Can any of you explain his point??
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. He who believes himself the master of others does not escape being more of a slave than they. How did this change take place? I have no idea. What can render it legitimate? I believe I can answer this question.
The most ancient of all societies and the only natural one, is that of the family. Even so children remain bound to their father only so long as they need him to take care of them. As soon as the need ceases, the natural bond is dissolved. Once the children are freed from the obedience they owed the father and their father is freed from the care he owed his children, all return equally to independence. If they continue to remain united, this no longer takes place naturally, but voluntarily, and the family maintains itself only by means of convention.
Aristotle was right, but he took the effect for the cause. Every man born in slavery is born for slavery; nothing is more certain. In their chains slaves lose everything, even the desire to escape. They love their servitude the way the companions of Ulysses loved their degradation. If there are slaves by nature, it is because there have been slaves against nature. (All men are equal, so it is against nature to enslave them. But eventually enslavement will make a man a slave by nature.... Force has produced the first slaves; their cowardice has perpetuated them.
The strongest is never strong enough to be master all the time, unless he transforms force into right and obedience into duty. Hence the right of the strongest, a right that seems like something intended ironically and is actually established as a basic principle. But will no one explain this word to me?Force is a physical power; I fail to see what morality can result from its effects.To give in to force is an act of necessity, not of will. At most, it is an act of prudence. In what sense could it be a duty?
Let's suppose for a moment that there is a such thing as this alleged right...... For once force produces the right, the effect changes places with the cause. Every force that is superior to the first succeeds tot it's right. As soon as one can disobey with impunity, one can do so legitimately; and sine the strongest is always right, the only thing to do is to make oneself the strongest. If one must obey because of force, one need not to do so out of duty; and if one is no longer forced to obey one is no longer obliged. Clearly then the word "right" adds nothing to force. It is utterly meaningless.
Obey the powers that be.
Since no man has a natural authority over his fellow man, and since force does not give rise to any right, conventions therefore remain the basis of all legitimate authority among men.
If, says Grotius, a private individual can alienate his liberty and turn himself into the slave of a master, why could not an entire people alienate its liberty and turn itself into the subject of a king?
Even if each person can alienate himself, he cannot alienate his children. They are born men and free. Their liberty belongs to them; they alone have the right to dispose of it. Before they have reached the age of reason, their father can, in their name, stipulate conditions for their maintenance and for their well-being. But he cannot give them irrevocably and unconditionally, for such a gift is contrary to the ends of nature and goes beyond the rights of paternity. For an arbitrary government to be legitimate, it would therefore be necessary in each generation for the people to be master of its acceptance or rejection. But in that event this government would no longer be arbitrary.
Even if we were to suppose that there were this terrible right to kill everyone, I maintain that neither a person enslaved during wartime nor a conquered people bears any obligation whatever toward its master, except to obey him for as long as it is forced to do so.
Thus, from every point of view, the right of slavery is null, not simply because it is illegitimate, but because it is absurd and meaningless. These words, slavery and right, are contradictory. They are mutually exclusive. Whether it is the statement of one man to another man, or one man to a people, the following sort of talk will always be equally nonsensical. I make a convention with you which is wholly at your expense and wholly to my advantage; and, for as long as it pleases me, I will observe it and so will you.
I don't know if he's saying that we all should give in to forms of slavery or if he's saying to resist powerful.