The Mystery of Obedience

Why Nations Cooperate with Their Own Oppression

“Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed.”
— Étienne de La Boétie, Discourse on Voluntary Servitude

Sometime in the 1980s, while doing postgraduate work at a Canadian university, I had a Zimbabwean classmate who enjoyed teasing me about Malawi.

His country was newly independent. Robert Mugabe was still the revolutionary hero, the liberation leader, the intellectual whose academic qualifications, “seven degrees,” as my friend never tired of reminding me, seemed almost another credential for governing. Zimbabwe represented the new Africa: confident, liberated and led by men who had fought a liberation war for freedom.

Malawi was rather more difficult to explain. We had a Life President.

“How can you Malawians allow one man to lord it over you for so long?” my friend would ask, puffing away at a pipe that seemed rather incongruous with his age, although in those days a pipe somehow lent a young intellectual an air of prematurely acquired wisdom.

It was not an unreasonable question. Hastings Kamuzu Banda, the “Ngwazi” as we all remember him, had ruled Malawi since independence and presided over a political system in which opposition was forbidden, dissent could be dangerous, and the distinction between loyalty to the country and loyalty to its President had become increasingly difficult to discern. Indeed, Obedience was formally proclaimed as one of the four cornerstones of the ruling party, alongside Unity, Loyalty and Discipline. The political vocabulary itself told the citizen what was expected of him.

My Zimbabwean friend found this incomprehensible. His people, after all, had fought a liberation war. They had overthrown white rule. They had Mugabe.

But history has a mischievous sense of humour.

We completed our studies and returned to our respective countries, and gradually the neat contrast my friend had drawn began to unravel. The revolutionary hero with the impressive collection of degrees remained in power, and the institutions around him weakened as the years passed. Political opponents were persecuted, election results became increasingly contested and violence entered political life. The liberator slowly acquired the authoritarian habits that sat uneasily with the freedom his movement had fought to achieve.

Meanwhile, something equally unexpected was happening in Malawi. The supposedly docile Malawians began to stir. Church leaders spoke. Students demonstrated. Workers went on strike. Political prisoners and exiles became part of the national conversation. Ordinary people who had spent decades lowering their voices when politics entered a conversation began speaking rather more loudly. In 1993, Malawians voted in a referendum to end the one-party system. The following year, in multiparty elections, they removed Banda from power.

I have sometimes wondered what my Zimbabwean classmate made of that reversal. With the passage of time, however, I have realised that he thought he was asking me a question about Malawians. Neither of us realised that he was asking a question about human beings.

More than four centuries before those conversations in Canada, a young Frenchman named Étienne de La Boétie had asked essentially the same question. His Discourse on Voluntary Servitude begins from a political puzzle so obvious that we often fail to notice how extraordinary it is. A tyrant may be one man, while the people he governs may number millions. How, then, do the millions come to place at the disposal of one man the very power by which he dominates them?

That formulation is more disturbing than simply observing that rulers need soldiers and policemen. La Boétie’s insight was that tyranny eventually reaches much further down into society. The ruler’s power is reproduced through innumerable acts of cooperation by people who could never themselves be described as tyrants. Around him stand those who benefit directly from his power; around them stand others who benefit from theirs. Further out are officials, soldiers, policemen, judges, businessmen, bureaucrats and countless lesser functionaries whose individual acts keep the machinery running. Beyond them stands the great mass of ordinary citizens, many of whom may privately dislike the very system their daily accommodation helps to sustain.

Some genuinely believe. Some pretend to believe. Some benefit. Some are frightened. Some tell themselves that politics is none of their business. Others have children to educate, careers to protect and lives they would rather continue living. Still others simply become accustomed to things, and what begins as an outrage can, with sufficient passage of time, become merely the way things are.

There is another category, perhaps more consequential than any of these: those who become guardians of the leader without ever having been recruited for the role. They take offence on his behalf, detect enemies he may never have noticed, punish criticism he may never have heard and compete with one another in demonstrations of loyalty. Some may be driven by genuine devotion, while others have acquired positions, privileges or simply a sense of security under the existing order and understand, consciously or otherwise, that their fortunes are tied to its survival. The dictator does not always have to instruct such people. Once a political system has existed long enough, it can manufacture its own volunteer policemen, citizens who enforce its boundaries because protecting the Great Leader has become indistinguishable from protecting themselves.

