James Quotes the Original Etienne de la Boetie who seemed to be describing Donald Trump when describing the tyrants of his time…
James Corbett
Welcome back to #SolutionsWatch, that regular weekly deprogram where we consider and critically examine various ideas for changing your life and changing the world for the better. Say, remember back in 2015, remember my presentation on how to free your tax cattle? More specifically, do you remember how I concluded that presentation?
“Mrs. President, I have some news for you. Your successor, was not selected as we intended. Of course, the voting machines did show that he won by 63%, but there’s a slight hitch.
No one voted. Not one single person showed up to the voting booths. We still think we can pass that one off, but there’s more. Tax Day came and went. Not a single person filed. We’ve passed as many arbitrary laws that we could think of to make people internalize their own enslavement. but they’ve stopped wearing their party hats to breakfast. They’re driving blue cars in cities with the letter C in their name on Tuesdays, and many, many other flagrant and wanton violations of our edicts. It looks like you’ve lost, Mrs. President. We? We? Oh, I’m sorry. No, that’s not the deal. You’re the puppet. You’re going to be slaughtered. As for me and my friends, well, I’ve decided to join the winning team. I am no longer going to be your slave master or anyone else’s. Peace, love, energy. “
I’m out. Ah, right, yes, that’s how it ended. That entirely fictional scenario about a fictional future in which people decide not to vote at all, thus immediately delegitimizing the entire government and the ruling class in general. What pie-in-the-sky thinking is that, James? That could never happen in real… Oh, well, actually, for those of you who aren’t following the twists and turns of Irish presidential politics, something just happened in Ireland just a few weeks ago that’s probably worthy of our attention.
Irish News Reporter Reporting on the 2025 Irish Presidential Election:
So we’re here at Dublin Castle as the votes are coming in for the 2025 presidential election. Catherine Connolly is running away with it in pretty much all parts of the country and is in the clear lead. It seems unassailable now and that she will be the next president of Ireland. But one of the other aspects of this story which will get a lot of coverage is the sheer volume of spoiled ballots which are overwhelming across the country. For context, the highest number of spoiled ballots there have ever been in an Irish presidential election was 4.4%, and that was back in 1945, so quite a long time ago. And currently we’re seeing in Dublin West, the tallies are indicating 14% spoiled ballots. In Dublin Fingal East, it’s 11%, according to the tallies. In Dublin Midwest, it’s looking at about 21%. According to Dublin Wrath Downs tallies, they’re looking at 7%, 17% in Dublin Central, 10% in Galway West, 15% in Longford West Meath, 11% in Roscommon Galway, etc, etc. You get the picture. So the seismic number of spoiled ballots combined with a historically low turnout, which it appears to be the case that there’s going to be very few people who turned out to vote this time around, comparative to previous elections, I think that will be a major takeaway and kind of a seismic shift when it comes to how people have conveyed their feelings about this election.
James Corbett
Wait, did he say election or selection there at the end? Well, in any event, yeah, some interesting things are happening in Ireland, and I would like to give special thanks to a listener, Katie from Ireland, who wrote in to tell me about this development, because I certainly didn’t hear it in the news over here in Japan.
But Katie wrote:
“Hi James, I hope you’re keeping well. I thought this recent news from Ireland might pique your interest. We just had our presidential elections, and unlike previous elections, there were only two candidates on the ticket, plus a third candidate who was on the ballot paper but pulled out of the race. To be nominated, candidates must obtain nominations from members of the Senate, Parliament, or multiple local councils. The established parties used their power to block anti-establishment candidates from being nominated, while five left-wing parties rallied behind one independent, who was the eventual victor.
The rigged system blew up in their faces as people were livid over the lack of choice. There was an unprecedented spoiling of votes, almost 13%. For context, previous elections had roughly 1% votes spoiled. This appears to be a European record, if not a world record. Though the choices are limited, at least we are making life difficult for the powers that shouldn’t be and undermining their legitimacy. small victories.”
All right, thank you for that very informative update, Katie. That is the kind of news that I’m very interested in hearing about, so thank you for sharing that. And I don’t know, small victory? Maybe. But on the bigger scheme of things, it could be a much larger victory if people understood what was happening in a moment like this and what it really means. But if you do want to understand what this really means, well, you’re not going to get it from the usual sources in the lying liars of the mainstream media, where you could turn to, for example, the Irish Times for their take on this, why I spoiled my vote. Quote, I feel invisible to the Irish political classes.
Absence of choice is the overwhelming motivation for those who responded to an Irish Times call out, an Irish Times survey. So yes, evidently it seems people don’t feel represented in this selection for their presidential ruler. Interesting. Or you could turn to the Irish Examiner. Concerns raised over 200,000 plus spoiled votes in presidential election and For context, for Americans and others, 200,000 in a country the size of Ireland is a lot of people. The invalid ballots represent 13% of all votes cast on Friday and a more than tenfold increase on the number of spoiled votes in the last presidential election. You could turn to the newsletter, which says Irish leaders express concern that more than 200,000 spoiled their votes, saying that their unhappiness needs to be understood.
