“The [totalitarian] state is a tiger seeking to devour the people, and they must either kill or cripple it. Their own safety depends upon it.”
Benjamin Tucker, Individual Liberty
One of the overriding themes of history is the battle between servitude and freedom – between power being centralized in small groups who wield it over the many, versus power being dispersed in a more decentralized manner where the individual is free to control his or her own life.
“Freedom is the right to live as we wish. Nothing else.”
Epictetus
Recently, this battle has been one-sided as statist governments across the globe have gained immense powers at the cost of individual liberties. Freedoms we took for granted, such as the ability to control our body, business, property, or medical treatments, or merely to speak our mind, are under serious threat. An important question arises: Why do so few people seem to care about freedom these days? Why, in other words, are we permitting the emergence of a totalitarian form of rule and in the process allowing bureaucrats and politicians to control the most precious of all things, our one chance at life?
Some will claim that the answer is simple: When a crisis strikes, the common man or woman is incapable of acting in his or her best interest and so we need an all-controlling government to keep us safe. But such an answer ignores a crucial lesson of history: the closer a state approaches total control, the more the human race suffers. The Soviet Union, China, Germany, Italy, Romania, Cuba, Cambodia, North Korea, all these countries flirted with total state control and all these countries experienced social destruction as a result. What is more, the governments in all these countries used crises, real or manufactured, to justify the initiation and the continuation, of this suffocating form of political rule.
Totalitarianism is not a solution to any problem, totalitarianism is a social disease of the worst kind. A better explanation, than the false and ignorant claim of its necessity, is needed to account for the modern day acceptance of this form of rule. We will suggest that three main factors can account for this phenomena: firstly, the human tendency to accept the status quo, secondly, a school system that is effectively indoctrinating people to worship the state, and thirdly a population so overwhelmed by fear that most people are failing to think clearly.
