Wednesday 9 February 2011

Here's the bread, now where's the circus?

"..there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon..."

It's one of the questions we ask, you know, is the government pulling the wool across our eyes? Or worse feeding us bread and circuses so as to take us away from our slavery, our lives tied to the grind of the workplace where we earn money to pay taxes. Taxes that mean the government can give us "services".


And the scaring us - waving the "terrorist threat" before us, speaking of the "fear of crime" at every opportunity and feeding the news media with endless tales of death, disease and illness.


Behind these words lies a central message - the core message of social democracy:


"Everything in the state, nothing outside the state."


From our earliest childhood we are taught of government's benign mission - the lawyers and lawmakers are held up to us as shining beacons of goodness. And to do this as Jane Addams said:


"We must demand that the individual shall be willing to lose the sense of personal achievement and shall be content to realize his activity only in connection to the activity of the many."


This fascism of the spirit - this denial of independence is the dull curse of the fabian. The belief that a clever elite, sitting over us, can direct towards a better society and more that the route to that better society is through the perfection of people and the denial of individual rights.


This is the corrupted world of nudge - where we hand out the soma to those good enough to comply but punish, cast out, those refuseniks who reject the state's promised betterment. This is the ghastly world where our governors sell us freedom within the collective but punish us should we step beyond that and declare ourselves independent - in the words of Thomas Paine:

"The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren and to do good is my religion."

This idea of liberty - that rights are innate, not something granted by a benevolent ruler or else passed to us on tablets of gold - is crushed by the social democratic groupthink and the evils of 'progressivism'. There is no liberty in government. As someone once said:

"I am not a number, I am a free man."

So tell me, where are the circuses?

....

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Great stuff