A People Afraid Of Freedom Will Create An Authority To Obey

The problem with seeing others as demons is you begin to view yourself as an angel, and that anything you do is justified in opposing absolute evil. That is exactly the sort of attitude any authoritarian government wants to instill in its citizenry, whether it be the government of a tyrant or that of an unaccountable and secretive bureaucracy. Find an external enemy that is a threat to the unchecked power of the authoritarian state, find those people internally who oppose the authoritarian state, and tie them together as if they were working as one. Make as simplistic and evil a straw man as you can and blame all of your failures on it.

That’s what Hitler did. He blamed the German Jews and tied them into an international Jewish conspiracy. He tied in the socialists and the communists too as being part of that international Jewish conspiracy. Everybody who opposed the unchecked power of the state was part of a global conspiracy and the only thing protecting you from it was the state. The state was therefore permitted to trample over rights such as privacy and free speech.

When we think of authoritarianism these days, we think we need to be on the lookout against a modern-day Hitler, the Big Brother type that was warned about in 1984. But strong man dictators are a bit of an anachronism these days. And in 1984, big brother, if he ever was an actual living human being, was really nothing more than an imposing symbol of the state. No evidence of a real Big Brother is actually given in the…