Oh, yes, they’re employing that Delphi technique to Oh, we hear you. We’re listening. We want to understand what’s going on here. It’s so hard to parse. If only someone could explain it to us. Yes, Irish misleaders, that headline should probably say. But if you want the one that really takes the cake, you’re going to have to go to the journal.ie and the fact checkers of the mainstream media who are always happy to tell you why. In actuality, there’s nothing at all unusual or interesting happening here, guys. Actually. As ballots are counted, misleading claims that the election was rigged spread online. And this report, this propaganda starts by saying, as ballots are being accounted across Ireland today, many fringe figures online are celebrating the high number of votes that were spoiled in this year’s presidential election. Some of those accounts are pointing to the number of spoiled votes combined with a low turnout as evidence that the election result is illegitimate.
You can see These establishment toadies wetting the bed, literally pissing their pants over the fact that people are calling out the system for what it is, a rigged and phony and illegitimate system at its base, and they’re refusing to play the game anymore. That, to me, is not just a small victory, that could be a very large victory if people understood the power of that action. And if you want to know a little bit about the power of such an action, let’s turn to another example, one that I won’t tell you what it is exactly yet, but let’s just say this was another selection in which there was a lot of spoiled ballots. And this is a recounting of the dramatic address to the nation that the prime minister of this European country gave after such a spoiled election. Quote, finally at 10 o’clock that night, the prime minister appeared on television. His face looked drawn. He had dark circles under his eyes, the result of a whole week of sleepless nights. And beneath the healthy glow of makeup, he was pale. He was holding a piece of paper in his hand, but he didn’t really read from it.
He just glanced at it from time to time so as not to lose the thread of his speech. Dear fellow citizens, he said, the result of the elections carried out today in our country’s capital was as follows. The party on the right, 8%. The party in the middle, 8%. The party on the left, 1%. Abstentions, none. Spoiled votes, none. Blank votes, 83%. He paused to take a sip from the glass of water beside him and went on. While we realize that today’s vote is both a confirmation and an exacerbation of the trend established last Sunday, and while we are in unanimous agreement as to the need for a serious investigation into the first and last causes of these troubling results, the government considers, after due consultation with His Excellency the President, that its legitimacy in office was not called into question.
not only because the election just held was merely a local election, but also because it declares and believes that its pressing and urgent duty is to carry out an in-depth investigation into the anomalous events of the last seven days, events in which we have all been both astonished witnesses and bold participants, And it is with profound sorrow that I say this, for those blank votes which have struck a brutal blow against the democratic normality of our personal and collective lives did not fall from the skies or rise up from the bowels of the earth. They were in the pockets of 83 out of every 100 voters in the city who placed them in the ballot boxes with their own unpatriotic hands. Another sip of water, this time more necessary for his mouth had suddenly gone dry.
There is still time to rectify this mistake, not by means of another election, which, given the current state of affairs, might prove not only useless but counterproductive, but through a rigorous examination of conscience, which, from this public platform, I urge on all the inhabitants of the Capitol, some so that they may better protect themselves from the terrible threat hanging over their heads, others, be they guilty or innocent in their intentions, so that they can either turn from the evil into which they have been dragged by who knows who, or else risk becoming the direct target of the sanctions foreseen under this state of emergency, whose declaration the government will be seeking from His Excellency the President, after, of course, initial consultation with Parliament, which has been convened tomorrow in extraordinary session, and from whom we expect to obtain unanimous approval. A change of tone, arms slightly spread, hands raised to shoulder height.
The nation’s government feels sure that in coming here, like a loving father, to remind that section of the capital’s population who strayed from the straight and narrow of the sublime lesson to be learned from the parable of the prodigal son, and by saying to them that there is no fault that cannot be forgiven, a heart that is truly contrite and wholly repentant, the government is merely giving expression to the fraternal will of the rest of the country, of all those citizens who, with praiseworthy civic feeling, properly fulfilled their electoral duties.
The Prime Minister’s final flourish—honor your country, for the eyes of the country are upon you—complete with drumrolls and bugle blasts, unearthed from the attics of the mustiest of nationalistic rhetoric—was ruined by a goodnight that rang entirely false. But then, that is the great thing about ordinary words. They are incapable of deceit. End quote. Yes, well, a very analogous situation to the one that played out in Ireland recently, perhaps a little bit more dramatic with a full, what was it, 83% of the vote being blank votes, but certainly apropos to what we’re talking about today.
