Whether
thugs succeed committing their crimes or are arrested before,
the result seems to be the
same: our “protectors” restrain everybody’s liberties. Most people
are proud to have all these free bodyguards, and don’t notice
that George W. Bush is never being searched by his.
This is only one illustration
of a much broader phenomenon: despite advances in science and
education (at least, in formal, universal education), mankind
hasn’t changed as much as we like to think, since the appearance
of Homo sapiens in Africa about 150,000 years ago.
Just think that we are now
the victims of a war of religion, as there have been so many
during the past millennium. But note that “our” side is also,
in many ways, much in tune with former times.
“We cure any disease” is the
emblematic, ubiquitous spam header. But the charlatans are also
everywhere in official medicine and the public health community:
they utter public-policy pronouncements that ignore 300 years
of economic analysis. The public health specialists will have
no rest until individual preferences are abolished and liberty
is cured.
Like in all times and places,
ordinary people want to be entertained, which explains what the
media, whether public television or private newspapers, offer
them. Having to revise one’s opinions is, for most people, threatening,
not entertaining. Hence prejudice and fashionable ideas —pidgin
environmentalism, for example—feed on and reinforce themselves.
In 1776, a French economist, Étienne
Bonnot de Condillac, tried to explain why the control of grain
supply by the French state led to shortages. People, he observed, “thought
that the one task of government was to procure them cheap bread.
The police regulations seemed to have been issued for this purpose.
In truth, they produced an opposite effect.” And, Condillac continues, “people
. . . regarded the grain merchants as grasping men who took advantage
of their needs.”
Perhaps economic literacy has
advanced a bit, if only because of the recent collapse of communism.
But I am not so sure. Obviously, they haven’t learned anything
in Zimbabwe, where the rulers blame the economic collapse on
vague enemies. Nor have the populists who now argue for controlling
the price of oil or health care, which are the corn and bread
of our day.
The last third of the 20th
century has seen the revival of witch hunts. Business executives
and financiers have been ruthlessly persecuted by pontificating
and self-serving inquisitors. Smokers are being “denormalized” by
their own government, even if the official jihad reserves the
term to their suppliers. Drug consumers and suppliers are hunted.
Pedophiles are convenient scapegoats: each time one is caught,
whether guilty or not, everybody’s social sins are expiated.
More than 200 years after Voltaire
and the Enlightenment, we are rediscovering formal, unashamed
attacks on freedom of speech. Hate speech is expanding. People
are prosecuted and even jailed for expressing forbidden opinions.
To borrow from Leonard Cohen, “Yes, you’ve come to this.”
Most people happily submit
to, and court, the authorities for the sake of bread, social
services and circuses. Democratic incantations have replaced
the divine right of kings. The statocrat is the new shaman. Except
perhaps at the time of the French Revolution, never has citizenship
been such a revered fetish, at the very time when citizens, in
any meaningful sense of the word, have become beggars, licence
carriers, and photo-ID clowns. Whether there remain enough citizens
left to reclaim democracy, or when the window will be definitively
closed, is a troubling question.
That mankind hasn’t changed
much is not surprising. Many of our preferences are hard-wired
in our mind, and the gene pool hasn’t changed in the last few
thousand years. What has helped man grow were the very social
institutions that are now being destroyed.
Thus, we should take very seriously
the pressing danger of tyranny, which has been the usual condition
of mankind in history. Institutional means to keep tyranny in
check were developed in the West, which culminated in the rule
of law (the rule of limited law), the rights of man and English
liberties, property rights and privacy. These are the institutions
that have been undermined in the 20th century, and are now in
accelerated decline.
With friends like our protectors,
who needs enemies? |
