In Egypt the powers that be continue to defy the peaceful throngs in the streets. Yet their rulers’ clumsy efforts to mollify the courageous people remind us of something usually overlooked about the nature of political power, namely, that ideas, not force, ultimately rule, for as Jeffrey Rogers Hummel says, ideas determine the direction in which people aim their guns.
This was well known to the sixteenth-century French political philosopher Étienne de La Boétie, author of The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, in which he wrote that to rule, tyrants require the cooperation of their subjects. It is doubtful that many Egyptians have read Boétie, but in filling Tahrir (Liberation) Square unarmed, they seem to have grasped his thesis. Here is an appropriate excerpt for the occasion...
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