And what exactly was the context of this? What election selection are we talking about here? Oh, this is from seeing. one of the latter works, shall we say, in the career of Nobel Literature Prize laureate José Saramago. And I would assume that there will be some in my audience who know of José Saramago, some who do not. If you do not, well, you will find that, yes, he was a Nobel Prize winning author and who was perhaps most famous in English for his work, Blindness, which was a tale about a town that suddenly all went blind all at the same time. And I do recall reading that book a couple of decades ago now, maybe almost three decades ago now, I’m dating myself, but I remember at the time not being overly impressed with that book.
However, recently, just a few months ago, and I don’t know exactly why, but I saw that there was a follow-up book by José Saramago to that blindness parable called Seeing, or at least that’s the way it’s translated in English. And I did read through it, and I was glad that I did, because it is about what would happen if a country overwhelmingly, the majority of the people, at least in the nation’s capital of this small, unnamed European nation, all decided to cast blank votes in the parliamentary election. What would happen? And from that, what would happen? You see the unfolding of this dramatic tale of essentially the collapse of law and order in this entire society.
And it’s satirical and it’s over the top and it’s funny and it goes wildly into a different course towards the end of the book. There’s a lot to commend this book to your attention. However, having said that, it will certainly not be everyone’s cup of tea. If you were following along in the video version of this and Barack was showing the text on screen, you will notice that there’s really very little in terms of punctuation here. There are no quotation marks. There’s very little paragraph changes. It’s just long strings of text. However, having said that, I think it’s a perfectly readable book, perfectly understandable, and some really, really incredible political satire.
But this follows that story of something like what we just saw in Ireland, but played out on a larger scale to a larger degree as part of a motivated campaign that doesn’t seem to be organized by anyone in particular, but seems to be the general zeitgeist of this European capital that Sarah Mago is writing about. People just decide that they are sick of the government and its lies, and they just all start casting blank ballots in multiple elections. And that leads the government to go essentially crazy. And the question becomes the question of their legitimacy, which you will note in that passage that the prime minister. Absolutely. We’ve decided that this does not question call our legitimacy into question.
I’m sure they did decide that. But the people have other matters to say. I will just leave it there in terms of the recommendation for this book. I think there are those in the audience who would very much enjoy this novel, and I think it is worth time and attention if you find that passage at all intriguing. But having said that, this is another example, I would say, of that phenomenon that we’ve had cause to note here on the Corbett Report before, that sometimes there are ways to understand something in a fictional or literary setting that you would not be able to simply write out in a non-fiction dry essay format in the same way. What would an anarchist revolution look like? Oh, well, the moon is a harsh mistress.
How could an anarchistic society function? Wouldn’t it just be taken over immediately by someone from the outside? And then there were none. What would it look like if people en masse decided to stop voting in the rigged selections? seeing by José Saramago. So there are ways to understand these things that I think are a little bit more easily graspable when they’re put in that literary form. But having said that, I hope you understand the point that is being made here and the point that I’m trying to underline today. Once again, the power in society still rests in our hands, not in the hands of the they-them-those controllers of everything who can absolutely manipulate anything, and they can do anything to us, and we’re such victims, oh, powerless us. No, quite precisely the opposite. They-them-those do not spend so much time, so much energy and so many resources trying to propagandize you into believing things and feeling things and investing your identity in this party or that party or this political candidate or that political candidate because those things have no meaning.
No, they do it because that is the basis of their perceived legitimacy. And if we withdraw our participation from their system, their legitimacy disappears like that. And that is the thing that the power controllers who are controlling our society fear more than anything else. The idea that you would stop playing their game. Now, this is not a new or radical idea. Quite the contrary. It has been around for at least half a millennium, which is something that I pointed out earlier on in that aforementioned How to Free Your Tax Cattle presentation, where I quoted Etienne de la Boétie. Mrs. President, sit down. We have a lot to discuss.
I’m afraid there’s been some setbacks recently. It seems that that little movement we were talking about is not going away like we had hoped. It seems that these ideas continue to be spread around amongst the peons and, well, we have been unsuccessful in our attempts so far to eliminate them. Recently, we discovered one of the texts that they are using to spread this ridiculous idea of theirs. The Politics of Obedience by Etienne de La Boétie. Listen to this vile filth:
James Corbett Quoting the Original Etienne de la Boetie2:
But oh good Lord, what strange phenomenon is this? What name shall we give it? What is the nature of this misfortune? What vice is it, or rather, what degradation? To see an endless multitude of people not merely obeying, but driven to servility, not ruled, but tyrannized over.
These wretches have no wealth, no kin, nor wife, nor children, not even life itself that they can call their own. They suffer plundering, wantonness, cruelty, not from an army, not from a barbarian horde, not from, uh, on account of whom they must shed their blood and sacrifice their lives, but from a single man. Not from a Hercules, not from a Samson, but from a single little man.
