The chains we fasten on ourselves!

By Arian Galdini

We have seen it often enough in history.

One man steps out onto a balcony, raises his hand, and the crowd below erupts in shouts and applause.

In that instant it seems as if his breath moves history, his word decides destinies, his eyebrow is read as a barometer of the future.

Drones overhead, cameras, banners, words in capital lettes, Leader, Saviour, Irreplaceable, Father, Legend.

Étienne de La Boétie, five centuries ago, would have greeted such a scene with a bitter smile.

He would not linger long on the face of that one man.

He would look at him, sense his vanity, read his fears, yet he would refuse to call him the secret of history.

For him the secret lies elsewhere, not in the head raised high, but in the long line of bowed necks beneath it.

In his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude he does something that still unsettles us today.

He shifts the gaze from “the one above” to “the many below”, from the blade of power to the hand that offers the blade.

We have grown used to imagining tyranny as a curse that descends from above, a single man, ruthless, insatiable, hungry for control, who climbs up and rules.

La Boétie concedes that such a face exists.

He does not strip reality of violence.

The tyrant has an army, a police force, a repressive apparatus.

Yet he asks a question that shatters every oversimplified narrative, how can one man keep all the others in subjection without being toppled at once?

His answer is clear, cold, and painful.

Because they consent.

Because they hand it to him.

Because their submission is half his strength.

In La Boétie’s reading, the tyrant is not only a cause, he is also a symptom of a deeper disease, the human tendency to delegate to someone else the burden of one’s own freedom.

The tyrant is the tip of a structure, not its only architect.

Without those who, willingly, out of fear, interest, habit, or spiritual exhaustion, choose to stay small in his shadow, he would be nothing more than a lonely man with a great appetite.

Today we know that slavery does not begin with tanks.

La Boétie had understood that it begins with schooling.

A human being is born thirsty for freedom, yet generations raised under the shade of arbitrary power slowly forget what freedom looks like, forget how freedom feels, forget how freedom is defended.

At first people kneel because of orders and fear, unjust laws, exemplary punishments, the demolition of biographies.

Some obey out of terror, some out of impotence, some out of cold calculation, ”if I resist, they will crush me”.

Then fear thickens into habit.

Habit hardens into normality.

One day people begin to speak in soft phrases: “It has always been like this”, “There is no other way”, “Better to keep your head down.”

Children grow up watching parents close their eyes, whisper, calculate how not to collide with “the powerful”.

They learn that bowing is not a curse but a safe address.

Slowly, without noticing, they begin to read servility not as a stain on the soul, but as a normal way to survive.

This is the moment when the chain no longer comes from outside.

It has taken root in the heart.

A person no longer bends only from fear, but from a kind of comfort, “better here, in his shade, than alone facing the world.”

A people who have never seen freedom with their own eyes perceive slavery as climate.

And when the climate becomes “natural”, no one asks why there are shackles at the door.

The tyranny of the twenty-first century no longer walks only in boots.

It also wears the costume of spectacle and the cloak of the algorithm.

La Boétie had grasped that capturing the mind matters as much as instilling fear in the body.

Alongside the fist, the tyrant offers a toy.

Alongside threat, he offers gifts.

Alongside prison, he offers shows.

In ancient Rome this was called “bread and circuses”.

La Boétie speaks of feasts and spectacles, parades, courts, decorations, privileges distributed with cunning to feed the illusion that “they remember us too”.

In today’s language you would call them small subsidies, “relief” packages, political extravaganzas of light and sound, screens where politics is edited like a soap opera and the suffering of a country is sold as a series with a new episode every evening.

A large part of this work today is done by the algorithm.

It is the tyrant’s most loyal courtier.

It decides what you see and what you do not see, which speech to place at the top of the page and which to sink to the bottom, which shout to give thousands of reposts and which to drown in shadow.

Algocracy is when not only the law but also the order of news and opinions revolves around the needs and fears of a small ruling clique.

In this digital world, the capture of the mind goes even deeper.

It comes not only from stage and square, but from the feed on your phone, from the suggestion list, from the column “For you”.

In the moment you accept this as nature, slavery no longer arrives as an order, it comes as a “personalized” selection.

Around the tyrant in our time there is no longer only a physical ring of courtiers, but a whole army of anonymous profiles, trolls and troll militias who work all day to drown every different voice in mockery, personal attacks, and mud.

They patrol the virtual space as guards of fear and contempt, turning every debate into an unworthy brawl until the ordinary person says, “Better not talk, it’s not worth running into this wall.”

An algorithm fed with troll brigades, clicks, and hatred makes visible only the noise that serves the system.

The invisible message is simple, do not touch the root of injustice, deal with the décor.

Deal with the words, not with their weight.

Deal with the screen, not with what hides behind it.

A society preoccupied with backgrounds and special effects has no energy left to notice that the stage is empty.

Entertainment, in this context, is no longer a healthy rest for the mind, it becomes an instrument to tire the mind so that it does not ask questions.

For La Boétie, the tyrant does not stand on top of a flat people, but on a whole pyramid of intermediary figures.

He is the tip of the iceberg, the deep, cold mass is the countless individuals standing beneath him.

At the top, a single man with a name and a portrait.

Under him: a tight circle of friends and clients who receive almost everything from him, money, posts, security, immunity.

Lower down, commanders, ministers, directors, prosecutors, judges, administrators who know that their careers rise in the same rhythm as their loyalty.

Further down, office chiefs, people with files in drawers, structures that carry orders down into daily life.