There may be an even more deeply personal investment at work. Having spent years defending a leader, people acquire an interest in continuing to believe that their defence was justified. To acknowledge that the leader has become oppressive may require them to acknowledge that their own judgement was mistaken, perhaps for many years and in front of many people. The threatened loss is therefore no longer merely material. Reputation, pride and one’s sense of oneself as a person of sound judgement are also at stake. We see the same instinct far beyond politics, in our resistance to new ideas and to criticism that threatens positions with which we have come to identify ourselves. Sometimes we defend an idea long after the evidence has turned against it because abandoning it would require us to revise the story we have been telling about ourselves.

This is the disturbing idea contained in La Boétie’s phrase voluntary servitude, although the word “voluntary” deserves some resistance. There is surely nothing voluntary about imprisonment, torture, exile or death. There is an enormous moral distance between the enthusiastic collaborator who prospers through oppression and the frightened parent who keeps quiet because other people depend upon him. Human beings do not live by political courage alone.

Centuries after La Boétie, the Czech dissident Václav Havel gave us one of the finest illustrations of this phenomenon. In The Power of the Powerless, he imagines a greengrocer who places the communist slogan “Workers of the world, unite!” in his shop window. In a Malawian setting, we might imagine something roughly equivalent: a sign declaring, “Boma ndilomweli, silikusintha.” The important point is that the greengrocer may not believe it. He puts up the sign because putting up the sign is what one does. The butcher does it, the office worker does it, the teacher does it and the neighbour does it. The sign says less about ideology than accommodation. The greengrocer is effectively saying that he knows the rules and wishes to be left alone.

When millions make essentially the same calculation, everyone can end up participating in the maintenance of a system that many privately despise.

Looking from the safety of another country, it is easy to ask why people do not resist. That was my Zimbabwean friend’s question. It becomes considerably harder when resistance might cost you your job, your children’s education, your passport, your freedom or your life. Yet the uncomfortable core of La Boétie’s argument survives: every oppressive system requires participation far beyond the small circle of people who actually direct it.

This may explain why the bad ruler’s greatest political asset is sometimes the reasonable citizen who dislikes him and still complies. The fanatic is already his. The more interesting person sees what is wrong, complains privately about it, perhaps even laughs at the ruler among trusted friends, and then goes to work the following morning and performs whatever small function the system requires of him. He may have excellent reasons. Speaking out may achieve nothing. Someone else may be better placed to do it. Why destroy one’s career? Why endanger one’s family? Surely one can accomplish more by remaining inside the system.

I have listened, over the years, to wonderfully brave and revolutionary conversations that never survived beyond the safety of the circle in which they were uttered. Today a WhatsApp group can resound with indignation, defiance and proposals for action, only for the revolution to expire quietly when somebody has to attach a name to a letter, appear at a demonstration or walk into an office and say publicly what everyone has been saying privately. There are often very good reasons for that retreat. The telephone revolutionary has a family too. He knows that the admiration of his fellow revolutionaries on WhatsApp will not necessarily pay his children’s school fees if his courage costs him his employment.

There is an irony here that I explored elsewhere when considering the declining fear that many modern authoritarian rulers appear to have of social media. A population may be permitted astonishing freedom to complain when complaint itself becomes a substitute for action. The pressure is released, everybody has spoken, everyone feels momentarily courageous, and the machinery continues running on Monday morning.

The difficulty becomes particularly acute when the ruler began as a liberator. A leader who comes to power through struggle possesses something an ordinary politician does not: moral credit. He suffered for the nation, fought for freedom, went to prison or into exile, and saw comrades die. The population therefore feels that it owes him something, sometimes a great deal.

George Orwell understood the danger particularly well in Animal Farm. The revolution begins with emancipation and gradually develops its own hierarchy, privileges and mythology. Yesterday’s comrades become today’s rulers, while the memory of the original struggle is repeatedly invoked to justify arrangements that increasingly betray its purpose. In actual political life, yesterday’s liberator can similarly begin drawing upon the moral account opened during the struggle. Criticism becomes ingratitude, opposition becomes betrayal, the party becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish from the nation, and eventually the leader from the party.

