Say you thought the human race could not be trusted with their freedom.
How would you go about subjugating a people proud of their liberty?
If you tried to do so by sheer force, you would most likely be unsuccessful. Once people have tasted liberty, they tend to be willing to die to keep it — that is if they do not kill you first.
Resistance to your overt suppressions would be spontaneous and fluid. You would be trying to stop a river with your bare hands. Every single stamp of your boot would create multitudes of martyrs and scores of new enemies devoted to ending your tyrannical aspirations.
Even if you somehow found victory through brute force, your legitimacy would hang by a thread. “Might makes right” is not only a dead letter among thinking men but an invidious invitation to imposters and imitators ready to supplant your rule. Not even tyrants wish to sleep with one eye open night after night. Even they wish to dream in peace.
But, what if, instead of this conspicuously violent approach, you were able to put the people themselves to sleep, to hypnotize them?
What if you were able to trick a free people into deceiving themselves?
What if, in the name of freedom, you could convince a people to forsake their freedom?
What if you could nudge them into a suicide pact in the hope of avoiding national suicide?
To do so, you would need to confuse people into thinking their liberty was merely a matter of sharing in the promises of power — say, convince them their right to vote and dictate to the lives of others was more of a basic 'right' than their individual right to think, speak and act freely — and then watch their lust for this power make them regard liberty with jealousy and fear.
You would also need to suggest liberty is just another good in a rigged and captured marketplace of ideas rather than the cornerstone of a just society.
You could then claim liberty should be “balanced” or even sacrificed for the sake of security, wealth, health, equality or the nation’s greatness. You could do this until the people themselves start singing the same chorus that all the solutions to all the world’s ills have a price tag marked with “our freedom".
“Power gives us a guarantee,” the people will chant, “and sets us free from the risks of liberty!”
If you, dear reader, do not think such an approach is feasible, I encourage you to look around you at what this approach has already achieved here in the “land of the free”.
One has to wonder, as an American: how free and independent are we truly from the managerial elite? Or, have we been hypnotized ever so gently by our big brothers and sisters to believe, in the words of George Orwell, “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength”?
Joey Clark is a native Alabamian and currently the host of the radio program News and Views on News Talk 93.1 FM WACV out of Montgomery, AL M-F 9 am-12noon. His column appears every Tuesday in 1819 News. To contact Joey for media or speaking appearances as well as any feedback please email newsandviews931@gmail.com. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News. To comment, please send an email with your name and contact information to Commentary@1819News.com.
