Man is a slave insofar as between action and its effect, between effort and the finished work, there is placed the intervention of alien wills. This is the case both for the slave and for the master today. Never is man face to face with the conditions of his own activity. Society is a screen between nature and man. To be face to face with nature and not with men is the only discipline. To depend on an alien will is to be a slave. Now that is the lot of all men. The slave depends on the master and the master on the slave. A situation that makes one either suppliant or tyrannical or both at once (omnia serviliter pro dominatione). On the contrary, face to face with inert nature, one has no other resource than to think. The notion of oppression is basically a stupidity -- one has only to read the Iliad. And, a fortiori, the notion of an oppressive class. One can only speak of an oppressive structure of society. Difference between the slave and the citizen (Montesquieu, Rousseau...): the slave is subject to his master and the citizen to the laws. In other respects, the master may be very gentle and the laws very harsh: that changes nothing. Everything lies in the distance between caprice and rule. Why is subordination to caprice slavery? The ultimate cause lies in the relationship between the soul and time. He who is subject to the arbitrary is suspended from the thread of time; he waits (the most humiliating situation...) for what the next instant will bring. He does not dispose of his instants; the present is no longer for him a lever pressing upon the future. To find oneself face to face with things frees the mind. To find oneself face to face with men degrades, if one depends on them, and this whether the dependence takes the form of submission or that of command. Why these men between nature and me? Never to have to reckon with an unknown thought... (for then one is given over to chance). Remedy: outside of fraternal bonds, to treat men as a spectacle and never to seek friendship. To live among men as in that railway car from Saint-Etienne to Le Puy... Above all, never to allow oneself to dream of friendship. Everything is paid for. Rely only on yourself. Beyond a certain degree of oppression, the powerful necessarily come to be adored by their slaves. For the thought of being absolutely constrained, the plaything of another being, is unbearable for a human being. Therefore, if all means of escaping the constraint are taken from him, he has no other resource than to persuade himself that the very things to which he is constrained, he accomplishes voluntarily, in other words, to substitute devotion for obedience. And he will even sometimes strive to do more than is imposed on him, and will suffer less from it, by the same phenomenon by which children endure laughingly, when they are playing, physical pains that would crush them if inflicted as punishment. It is by this detour that servitude degrades the soul: for this devotion rests on a lie, since its reasons do not bear examination. (In this regard, the Catholic principle of obedience must be considered liberating, whereas Protestantism rests on the idea of sacrifice and devotion.) The only salvation consists in replacing the unbearable idea of constraint, no longer with the illusion of devotion, but with the notion of necessity.
On the contrary, revolt, if it does not immediately pass into precise and effective actions, always changes into its opposite, because of the humiliation produced by the feeling of radical impotence that results from it. In other words, the principal support of the oppressor lies precisely in the impotent revolt of the oppressed.
One could write in this vein the novel of a conscript of Napoleon.
And the lie of devotion deceives the master too...
Always consider men in power as dangerous things. Guard against them as far as one can without despising oneself. And if one day one finds oneself compelled, on pain of cowardice, to go and shatter oneself against their power, consider oneself vanquished by the nature of things and not by men. One can be in a dungeon and in chains, but one can also be struck by blindness or paralysis. There is no difference.
The only way to preserve one's dignity in forced submission: to consider the chief as a thing. Every man is a slave to necessity, but the conscious slave is far superior.
Social problem. To restrict to a minimum the amount of the supernatural indispensable for making social life bearable. Everything that tends to increase it is bad (it is tempting God). Misfortune must be eliminated from social life as far as possible, for misfortune serves only grace, and society is not a society of the elect. There will always be enough misfortune for the elect.