(no subject)

[timelets]

It is one thing to say that I may be coerced for my own good which I am too blind to see: this may, on occasion, be for my benefit; indeed it may enlarge the scope of my liberty. It is another to say that if it is my good, then I am not being coerced, for I have willed it, whether I know this or not, and am_free (or 'truly' free) even while my poor earthly body and foolish mind bitterly reject it, and struggle against those who seek however benevolently to impose it, with the greatest desperation.

...
unlimited authority in anybody's grasp was bound, he [Benjamin Constant] believed, sooner or later, to destroy somebody. He maintained that usually men protested against this or that set of governors as oppressive when the real cause of oppression lay in the mere fact of the accumulation of power itself, wherever it might happen to be, since liberty was endangered by the mere existence of absolute authority as such.

Isaiah Berlin. Two concepts of liberty.