Too frequently, this same little man is the most cowardly and effeminate in the nation, a stranger to the powder of battle and hesitant on the sands of the tournament, not only without energy to direct men by force, but with hardly enough virility to bed with a common woman.
Shall we call subjection to such a leader cowardice? Shall we say that those who serve him are cowardly and fainthearted? If two, if three, if four do not defend themselves from one, we might call that circumstance surprising, but nevertheless conceivable. In such a case, one might be justified in suspecting a lack of courage.
But if hundred, if a thousand the caprice of a single man, should we not rather say that they lack not the courage, but the desire to rise against him, and that such an attitude indicates indifference rather than cowardice? When not 100, not 1,000 men, but 100 provinces, 1,000 cities, a million men refuse to assail a single man from whom the kindest treatment received is the infliction of serfdom and slavery, What shall we call that? Is it cowardice?
Obviously, there is no need of fighting to overcome this single tyrant, for he is automatically defeated if the country refuses consent to its own enslavement. It is not necessary to deprive him of anything, but simply to give him nothing. There is no need that the country make an effort to do anything for itself, provided it does nothing against itself. It is therefore the inhabitants themselves who permit, or rather bring about, their own subjection, since by ceasing to submit, they would put an end to their servitude.
A people enslaves itself, cuts its own throat, when, having a choice between being vassals and being free men, it deserts its liberties and takes on the yoke, gives consent to its own misery, or rather, apparently welcomes it.
Everyone knows that the fire from a little spark increase and blaze ever higher as long as it finds wood to burn. Yet without being quenched by water, but merely by finding no more fuel to feed on, it consumes itself, dies down, and is no longer a flame. Similarly, the more tyrants pillage, the more they crave, the more they ruin and destroy, the more one yields to them and obeys them. By that much do they become mightier and more formidable, the readier to annihilate and destroy. But if not one thing is yielded to them, if without any violence they are simply not obeyed, they become naked and undone and as nothing, just as when the root receives no nourishment, the branches withers and dies.
A people enslaves itself, cuts its own throat when, having a choice between being vassals and being free men, it deserts its liberties and takes on the yoke, gives consent to its own misery, or rather, apparently welcomes it. Some incredibly important words that I think we here in the 21st century are still struggling to internalize, understand, and apply. But if anything, I think the voters in Ireland are pointing to a potential way forward for those who are still stuck in the paradigm of believing that we have to vote. We have to vote for this slave master because he’s slightly less cruel than the other slave master. You wouldn’t want the bad slave master to get in and be slave master over you.
We want the good slave. If we could possibly get out of that mindset and start realizing that we do not have to consent to this system, in fact, we can display in a way that will be seen, felt, and heard by others, including that would-be presumed ruling class, then we can actually break the staff of that legitimacy in their face. That is an incredibly powerful thing, and it should not be underestimated. So yes, perhaps this tiny, insignificant little protest vote in Ireland means nothing. It will be forgotten tomorrow and swept under the rug, and Irish politics and politics all around the world will continue as it has before.
But what if… And if we do not take that into consideration, if we do not actually start applying this, if we do not create a movement that will participate in this mass throwing in the face of these silly paper ballots into the face of the ruling class, if we do not participate in such a rebellion, What do we expect? Oh, we’ll eventually vote our way to freedom. Just vote harder, guys. Man, 2028 is going to be the most important presidential selection of your life. Voting slaves, cast your ballot in the circular suggestion box. It’s ridiculous on its face and I hope that more people will start to understand the fundamental point that the legitimacy that the government has to rule over us is only that legitimacy which we give it.
It has no power over a people who have declared their sovereignty and refused to participate in the system. So having said that, the old anti-war cliche, what if they held a war and nobody came? Well, how about if they held an election and nobody came? That would be something. And I think the next best thing would be, okay, how about everybody came, but they all cast blank ballots or spoiled ballots. Wouldn’t that send a message that might have a ripple effect? Anyway, I’m just putting this idea out into the ether. And I think, first of all, I just want to applaud the people of Ireland who decided to not participate in that rigged and phony system, throwing it in the face of the government and their actually fact-checker toadies. And I hope more people will take that example to heart.
That’s going to do it for today’s very simple lesson. This is James Corbett of CorbettReport.com. Looking forward to talking to you again in the near future. Insane. Deranged. Crazy. The idea that would-be rulers would cynically use the lunatic cudgel against their political enemies is bad enough. But what if the reality is the complete opposite of what is commonly understood? What if the delusions of the dissidents are in fact real? What if their inability to fit in is not a sign that they are sick, but the society they are protesting against is sick?
In Dissent Into Madness, you will learn about the dark history and the disturbing present of political psychopathy. Descent into Madness. Watch the documentary for free at CorbettReport.com/madness or continue your education with the free psychology course at OpenSourceEducation.online.
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