This is one reason education offers no guaranteed protection against authoritarianism. My Zimbabwean friend was proud that Mugabe had seven degrees. Perhaps he really had seven; perhaps the number had already entered the mythology surrounding him. It hardly matters. The assumption underneath the boast was more interesting: such an educated man must surely govern wisely. History has repeatedly demonstrated that intelligence, character and restraint are quite different qualities, and academic degrees, however numerous, provide no vaccination against the intoxicating effects of power.

I found myself thinking again about those long-ago conversations recently because of an American military officer. Major Jason Watson, an active-duty officer in the United States Air Force, publicly called for the impeachment and removal of President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance. He knew that an active-duty commissioned officer operates under political restrictions that do not apply in quite the same way to an ordinary citizen. He appeared in uniform, protested at the Capitol, was arrested, and placed his military career at risk.

The truth or otherwise of Watson’s political accusations has to be established independently of his courage. Sacrifice has never been proof of correctness; history is full of people who have suffered heroically for ideas that history subsequently judged mistaken or even terrible. What Watson’s action demonstrates more convincingly is the seriousness of his conviction. He was prepared to pay a price for saying publicly what he believed.

That distinction has stayed with me because I have heard so many courageous opinions that cost their authors nothing. A private denunciation among friends is one thing; the same words acquire a different moral weight when one’s name, livelihood, liberty or reputation is attached to them. The distance between those two forms of speech can be enormous, and there are perfectly understandable reasons why most of us hesitate before crossing it.

Malawi crossed it in the early 1990s because particular people crossed it first. Before the crowds filled the streets and before political change acquired the reassuring appearance of inevitability, there were individuals who spoke when speaking could still bring consequences. Clergymen used their pulpits when silence would have been safer; students demonstrated before demonstrating became an expression of the national mood; workers withdrew their labour while the coercive institutions of the one-party state still existed. Some people paid heavily for acts that later generations would remember simply as stages in Malawi’s democratic transition.

Their actions altered the calculation for everybody else. Once one person had spoken, the next person knew that he was no longer entirely alone; when another joined him, others discovered that fears and doubts they had imagined to be private were shared. Gradually the spectacle of universal obedience began to crack. People who had spent years looking at one another and seeing conformity began to recognise dissent. The apparently immovable system confronted a danger greater than any individual opponent: its subjects were discovering one another.

That may be one of the secrets behind the longevity of bad rulers. Fear isolates. Each citizen looks at the others and sees obedience, assumes from their behaviour that they believe, and therefore conceals his own doubts. The others observe his conformity and draw precisely the same conclusion. A nation can contain millions of people waiting for millions of other people to go first.

I wish I could remember exactly how I answered my Zimbabwean friend all those years ago. Perhaps I defended Malawi, perhaps I changed the subject, or perhaps I simply laughed. I now know that I did not possess the answer, and I am not sure that I possess it even today.

Fear explains part of the mystery, as do habit, self-interest, propaganda, patronage, nationalism, ideology and the perfectly human desire for an ordinary peaceful life. La Boétie was surely right to see that tyranny depends upon obedience, although experience should make us cautious about describing all such obedience as voluntary. Political systems can make disobedience extraordinarily expensive, which is precisely why those who nevertheless refuse deserve our attention.

Sometimes the refusal begins almost imperceptibly: a greengrocer removes the sign from his window, a priest says from the pulpit what people have previously said only in their homes, a student walks into the street, a worker puts down his tools, or an officer decides that silence has become more difficult to live with than the consequences of speaking.

Maybe this is the answer I should have given my Zimbabwean friend in Canada forty years ago. The mystery was never why Malawians allowed one man to rule them for so long, any more than it later became why Zimbabweans allowed their revolutionary hero to acquire the habits of the rulers they had fought to overthrow. The mystery belongs to neither Malawi nor Zimbabwe. It belongs to all of us.

Every tyranny therefore leaves us with two questions: what happens to a ruler when power gradually ceases to encounter restraint, and what happens to the rest of us when obedience becomes the easier way to live?

It may be, then, that my Zimbabwean friend was asking the wrong question. The mystery is not simply how one man manages to lord it over millions. It is how millions, each with his and her own perfectly understandable reasons, come to make this possible.