It is vitally important for Americans to understand that the collectivist
dictatorship of the future (that writers like Aldous Huxley and George Orwell
were warning us about) is not going to take over our country instantaneously
as in Nazi Germany or violently as in Soviet Russia, and certainly not by
openly declaring that it is going to take over. It is coming about very
slowly and subtly by the adoption of false ideas and a subconscious
self-deception among the intellectuals that lead our nation, by corruption
of the word symbols that the people use, and by a philosophical distortion
of the reality around them. Such deceptions and corruptions make the people
believe that what they are getting is some new enlightened kind of freedom,
some sort of “progressive,” “creative,” and “benevolent” government that will
erect a great utopia of material wealth, where all men will be perpetually
secure and successful no matter what the levels of their capability,
intelligence, and energy are.
The modern-day tyrant gains his power by telling the people that he is
going to make life more plentiful and beautiful for them than they are
capable of doing on their own. And in most cases, he actually believes he is
going to. He proclaims that their concern for freedom is “old fashioned,”
that they must go beyond such “simplistic desires” to a Great Planned Society
where enlightened bureaucrats and philosopher kings will guide them through
their life’s decisions and tribulations, relieving them of the responsibility
of their acts while providing them with all their basic needs. It is a siren
song as base as the power lust it springs from, and it lures the people of a
country into a collectivist slavery as sure as the darkness of night follows
the light of day.
Slavery Through Sophistry
“The world’s stable now,” said the Controller to Mr. Savage in Huxley’s Brave
New World. “People are happy; they get what they want, and they never
want what they can’t get. They’re well off; they’re safe; they’re never ill;
they’re not afraid of death; they’re blissfully ignorant of passion and old
age…they’re so conditioned that they practically can’t help behaving as they
ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there’s soma.” [1]
The statist controllers of our time use welfare entitlements instead of
soma to render servile the masses, but the principle is still the same.
Weak-willed men will always relinquish their freedom to government guardians
who promise them release from the vicissitudes of existence. And the means of
extracting such a relinquishment is invariably through sophistry and twisted
language on the part of both the tyrants and the victims, the tyrants because
they wish to rule men’s lives, and the victims because they wish to be ruled.
The latter wish is what Ayn Rand meant by “the sanction of the victim.”
Thus, it is a twofold process that allows the collectivist state to swell:
1) The weak-willed of society, under sway of the collectivist intellectual
elite, join together in large voting factions to gain control over the
government apparatus so as to mandate special privileges, favors, and
handouts for themselves at the expense of those who are productive and
self-reliant. 2) This formation of factions is brought about over the years
by distorting the concepts that define what freedom and tyranny are and what
constitutes each individual’s rights.
Evil is never tolerated by men of courage if they understand clearly that
it is evil confronting them. But feckless men, taught from birth that statism
is good for them and individualism bad for them, will readily vote for their
own enslavement. Many will even relish the subservience and forfeiture of
freedom that is required.
It is this fact, that large groups of humans are by nature willing to
accept a life of regimentation and obedience in order to gain personal
security, which paves the way for the monstrosity of the Leviathan. Men
possessed of strength of character never want to give up their freedom and
will fight endlessly to stave off such a fate. It is the craven who sanction
the tyrant with their anxiety-driven votes and their mobocracy. And it is
through the destruction of human language and a misrepresentation of reality
that good and evil are clouded to the point where they are indistinguishable,
thus establishing the philosophical justification for the growth of such a
monster government.
Compliant masses are the fodder that tyranny seeks, and the obliteration
of reason is the contagion it brings about. Spreading its ideological agents
throughout the nation like germs consuming a host cell, it teaches (in the
schools, the churches, and the media) that to be free and independent is
“selfish,” that making a profit is “exploitative,” that laissez-faire
capitalism is “unworkable,” that obedience to the majority will is “true
freedom.” A ready audience, eager to absorb such propaganda, is culled from
the conformist and fearful. The concepts of collectivism and state welfare
are glorified to the young, and the subservient among them grow up wanting
to become collectivistic, wanting to become servants to the government.
What is so alarming is that just such a subtle and sophisticated
indoctrination process is taking place today in almost every American
university.
Learning to Love Our Servitude
In the Introduction to Brave New World, Huxley wrote:
A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all
powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a
population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their
servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present day
totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and
schoolteachers. [2]
The “army of managers” Huxley was warning about is already upon us. They
are the statist intellectuals in our colleges and media. They have a powerful
control over the minds of our youth, and they’re turning them into the most
dutiful of young collectivists who “love their servitude.”
Huxley went on to say:
[U]nless we choose to decentralize and to use applied science, not as the
end to which human beings are to be made the means, but as the means to
producing a race of free individuals, we have only two alternatives to choose
from: either a number of national, militarized totalitarianisms, having as
their root the terror of the atomic bomb and as their consequence the
destruction of civilization (or, if the warfare is limited, the perpetuation
of militarism); or else one supra-national totalitarianism…developing, under
the need for efficiency and stability, into the welfare-tyranny of Utopia.
[3]
Huxley wrote these words in 1946, and our world today has proven him to be
amazingly prescient. Do we not now have the “perpetuation of militarism”
engaged in endless “limited warfare,” slowly moving toward a “supra-national
welfare-tyranny of Utopia,” i.e., a one-world government in the manner of
Sweden’s new totalitarians where a morbid egalitarianism robs our lives of
all meaning?
The authoritarian World State is not here yet, but it is on its way. When
it arrives, it will be as Tocqueville warned, “unlike anything that ever
before existed in the world.” It will be a dreadfully benevolent power that
“compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people” until they are
“reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of
which the government is the shepherd.” [4] Imagine a Swedish-style
social welfarism (with 75 percent tax rates) mixed in with a neo-fascistic
global corporatism in the manner of the original movie Rollerball
that has to contend with desolate outback sectors of the world like we saw in
Mad Max.
What Needs to Be Done
It is clear that Huxley was correct. Ever since 1913, the American
Republic has been evolving into a globalist cog of the authoritarian World
State of Brave New World and away from the free and sovereign
country forged by the Founding Fathers. Huxley saw it all coming, but was not
overly specific in telling us precisely how to “decentralize” and stop the
relentless expansion of government.
With the publishing of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and the rise of
libertarian writers such as Ludwig von Mises and Henry Hazlit in the 1950s
and 1960s, however, we were given a clear vision of what was necessary for
“decentralization” and stopping the relentless expansion of government.
If we are to stave off and reverse freedom’s self-destruction, we will
have to go back to the source of that destruction. We will have to go back to
1913 and purge our country of the two institutions established in that year
that gave the federal government the power to take over our lives – the
progressive income tax and the Federal Reserve.
Only when these two Marxian tools have been abolished can we stem the tide
of government aggrandizement that is destroying freedom and sanity in
America. All political causes that ignore these two sources of government
expansion are futile. Only by denying the bureaucratic Dracula in Washington
its life blood can we hope to restore what the Founding Fathers bequeathed to
us. The bureaucracy monster cannot grow without an income tax and
inflationary monetary policy. End these two powers so ignorantly granted to
Washington in 1913, and the Republic is saved. Ignore these two powers, and a
horrific World Government will be our fate.
Huxley gave us a remarkable warning in 1932 with Brave New World.
We must now summon the courage to act upon that warning. We must end income
taxation and government banking. Only when this takes place will we be on the
path to restoration of the freedom America was founded upon.
Notes
1. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, (New York: Bantam Books,
1967), p. 149. Harper & Brothers, 1932.
2. Ibid., p. xii.
3. Ibid., p. xiv.
4. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1994), Vol. II, pp. 318-319.
