However, as Pascal noted, ‘Why do we follow the majority? Is it because they have more reason? No, because they have more power. that power resides in the state apparatus, which, like a harlot, will serve whoever has the money to pay it—to be exact, the legal authority to spend the money that the fiscal agents of the state apparatus take from the subjects. Pascal merely echoed the original Hobbesian argument. In the face of a majority backed up by an organized monopoly of the means of violence, staffed by fulltime professionals, cowardice is wisdom and the defeated submit to the winners, thereby authorizing them to do what they want. The citizens make themselves the symbolic rulers of the State by allowing themselves to be convinced that the majority rules because they want it to rule. According to the neo-Stoic Hobbesian logic, in so convincing themselves they merely follow the dictate of reason which tells every person that it is if not altogether pointless then at least all too risky to oppose the powers that be.