- The real "opiate" of the masses

I’ve been thinking about how we’ve come to the state we’re in and when it comes right down to it, I think it’s all a result of a single pernicious idea. Somewhere along the line, a majority of the people in this country began to believe that our lives would be better if government relieved us of our responsibilities and managed them in our place. It’s not true of course… it only leads to a corruption of the spirit. It’s like an addictive drug, which rapidly spirals downward to a point where we are no longer capable of tending to ourselves and soon require government to handle everything for us. The real opiate of the masses isn’t religion; it’s the belief that somewhere there is a benefit that can be delivered without a corresponding cost.

But for the longest time, this wasn’t true in America at all. For the first 150 years or so, our country was a place that defined itself by its rigid embrace of individual liberty and along with that came the individual responsibility for it. We were constitutionally opposed to the idea that a man can be relieved of his responsibilities. He was free, but that also meant that he was free to perish if he didn’t handle his personal business. And the first and foremost of those was the duties to keep one-self alive. An early American had to find a way to eat, drink, have shelter, and to protect himself from the threats that lurk in every dark corner of the wild country. He was absolute master of his own fate and would prosper or perish by his own acts.

This kind of life suited the early Americans just fine since the common characteristic of many of them was the desire to throw off the yoke of someone else’s tyranny. They came from different places, spoke different languages, and followed different traditions, but they all wanted to be set free from the burdens placed on them by others. And when you build an entire society of these people, what you end up with is what we now call American exceptionalism. As a people, we continued to believe in the importance of “freedom” long after we had civilized the continent, and that idea turned out to have other side benefits. And through all of that, most of us continued to be comfortable with the idea that there was a cost to bear for this freedom and that we must each bear it on our own.

In the mean time while America was taking the cream of the crop from the “old world”, Europe was quickly becoming skim milk. When the most self-reliant people left for America, they seem to have marginally watered down the European gene pool. All that was left behind were those people who had either fashioned the yoke of others to work for them, or those who would prefer the security of those chains to the risk of being their own masters. When the rebellious and independent fled for the “new world” across all of Europe, all that was left was the fat and lazy masters and their docile slaves.

Then, in the first half of the 20th century, “the welfare state” changed the reasons to come to America. Some say that it started with Marx, but I don’t really believe that’s true. I think it’s more that the natural evolution of any society always leads to tyranny. I think if you look back at history, it was the self-reliant who built every society that history remembers, and the people who tagged along after the way was made safe for them, who inevitably choked it to death.

For example, western civilization’s thriving Middle Eastern cradle eventually became an antiseptic desert. For centuries now, it’s been populated by a people who can’t buy into the Augustinian idea that “reason is a source of truth”, because it requires too much self-reliance. This is an old idea in the west, really the oldest, but the easterners will have none of it. They would rather rely on their masters in the mosque to tell them what the truth is. Even Alexander said of Persia that there are no free men there, only “masters and slaves”, so apparently it’s been this way for a while.

In Europe, the people left behind when the self-reliant went off to the new world immediately began to “up their dosage” of societal morphine by embracing intrusive socialism in every corner of their lives. National health care, cradle to grave pensions, and state mandated employment are all either common place or being vehemently argued for. The people that are left continue to demand that someone somewhere step in and take their responsibilities before they ever consider doing them for themselves. They have even largely abandoned their own national defense, and demand that America protect them with one hand while complaining of American “arrogance” with the other.

And even in modern America, where the oldest cities have begun to look more like Europe than the wilds of North America, the people continue to show the least degree of self reliance for Americans, and are most prone to the intoxication of communal thought. These days it’s a rare thing indeed to hear someone demand more freedom from Boston, New York, or Philadelphia, unless the word freedom is totally misused. They talk about freedom from high health care costs, or freedom from unemployment, or freedom from the other risks of being master of your own fate. But the solutions they now suggest all involve giving the benefits to the people but handing the responsibility for them off to someone else. And because that’s so, whatever they promise, they only deliver chains.

I think it’s probably avoided much violence to always have a wilderness to run to. In the past when this “corruption of the spirit” began to take hold, the self-reliant would simply uproot and move on to build a new society in some other far off place, away from those who would make them slaves. But on that score we really have come to the end of the road. One downside of the global village is that the people are literally everywhere and there is nowhere left to go. So the question then becomes: Is America exceptional enough to reverse the tide? Is our social experiment, a society based on the idea of individual freedom, powerful enough to overturn the very nature of an evolving society? Can we still throw off the yoke without simply walking away from it like we have always done in the past?

It’s a good question… I wish I had a good answer. My first impression is that the people who have fashioned the yoke have never taken kindly to the idea of the peasants taking it off in the first place, and whatever their specific reaction to the idea, I can guess that it will almost certainly involve force. On the other hand, we’ve never had a peasantry so well armed as we Americans. And the 90 million gun owners in this country don’t generally take to the idea of being forced to do anything. I’m hoping that if we can credibly convince our rulers that we will respond to any force with force in kind, then we may indeed get away with not having to actually use any at all. These people who call themselves our masters are not fools. And it’s my hope that in the end they will act in their own interest.

Like I said, that’s what I hope. Then again, I’ve never seen socialism turned back any other way. One way or the other, it looks like we’re going to find out, because there is nowhere left for us to run.