The Mob Has Always Been Eagerly Open to Bribes So Rulers Purchase Consent with Material Benefits Like Bread and Circuses

Specious ideology, mystery, circuses; in addition to these purely propagandistic devices, another device is used by rulers to gain the consent of their subjects: purchase by material benefits, bread as well as circuses. The distribution of this largesse to the people is also a method, and a particularly cunning one, of duping them into believing that they benefit from tyrannical rule. They do not realize that they are in fact only receiving a small proportion of the wealth already filched from them by their rulers. Thus:

Roman tyrants ... provided the city wards with feasts to cajole the rabble.... Tyrants would distribute largesse, a bushel of wheat, a gallon of wine, and a sesterce¹: and then everybody would shamelessly cry, “Long live the King!” The fools did not realize that they were merely recovering a portion of their own property, and that their ruler could not have given them what they were receiving without having first taken it from them. A man might one day be presented with a sesterce¹ and gorge himself at the public feast, lauding Tiberius and Nero for handsome liberality, who on the morrow, would be forced to abandon his property to their avarice, his children to their lust, his very blood to the cruelty of these magnificent emperors, without offering any more resistance than a stone or a tree stump. The mob has always behaved in this way — eagerly open to bribes. . . .

Here La Boétie proceeds to supplement this analysis of the purchase of consent by the public with another truly original contribution, one which Professor Lewis considers to be the most novel and important feature of his theory. This is the establishment, as it were the permanent and continuing purchase, of a hierarchy of subordinate allies, a loyal band of retainers, praetorians and bureaucrats. La Boétie himself considers this factor “the mainspring and the secret of domination, the support and foundation of tyranny.” Here is a large sector of society which is not merely duped with occasional and negligible handouts from the State; here are individuals who make a handsome and permanent living out of the proceeds of despotism. Hence, their stake in despotism does not depend on illusion or habit or mystery; their stake is all too great and all too real.

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¹From dictionary.com: A sesterce is a silver coin of ancient Rome, the quarter of a denarius, equal to 2½ asses: introduced in the 3rd century b.c.

—Murray N. Rothbard, introduction to The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, by Étienne de la Boétie, trans. Harry Kurz (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2002), 26-28.