Celebrating the Winter of Love & the Worldwide Freedom Convoy Movement
“The importance of the event [the storming of the Bastille] lay simply in the psychological fact that for the first time the people received an obvious proof of the weakness of an authority which had lately been formidable.
“When the principle of authority is injured in the public mind it dissolves very rapidly. What might not one demand of a king who could not defend his principal fortress against popular attacks? The master regarded as all-powerful had ceased to be so.
“The taking of the Bastille was the beginning of one of those phenomena of mental contagion which abound in the history of the Revolution. The foreign mercenary troops, although they could scarcely be interested in the movement, began to show symptoms of mutiny.”
—Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution
This profile may seem like old news. The Canadian Truckers Freedom Convoy is so February. The hypnotizing bauble is now yo-yoing over the Ukraine. That’s what we’re supposed to be fixated on now.
Forget about the contagious burst of freedom that broke out in Canada—and especially forget about the emergency powers seized by Tyrant Trudeau without ever deigning to engage in diplomatic talks with the truckers, physicians, veterans, business owners, or ordinary citizens who gathered to support them.
But I cannot forget. And I will not forget. Because what the Canadian truckers achieved in that courageous act of peaceful mass noncompliance is one of the most beautiful expressions of what I described as the secret to capsizing tyranny in my second essay, COVID IS OVER! … If You Want It, courtesy of Étienne de La Boétie’s The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude:
“You can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free. Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.” (more...)
Profiles in Courage: The Canadian Truckers
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