O man! tightens your life inside of you, and you will not be miserable. [...] Your freedom and your power will extend only as far as your natural strength, and not beyond, all the rest is only slavery, illusion, prestige. The same domination is servile when it depends upon opinion, for you depends on the prejudices of those you govern by prejudices. To lead them as you please, you must conduct yourself as they please. They simply change their way of thinking, he will have by force that you change his ways. Those who approach you have to know the opinions of the people govern you think govern, or favorites that you govern or those of your family or thine own: These viziers, courtiers, those priests, soldiers, these lackeys, these stomachs, and even children, when you'd be a Themistocles Engineering, will lead you, like a child yourself in the midst of your legions. Whatever you do, never your real authority will go further than your actual abilities. As soon as he should see through the eyes of others, he must want their wishes. My people are my subjects, you say proudly. Either. But you, what are you? The subject of your ministers. And your ministers, in turn, what are they? the subjects of their clerks, their mistresses, the servants of their servants. Take all, usurp everything and then pour the money with both hands, erect gun batteries; raise the gallows, wheels, giving laws, edicts, multiply the spies, soldiers, executioners, prisons, chains: the poor little men, what you used this? you'll do no better served, stolen or less, no less wrong, or more absolute. You always say: we want, and you'll always be what others want.
The only one who does his will and he who does not need to do it, put the arms of another at the end of his own: hence it follows that first of all goods is not authority but freedom. The truly free man does what he can, and does what he pleases.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile or Of Education, GF-Flammarion
No. 117, 1966, pages 98-99.
No. 117, 1966, pages 98-99.
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