This Day In History: Scottish Philosopher David Hume died on this day in 1776. One puzzle that Hume posed is especially pertinent today in the era of mass lockdowns. In his First Principles of Government, Hume wrote, "Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers."
200 years prior to Hume, Étienne de La Boétie wrote his "Discourse on Voluntary Servitude" wherein he wonders, "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!"
Henry David Thoreau thought about this as well: “Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. . .The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.” (Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience)
The need to obey may be instinctual and have been a way to protect ourselves in the past. We have been conditioned to obey for thousands of years, but that does not explain why we obey mandates from on high that are clearly immoral and even evil.
“We may be genuinely puzzled as to how people could obey commands that seem both bloodthirsty and stupid. Puzzlement can vanish when we realize that in the eyes of their perpetrators the hideous crimes of history are not hideous crimes at all, but acts of loyalty, patriotism and duty. From the vantage point of the present we can see them as hideous crimes, but ordinarily from that same vantage point we cannot see the crimes of our own governments as hideous or even as crimes.” (Don Mixon, Obedience and Civilization)
It was the great H.L. Mencken that figured out how easily we are manipulated: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
However, it is not compliant sheep that moves societies forward, but the few and the brave who are willing to disobey.
“Man has continued to evolve by acts of disobedience. Not only was his spiritual development possible only because there were men who dared to say no to the powers that be in the name of their conscience or their faith, but also his intellectual development was dependent on the capacity for being disobedient, disobedient to authorities who tried to muzzle new thoughts and to the authority of long-established opinions which declared a change to be nonsense.” (Erich Fromm, On Disobedience and Other Essays)
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David Hume: How Easily the Masses are Manipulated by the Few
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