Arto Bendiken

"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

You see ever-larger government, ever-greater concentration and abuses of power, ever-increasing regulations and taxation, ever-worse infringements of your supposedly inalienable rights, and you still think it's all going to, somehow, be all right. Well, what if it isn't?

Happy endings are features of fairy tales, Hollywood movies, and massage parlors, not of politics. If we look to historical examples (you know, like actually read some of those dense old-fashioned things called books), we are at present following a well-trodden script and this chapter does not conclude with a happy ending.

Wishful thinking does not dictate reality. If you think essential liberty once lost can ever be regained within the scope of the political process, you are living a pipe dream. If you think your vote counts for anything but legitimizing the process by which you are enslaved, you are delusional at best.

The reality is that human freedom peaked in the West at the end of the 19th century and has been in decline ever since. You are now living through the penultimate stage of that decline, yet you still cling to the notion that you are free. Pray tell, do you even know the meaning of liberty?

Did you even blink when the checks and balances finally failed altogether, when individual rights went out of fashion and were replaced by arbitrary privileges? Privileges your government graciously grants you, it can also take away at a whim — and so it inevitably does, one at a time, when it serves the interests of those who wield power over you.

You continue taking for granted something that no longer exists in anything but name only. It has not substantially existed for several generations; yet you still buy into the lip service given it.

If you truly believe you are still free, you are either ignorant of what freedom is, or living in denial. The poorest, most wretched farmer at the onset of the Dark Ages was freer than you are. Indeed, his descendant the medieval serf, two dozen generations later, was still freer than you are. Needless to say, the subjects of the Thirteen Colonies were freer than you are, both prior to and after their historic revolution.

Government today expropriates half the product of your labor, meaning you don't work on your own behalf for, typically, five or six months every year, and you have the nerve to tell me you are free?

Government has, inch by inch, appropriated the power to reach into every aspect of your life, from your bedroom to your bank account to your travel plans, and you dare call yourself free?

You are a living mockery of the very concept.

The truth is that we are no longer on the road to serfdom, we are well past serfdom. Medieval serfs, illiterate peasants that they were, would have already risen up and killed their lords long before those meddlesome parasites and looters could have subjected them to such excesses of government as you take for granted every day. But then, they weren't indoctrinated in government schools, did not have even the pretense of a vote, and certainly lacked cable television with six hundred channels.

The truth is that you are a slave. Like most everyone today, you were born into bondage. The present-day institution of bondage is called citizenship. It reached its logical conclusion over the course of the warlike 20th century, and it is now a treasured and protected cartel of sorts: without a citizenship from some nation-state or other, you are considered at most some form of unperson, and you don't fit neatly into any bureaucratic category but "refugee".

Put in the most elementary terms, modern citizenship is the notion that you don't own yourself, that a nation-state has prior claim to your life and to your labor, and that it can give or take away any of your privileges at its sole discretion. This is the reality of your existence today; but if you accept this notion and your degrading condition without protest, then you are indeed the meekest of slaves and are surely getting the government you deserve.

It is true that your government may still ostensibly claim to honor individual rights; this notwithstanding, in practice it has usurped the power to dispose of you in any way it wishes. Actions speak louder than words, and dead letters cannot safeguard your liberty; only living individuals can do so, and you have failed at it.

Don't mistake material prosperity and high-tech gadgets for freedom. Freedom in a box is no freedom at all, and a slave is no less a slave for being the property of an opulent household that keeps him well-fed, provides him a comfortable lice-free berth, and permits him to go about town without adult supervision. These extravagant privileges are granted him by his gracious owners who directly profit from his carefully contained unhappiness. They may be revoked at any time.

If you are like most people, you have confused technological advancement for the progress of civilization. For lack of understanding, you have predictably as clockwork acted out that age-old tragicomedy: you have peddled your inalienable rights for bread and circuses, sacrificed your sovereignty at the altar of the dole, thrown your essential liberty away at hobgoblins conjured up by scaremongers, and then called this progress.

Progress? You've done nothing less than sold your children down the river — and what's worse, you've sold mine, too. You've done your part in sowing the seeds of collectivism that have now taken root; through your participation in the hollow spectacle of party politics and the sham of the electoral process, and no less by your oblivious direct financing of its oppressive activities, you've helped legitimize the police state that is even now fencing us in. You are part of the problem, not part of the solution, and I damn you for it.

Now the familiar world you've grown up in is crumbling around you, and you refuse to accept the truth of it. How long do you think you can keep up the charade of see no evil, hear no evil? What will it take for you to no longer look the other way while endless individual injustices and tragedies at the hands of your masters and owners are piled higher every day, these acts committed in your name and on your behalf?

You have no doubt heard, countless times, the admonishment that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Yet it seems you have never imagined that this might apply to yourself. You have thus treated history as nothing more than a stuffy library filled with stories that could not possibly have meaning to you, save as occasional entertainment value.

Now that we are arriving yet again at a crossroads of history, this places you in the worst of positions: utterly unprepared, overcome by events beyond your imagination, and at the mercy of forces beyond your comprehension.

Should your freedom and prosperity ever be restored to you, it can only be through the efforts of better men than yourself.

You still deride as reactionaries and, heaven forbid, terrorists those your neighbors who are presently acquiring the means to defend their families from enemies criminal and federal, who are securing their life savings beyond the long reach of the senile bankruptcy of the nation-state.

Even a frog slowly boiled has more of a sense of premonition.

Your obstinate incomprehension is rooted in a basic cognitive bias, one that every unthinking animal shares: your future expectations are informed only by your own prior experience, only by your own vanishingly short and, in the broad span of history, uncharacteristic life, only by your own flawed perspective — one that you have bothered to neither examine nor enwiden.

You think yourself implicitly superior to earlier generations, your situation as utterly incompatible with theirs, their horrors of history having no relevance in the enlightened modernity you believe you live in. You take these premises for granted, as indeed have generations before you; yet you could not be more sorely mistaken on any of these counts.

You have yet to internalize that history rhymes, as Mark Twain said, because human nature is a constant. (That's why it's actually called nature, not nurture.) There is no blank slate, no escape from the demons within. Give them free rein in the political arena, and the outcome is time and again predictably terrible at best, unimaginably horrible at worst. Congratulations, you have now booked first-row seats to witness this up close and personal in the years to come.

You have yet to learn how shallow is the veneer of civilization, or in what a hurry it can unravel once breached. This transition now approaches as surely as night follows day. Over the course of the last century, Lady Liberty has suffered the slow, painful death of a thousand knives wielded by a thousand men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding. She is not much longer for this world, and with the benefit of hindsight you may yet find cause to miss her once she is gone.

Crouch down and lick the hands which still for the moment feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you ever crawled the surface of this fair, free Earth.