other French generals were better: they respected the Republic.

Fairey, who created this poster was (as I was then) very much taken by Obama at the time. (“Hope” was suggested by the Obama propagandists.) However, Fairey realized later that was gross propaganda. Fairey was jailed countless time, and condemned by the Justice system to 500 hours and a huge fine. By then he realized Obama personally authorized one deadly drone strike every twenty minutes during his 8 years reign. [Compare with Trump, fake left!]

That the plutocrats are not followers of Pluto is Biden (and Obama) main point. Said Biden:”Billionaires are really nice guys!” The truth, though, tends to be the opposite. Granted, real, formally educated engineers such as Bezos or Musk bring real added value (and they are both building reusable rocket systems, for space colonization, among other things). 

However, most billionaires are either so motivated by greed, that they succeeded, or then financed by the greedy (private investors, banks) using dirty tricks that should be unlawful (and have typically been installed by politicos such as Biden and Obama). Thus typical billionaires are criminally profiting from a criminal system, and it’s just a matter of time before their own criminality is very conscious. 

The end result is that each plutocratic individual or organization contributes to a global plutocratic mass. Just as a critical, big enough mass of Plutonium, the Pluto mass can become critical and undergo a chain reaction, where it overwhelms all. 

A good example is right now the GAFAM, the world top tech monopolies, the world’s most “valuable” companies, in market capitalization: a deliberate effort, probably driven by the US Deep State (NSA, etc.) was made to create world monopolies of information, to, simply, rule the world (the GAFAM themselves being controlled by the Deep State and associated stealth investors: foundations, trusts, etc.). 

If a society doesn’t react to plutocracy before it reaches critical mass, a chain reaction of evil will ensues, from which it is hard to escape: most societies fall into it, self-devouring, or then getting weak enough to be devoured by more democratic, hence stronger societies (story of the world under European domination). Contemplate for example Russia, which has been unable to escape the rule of evil… for centuries (although it came close to escape under the last years of Tsar Nicholas II’s rule… until the Bolshevik coup of 1917).

Hence, it turns out that, to have a more worthy society, more worthy because having more ideas, more science, more understanding, more stuff, more power on nature… and more military might, one needs more, enough collective psychoanalysis to free oneself from the delusion of prior collective hypnosis of a more primitive type, including the erroneous notion that the evil masters are not evil masters…

Yes, it was no accident that Alexander’s army knew Alexander was not a god: therein the superiority of the Greek-Macedonian army. That fact had escaped Alexander (until the army went on strike, after observing that India was significantly larger than Alexander had thought… And thus that going to the Pacific was not reasonable).

It’s striking, when one looks at Nazi movies (some of them pretty good artistically) how much in collective dreamland they were. Consider the extract of “Woman From My Dreams” (August 1944, just when Paris was liberated): https://alchetron.com/The-Woman-of-My-Dreams

To get out of voluntary servitude, one needs enough energy to build one’s brain anew, better and more faithful to reality. Work: there is no substitute. No personal mental work, no freedom

To fight stupid propaganda, to fight stupidity that propagates, there is just one way: more intelligent propaganda, clever enough, and brutal enough, to get people out of their comfortable hypnotism and fake moral righteousness… it can’t be just more sophisticated ideas, it has to shatter with emotional impact.

If one doesn’t want people to behave like ants, one will have to kick the anthill... All the more so, because as I said, the ants are not that innocent, and covering that up, makes it even more difficult to extricate. As Greek mythology has it, Pluto is not just evil: it can make himself invisible.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] It turned out that Napoleon’s man eating dogs were not racist: they also ate wounded white soldiers…

Tags: August 1944, Estienne de La Boétie, Nazis surrendering Paris, Propaganda, Self-Hypnosis, Voluntary Servitude, Woman of my Dreams