The New Totalitarianism

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Published : September 28th, 2016
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Category : Today's Editorial

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.
 

 

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Nelson Hultberg is a freelance writer in Dallas, Texas and serves as the Director of Americans for a Free Republic, www.afr.org, an educational organization founded to promote sound money and fair taxation. Mr. Hultberg's articles have appeared in publications such as The Dallas Morning News, The American Conservative, The Freeman, Liberty, and on numerous Internet sites such as The Daily Bell, Financial Sense Online, and Safe Haven. He is the author of a soon to be released book, The Golden Mean: Libertarian Politics, Conservative Values.
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Excellent essay, sir! I wholeheartedly agree with your assessment, essentially repealing the Federal Reserve Act and the 16th Amendment.

I would only add the 17th Amendment as well, the direct election of Senators. Senators were intended to be elected by the respective state legislatures, so as to represent the interests of the State; while the Representatives in Congress were to represent the interests of the People. The fact is, direct election of Senators has only further diminished the interests of, and the rights of the states.
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Socialism is progressing insidiously under the camouflage of green politics, but the same deluded agenda which has always been propagated by the Socialists, and the majority follow like sheep. People are happy to be fooled into giving up their freedoms and responsibilities if they are given a 'holy' cause to follow. Beware the watermelons.
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Great commentary! Can't get enough of reality...even though it is most depressing.
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Proletocracy.

Excellent article. Could not agree more.

Proletocracy is a system where a majority of lazy proletarians democratically out-vote the minority of hard-working middle class and upper class. For example, Germany has already reached that stage. There, the government taxes the heck out of some 40 percent of the population, only to re-distribute the proceeds to the other 60% who vote for the government. The 60% will then keep the government in power, in order to receive future entitlements. The government dons the moral halo, calling the redistribution 'social justice'.

America is well underway to become such a society, too. To gain and to stay in power, any unscrupulous government needs is a slight majority of the vote, e.g. 51%. The government will then proceed to tax the heck out of the other 49% and pass on the money to 'their' 51% majority clientele, in the form of welfare checks, entitlements, freebies, useless + unproductive government jobs, unproductive government spending.

The middle class becomes increasingly poorer in the process, and eventually loose jobs, income, etc. these folks will eventually also depend on welfare. To ensure the welfare checks keep coming, they will now also vote for the government that promises them these welfare checks. Thus the spiral moves downwards to an ever larger part of population becoming poorer, and taxing ever more out of the shrinking middle and upper classes. This will be garnished with highly expensive but totally unproductive government programs. Everyone knows what these programs are. In the end stage of this development, every one is poor, and it will be not much different from the old communist countries. The creepy part is that this creeping in - slowly, and no one notices.
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I got a part way into this 'story' before pulling the plug.
The facts that are being massaged again are quite clear to anybody who wants to see. The big end of town pays next to no tax and has more outs than holes in a Swiss cheese whilst at the same time demanding that wages and conditions for average citizens are decreased to zero. That's where the real game is.
When one understands that the big end of town owns governments and does what is in its interests then one understands who is ruling the world. The result is huge (and growing) disparities between rich and poor with the big end unashamedly crying wolf with no end.
The writer of this piece of propaganda is either part of the big business end of town or is a journalistic wanker who lives in an ivory tower. The article is without credibility because governments, especially in America, do NOT serve the people and the few benefits the system bestows on average citizens is far outweighed by the fact that remuneration for the middle class has been falling for decades with it becoming the new poor.
Tell me all the benefits.....like health care for the poor. "Let them eat cake"!!!!
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I think you've entirely missed the point of the author--or you simply didn't read the essay. The truth is, you're right that the governments do not serve the people; however, you've missed the point of the author that governments have absolutely created a large subservient class of persons who are happy in their subservience to government (and big business, with our crony capitalist society for that matter) that they shout about getting their "Obamaphone" or "Free" healthcare or "Free" college, etc., ad nauseum. They've not been taught to think critically, nor do they care to. The vast majority of Democraps in the US couldn't tell you anything specific about how our economy or government works, but they can tell you who won "The Voice" or "American Idol" or name the Kardashians, and that's all they care about. This is by design, not by accident.
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Excellent essay, sir! I wholeheartedly agree with your assessment, essentially repealing the Federal Reserve Act and the 16th Amendment. I would only add the 17th Amendment as well, the direct election of Senators. Senators were intended to be elect  Read more
ramasart - 9/29/2016 at 11:21 AM GMT
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