Essai 7 — Unconscious Servitude, and the Escape from Evil

The pyramid of domination is strangely simple.

At its summit stands a single ruler.
Below them, a small circle of close associates.
Then relatives, affiliates, and subordinates follow,
until at the very bottom spreads an innumerable mass of people.

Yet what sustains this structure
is not the power of one ruler alone.

The fuel of domination is obedience.

In sixteenth-century France, the thinker Étienne de La Boétie posed a question more ruthless than the mere exposure of tyranny:

Human beings submit voluntarily.

Why do people willingly surrender their freedom?

The reason is neither fear nor brainwashing.

They seek security.
They want to belong to the group.
They wish to avoid bearing the responsibility of decision-making
and instead entrust it to someone else.

The accumulation of these small, individual acts of self-preservation
eventually gives rise to the massive structure we call domination.

People are not simply “forced” to obey.
They choose obedience.

Fire cannot continue to burn without fuel.
The flame of domination is no different.

Taxes, labor, trust, empathy, silence—
everyday actions offered in the course of ordinary life
become firewood for those in power.

There is no need to pour water on the flames.
One need only stop supplying the firewood.
Simply say, “I will not submit.”

That alone causes the fire to weaken, naturally.

The problem, however, lies deeper.

Human beings themselves desire to become fuel.

As demonstrated by the Milgram obedience experiments,
when commanded by authority,
even ordinary, well-intentioned citizens
can inflict harm upon others.

By abandoning thought and clinging to the excuse
“I was only following orders,”
they can participate in violence.

As Erich Fromm observed,
human beings fear freedom itself.

Freedom means the anxiety of continual choice,
the endurance of loneliness,
and the burden of responsibility.

Many cannot withstand this weight
and flee instead into obedience.

If one obeys, there is no need to think.
If one remains within the group, there is no need to face loneliness.

Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil”
lies directly along this extension of thoughtlessness.

Evil does not arise from madness or hatred.
It begins at the moment one stops thinking.

As Michel Foucault pointed out,
modern power no longer relies on beatings or executions.
Instead, it infiltrates the interior of the human being
through education, norms, language, and pressure to conform.

People no longer even recognize that they are being dominated.
They come to believe, unconsciously,
that obedience is “normal.”

Those who resist are always alone.

Obedience is easier.
Resistance invites exclusion from the group.
And resistance appears meaningless.

To choose reason
is, in effect, to refuse becoming part of the crowd.

I reflect on this.

Genes drive human beings toward the group,
seeking safety through conformity and obedience.

If that is so,
then refusing obedience, accepting loneliness,
and declaring “I will not submit”
is an act of rebellion against nature itself.

It is a decision to choose dignity over survival.

If one attempts to change the world through violence,
that force will inevitably be crushed.
Direct revolution no longer holds.

That is why I choose another path:
to leave behind words and images.

Not to illuminate the present,
but as a light meant to reach future forms of life.

To replicate thought as if it were genetic material—
I place my wager on that possibility.

Systems of domination will not disappear quickly.
But if thinking individuals quietly increase in number,
the supply of firewood will eventually run out,
and a social order that no longer requires domination
will begin to emerge.

And somewhere along this long, spiraling transformation,
I want to believe that humanity will once again
turn back toward freedom.

⸻

© Taro Kanoe
All rights reserved.

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