Musings on the Mechanism
If governments explicitly spelled out the truth on all the “emergency measures” and “crisis responses” they have initiated during the pandemic — namely that not one of these new measures, powers, or mandates will ever be repealed, but rather, on the contrary, that every one of them will be expanded, and cited as convenient precedent, in perpetuity, to encompass an ever-increasing range of “issues” and “problems,” including a theoretically infinite number of matters in response to which you would never previously have thought such restrictive and rights-suspending measures could be a proportionate and reasonable government response — would the populations these governments represent still bow their heads for the yoke of these “emergency measures” as compliantly as they have done over the past twenty months?
I do not ask that question rhetorically, to strike a blow. Today, in all honesty, I cannot say with certainty that the majority of today’s world population would not accept these rapid-fire, endlessly evolving tyrannical impositions meekly, even if their rulers did spell the above truth out for them in the most concrete and unambiguous terms.
“You will be gradually but irreversibly enslaved by the State over the coming years, until there is nothing significant you may do in your life without the express permission of the State, without proving through various “obedience passes” — which you will be required to carry on your person at all times and produce on demand — that you are eligible to participate in any of the government-sanctioned forms of social life, economic activity, or ordinary public conversation. But, and this is the key, you will be enslaved this way for your own safety. Do you accept these terms?”
I am certain that many among us would answer “Yes,” without hesitation. Many more would assent after a few troubled nights of sleep. But how many would say “No,” unequivocally, were this question put to them directly on these terms, such as in a referendum? If the past twenty months have established anything, it is that we can no longer have any confidence in our fellow man, with regard to the question of freedom versus tyranny. Several generations lived under conditions of incremental encroachment, mass government schooling, socialized healthcare and collectivized “justice,” continual proximity to totalitarian ideas and apologetics, and the nihilistic materialism which reduces all human concerns to bare survival and physical comfort, have burned away much of what men used to be able to take for granted in their fellow citizens, such as the assumption that we all desire some measure of self-determination and personal responsibility for our individual fates.
No, unfortunately, that can no longer be assumed. Such a desire is now a hothouse flower, a strange remnant of old-fashioned thinking, and increasingly an object of distaste, or even hatred, among the bulk of mankind.
