How Voluntary Servitude

Creates a Reactionary Mind

Last month in this series, we took a look at the writing from La Boétie who lived in the 1500s. He asks the question, “Why do people consent to their own domination?” His core claim is simple and radical in a philosophical, not revolutionary, way. People do not stay oppressed because rulers are strong. They stay oppressed because people cooperate with their own subordination. Tyranny is not a top-down imposition; it’s a bottom-up offering.

This week, I want to connect this idea back to the book that we covered in February, “The Reactionary Mind.” Reactionaries are not simply nostalgic. They are committed to the principle of hierarchy and respond emotionally when that hierarchy feels threatened. People defend power structures they’re embedded in. People don’t just obey; they identify with the system. They may even romanticize the very hierarchy that limits them. Reaction is psychological before it is political. It’s about a fear of disorder and comfort in the known. It is a desire for social permanence and emotional loyalty to existing authority.

La Boétie helped us understand obedience. Corey Robin helps us understand what happens when obedience becomes emotional loyalty. This is when people don’t just submit to hierarchy but defend it. The hierarchy has literally become part of their identity, and they feel personally threatened when it is challenged.

In the last twenty-five years, there have been many threats to this hierarchy. Think about how the movement for Trans identity threatens hierarchy, the Me-Too movement was a threat, racial threats came from the reaction to the killing of George Floyd. Each of these movements challenge who gets to stand above whom and that is the deepest fault line in any hierarchical system.

Hierarchy survives because people get relative power from it, even when they don’t get absolute power. La Boétie describes a chain of domination. The tyrant stands at the top. Beneath him are a few powerful nobles who gain wealth and status. Beneath them are those who serve the nobles. And so on, all the way down. People defend the hierarchy because each level grants someone authority over someone else. Even if they are dominated from above, they can dominate below.

That psychological compensation makes the whole system feel tolerable, even meaningful. Reactionary politics is about defending the chain of hierarchy. Not because everyone benefits equally, but because everyone except those on the very bottom get a relative advantage. This is why democratic or egalitarian movements come to be perceived as threatening. People fear equality because equality means losing someone to stand above.

Corey Robin explicitly discussed this idea, the loss of status relative to others. There is a deep psychological pattern about hierarchy, obedience, and the human craving for status, which shows up again and again across history, philosophy, and political experience. It appeared in Milton Mayer’s “They Thought They Were Free.” There the hierarchy was about the Jews. It can be about any group. It is the hierarchy and the tyrant that are the constant.

La Boétie (1600s) and Corey Robin (today) both show us that hierarchy survives because people find identity and meaning inside it. Together, they expose a truth that liberal societies often prefer to ignore. Freedom is not humanity’s default setting. Hierarchy is. This is why every push toward equality feels destabilizing. It is why movements for gender, racial, or social justice trigger such intense reaction. They do not merely disrupt political arrangements. They disrupt the emotional economy of status. The danger for liberal democracy is not that reactionary movements exist. It is that the psychological soil that nourishes them is always present. The question is not whether these forces will reappear, but how will we respond when they do.

Next week is our freebie. If I have something pressing to say, I might add a post. But otherwise, all four series will have posts in June. Meanwhile, have a safe Memorial Day Weekend.