Salut les déviants textuels ! Let Tit Bee (Tomek) and M is for Montaigne (yours truly) are back with another edition of your favorite textually deviant podcast. The text under consideration in this all-new episode of Texting is the “seminal” Discours de la servitude volontaire. Translated into English as “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, or the Anti-Dictator,” this essay full of “revolutionary fervor” was penned by Michel Montaigne’s best friend, Étienne de La Boétie. Press play above to hear the entirety of your textually deviant co-hosts’ free-ranging conversation and explication de texte, during which they discuss, among other things, the Enlightenment, Reason and Nature, Orwell and elephants, agorism and voluntarism, force vs. persuasion, Shelley, Machiavelli, Voltaire, Thomas Paine, the PayPal mafia, crime families in the US, Trump’s cognitive incompetence, the corruption of absolute power, and the question of whether or not legitimate authority exists. You can also watch the unfiltered livestream and/or the edited video(s) below.
“raw” dawg:
“cooked” to perfection (with another killer thumbnail by Tomek):
clips:
Show Notes
previous pod on Étienne’s bestie (S2E11):
Delacroix’s take on La Boétie’s “burning desire for liberty”:
Would you voluntarily serve this creep (Lodovico Manin, the last Doge of Venice)?
Would you bend the knee to the Grand Turk (Suleiman the Magnificent, here depicted by Titian)?
“Imagine there’s no countries”:
“Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery”:
“Our so-called leaders speak / With words they try to jail ya”:
“Exit and Build”:
WWUD (What Would Ulysses Do)?
There are always a few, better endowed than ourselves, who feel the weight of the yoke and cannot restrain themselves from attempting to shake it off: these are the men who never become tamed under subjection and who always, like Ulysses on land and sea constantly seeking the smoke of his chimney, cannot prevent themselves from peering about for their natural privileges and from remembering their ancestors and their former ways. These are in fact the men who, possessed of clear minds and far-sighted spirit, are not satisfied, like the brutish mass, to see only what is at their feet, but rather look about them, behind and before, and even recall the things of the past in order to judge those of the future, and compare both with their present condition. These are the ones who, having good minds of their own, have further trained them by study and learning. Even if liberty had entirely perished from the earth, such men would invent it. For them slavery has no satisfactions, no matter how well disguised.
The Next Text
Believe it or not, Tomek has insisted that we do another tournament-style pod. This time the competitors will be the 64 Greatest Writers of All Time, and our 3-judge panel will include my sometime co-author G.J. Villa. In case you’ve forgotten how the tournament format works, I refer you to our episodes on musical artists and favorite foods (each of which was a two-parter):
