On this 4th of July, here is an excerpt from a longer excerpt of JM Coetzee’s new novel, Diary of a Bad Year, due out in Jan 2008.

When the phrase “the bastards” is used in Australia, its reference is understood on all sides. “The bastards” was once the convict’s term for the men who called themselves his betters and flogged him if he disagreed. Now “the bastards” are the politicians, the men and women who run the state. The problem: how to assert the legitimacy of the old perspective, the perspective from below, the convict’s perspective, when it is of the nature of that perspective to be illegitimate, against the law, against the bastards.

Opposition to the bastards, opposition to government in general under the banner of libertarianism, has acquired a bad name because all too often its roots lie in a reluctance to pay taxes. Whatever one’s views on paying tribute to the bastards, a strategic first step must be to distinguish oneself from that particular libertarian strain. How to do so? “Take half of what I own, take half of what I earn, I yield it to you; in return, leave me alone.” Would that be enough to prove one’s bona fides?

Michel de Montaigne’s young friend Étienne de La Boétie, writing in 1549, saw the passivity of populations vis-à-vis their rulers as first an acquired and then later an inherited vice, an obstinate “will to be ruled” that becomes so deep-rooted “that even the love of liberty comes to seem not quite as natural.”

It is incredible to see how the populace, once they have been subjected, fall suddenly into such profound forgetfulness of their earlier independence that it becomes impossible for them to rouse themselves and recover it; in fact, they proceed to serve so much without prompting, so freely, that one would say, on the face of it, they have not lost their liberty but won their servitude. It may be true that, to begin with, one serves because one has to, because one is constrained to by force; but those who come later serve without regret, and perform of their own free will what their predecessors performed under constraint. So it happens that men, born under the yoke, brought up in servitude, are content to live as they were born…assuming as their natural state the conditions under which they were born.

Well said. Nevertheless, in an important respect La Boétie gets it wrong. The alternatives are not placid servitude on the one hand and revolt against servitude on the other. There is a third way, chosen by thousands and millions of people every day. It is the way of quietism, of willed obscurity, of inner emigration.