“The fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly (and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered): Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?”

Source: Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Last update Dec. 6, 2022. History

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Gilles Deleuze 35
French philosopher 1925–1995

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Context: Spinoza formulated the problem of the socially patterned defect very clearly. He says: "Many people are seized by one and the same affect with great consistency. All his senses are so strongly affected by one object that he believes this object to be present even if it is not. If this happens while the person is awake, the person is believed to be insane. … But if the greedy person thinks only of money and possessions, the ambitious one only of fame, one does not think of them as being insane, but only as annoying; generally one has contempt for them. But factually greediness, ambition, and so forth are forms of insanity, although usually one does not think of them as 'illness.'" These words were written a few hundred years ago; they still hold true, although the defects have been culturally patterned to such an extent now that they are not even generally thought any more to be annoying or contemptible.

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“The fundamental political question is why do people obey a government. The answer is that they tend to enslave themselves, to let themselves be governed by tyrants. Freedom from servitude comes not from violent action, but from the refusal to serve. Tyrants fall when the people withdraw their support.”

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This quote is a paraphrase of the contents of the first chapter of Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. The quote appears in an edition titled Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude edited by Murray Rothbard and Harry Kurz (1975), p. 39 http://books.google.com/books?id=6o-8P3iqf7IC&pg=PA39
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