Today, an entire digital layer has been added to this chain, clientelist portals, influencers with rented souls, opinion-makers with invoiced services, anonymous troll squads who guard the virtual perimeter of fear and mockery.

At the base: those who receive the crumbs, a job for the son, a small contract, a favour at the hospital, a minor tax relief, a local favour, a mention on the front page.

Each in this pyramid says, “I am not the tyrant.

I am just playing the game, like everyone else. I’m looking after my own.

I’m not the problem.”

La Boétie dismantles this self-justification with one cold sentence, every link that accepts to be part of that pyramid is a vote for voluntary servitude.

That person is not merely a victim.

He is a collaborator.

He accepts to be subjected upward, on condition that he is allowed to rule someone further down.

Flags may change, names, parties and slogans may change.

Tyrants may exchange the balcony for the screen, the podium for the profile, but if the logic of the pyramid remains the same, the claim of one man to be the centre and the bowing of many to be his satellites, the structure, in La Boétie’s terms, tells you that tyranny is still there, even if the vocabulary about it has changed.

La Boétie neither romanticizes the people nor merely demonizes the tyrant.

He sees two illnesses feeding one another, the illness of a man who wants to become the source of every fear and every hope of others, and the illness of a majority who accepts to make this man the source of everything in order not to carry the burden of their own freedom.

He sees people who grow accustomed to kneeling, who cling to someone else’s luxury hoping that one day they themselves will touch that thread of gold, who are dazzled by the spectacle of power like by a torch in a cold night, who rot slowly inside from fear, interest, spiritual fatigue.

There are people enslaved by force, with no real path of escape, for them the struggle is to survive without losing their face entirely.

But there are also others who do have a choice and decide to sell their dignity for calm, for a salary, for an armchair, for a morsel of power over others.

And if you go further in, you see that even the tyrant himself is a prisoner of his own thirst for adoration, a slave to the need for applause, terrified to the core by the possibility that one day the bowed necks will straighten and the balcony will be left empty.

The deepest wound is not the chain on the ankle.

It is the moment when a person learns to call the chain “normality”.

When the words “That’s how the system is”, “They are all the same”, “Nothing can be done” become a song hummed under the breath, servitude has seized the strongest ground: the heart.

In the face of this, La Boétie does not tell people to raise their swords.

He tells them to stop and dismantle their own submissive hands.

He does not cry “Take to the streets and burn everything”, but something harder, refuse to be part of the game.

Do not feed it.

Do not serve it.

Do not honour it.

Do not give it what it cannot seize by itself, your will.

He does not say that it is enough to hate the tyrant.

To cease serving him you must change the way you understand security, the way you see your career, the way you accept the comfort that comes from someone else’s silence and someone else’s compromises.

One man cannot chain an entire people if that people refuses to wear the chains.

He falls not when someone topples his throne by force, but when, at last, he lacks the body on which he stood.

To many this may sound abstract.

Yet La Boétie translates it into everyday language, the tyrant does not need you to love him.

He needs you to accept him.

Every time you, for a small favour, a small fear, a small comfort, choose not to disturb the order of that pyramid, you add a brick to the wall that holds you captive.

You yourself become a brick in the wall of your own bondage.

None of us passes untouched.

That is why the motto “Remove your brick” remains, perhaps, the only truly honest revolution left to us in our time.

Everything else is a fall into the same trap.

At least once in our lives we have known that strange calm that a “friend up there” gives, a hidden favour, a shortened queue, a closed eye, and later we have seen that this calm has added one more link to our inner chain.

Each of us has crossed that threshold where we have told ourselves, I too have kept silent in front of injustices.

I too have accepted an ease that I knew I did not deserve.

I too have been grateful for a door that opened for me while the same door slammed in someone else’s face simply because they did not have “the right person”.

Every time we have understood this, the calm of that moment has seemed less like a gift and more like a new iron ring around the soul, tightening whenever we want to say “no”.

Each time we tell ourselves, “I have no other choice, they are all the same, the system is like that”, voluntary servitude takes a step forward.

And every time someone else says, “I have no strength to overthrow him, but I have the strength not to feed him with lies, with servility, with cheering, with paid silence”, one invisible fibre is cut from the tyrant’s body.

Every country that has elevated someone into a cult, every era in which one voice has become law, every society where people say “Nothing gets done unless the powerful are involved”, finds itself in this mirror.

Tyrants may change costumes and slogans, may trade the balcony for the screen, the podium for the profile, but the structure that sustains them does not change unless the will of those who submit changes.

La Boétie does not promise a new world in a single stroke.

He promises something at once smaller and greater, the possibility that, even inside a rotten system, you do not become part of the chain that keeps it alive.

In a time when many complain about tyrants, he turns the question back to the self:

How many times have you chosen not to see, not to speak, not to oppose, just so as not to complicate your own life?

How many times have you accepted to commit a small injustice because “everyone does it”?

How many times have you felt that bitter peace brought by a “friend on high”, while somewhere below someone else paid the price?

For La Boétie, the tyrant is not the pair of eyes on the balcony.

He is a shadow enlarged by the light we ourselves give him.

The real chain is not the one hanging from our feet. It is the one we have consented to wrap around our own minds and hearts.

And in the moment when a single person decides no longer to kneel before another human, but only before the truth, the power of the tyrant begins to melt away, like everything that has lived more from the fear and submission of others than from its own strength.

The question that remains, for each of us, is not whether there will be tyrants again, but how many chains we are ready to break within ourselves before asking others to break theirs.

Arian Galdini