Socialism
The spoiled brat of liberalism that seeks to control much of our lives, especially our money. Socialists will just end up spending it on candy for themselves and their friends.
A top-down model obsessed with the redistribution of wealth that promises it will work next time.
The main driver and benefactor of the dilution and redefinition of words, which is why it always predictably results in fascism.
At odds with the rule of law because the powers of central planning are arbitrary.
Austrian-British economist, legal theorist and philosopher Friedrich A. Hayek, had a great deal to say regarding the evident and unavoidable connections between liberalism, socialism, communism and fascism. He catalogued his observations in the Road to Serfdom.
He pointed out that few recognize that the rise of fascism and Marxism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies. Yet it is significant that many of the leaders of these movements, from Mussolini down (and including Laval and Quisling) began as socialists and ended as fascists or Nazis. And that long before the Nazis, too, the German and Italian socialists were using techniques of which the Nazis and fascists later made effective use. The idea of a political party which embraces all activities of the individual from the cradle to the grave, which claims to guide his views on everything, was first put into practice by socialists. To many who have watched the transition from socialism to fascism at close quarters the connection between the two systems has become increasingly obvious, but in democracies, the majority of people still believe that socialism and freedom can be combined. (1)
It is not a novel take, but he drives his concerns home with the often-maligned sentiment:
“They do not realize that democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is not only unachievable, but that to strive for it produces something entirely different - the very destruction of freedom itself. As has been aptly said: ‘What has always made the state of hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven.”
The book is a tour of socialism’s operating system, where Hayek combines humanist philosophy with historical record to deliver a compelling argument seeking to shatter the illusions and manipulations put forward by any system set on centralized planning. He was attempting to assist us in identifying and interpreting their tactics, lest we fall victim to the same deceptions as our forebears.
Any system trending towards central planning should rightfully generate concerns in the minds of citizens. Humans do not tend to manage power well, despite the glee with which many seek to accumulate it.
One of the most popular deceptions is the preying on the earnest interests of citizens through the deliberate ambiguation and redefinition of words. The craving for ‘freedom’ felt by citizens will take on a new meaning. Classically, it meant freedom from the arbitrary power of others, but socialists now use it to describe a sort of freedom from necessity and limitations. Ironically, this would only be achievable through the use of arbitrary powers that governments grant themselves, which is the opposite of freedom. Socialists used this change in meaning to carry out a redistribution of wealth, from the pockets of ordinary citizens to the coffers of the government. Socialism was to bring ‘economic freedom’ which they would argue is more important than all other freedoms.
People often quibble over the fact that since the communists and Nazis clashed with one another more than with others, that this someone places them in opposition to one another. Hayek points out that this only occurred ‘because they competed for the same type of mind and reserved for each other the hatred of the heretic. Their practice showed how closely they are related’. They never reached a compromise because this would interfere with their prospects of robbing one another’s garden for choice daisies. It is relatively easy to turn a Nazi into a communist and vice versa, and both sought to funnel incensed and idealistic young socialists into their ranks. A socialist seed grows into a fascist flower if you give it the right light.
The promises of a road to freedom are just the opposite, because the control necessary to produce such a thing is complete. A totalitarian regime will be forced to take control in ways that even they did not intend at the outset. Individualist ethics will be replaced with collectivist ethics, and one will always be sacrificed for the other. This is when invocations of the GREATER GOOD will occur, acting as cover for an impossible venture that they believed was clear and accessible. ‘Once you admit the individual is merely a means to serve the ends of the higher entity called society or the nation, most of those features of totalitarianism which horrify us follow of necessity’. All collectivist conduct will be regarded as imperative, and intolerance for dissidents will become public policy.
The MAID – medical assistance in dying policies in Canada glaringly exemplify the killing of the old, the sick and the downtrodden. Policies such as these are treated as ‘mere matters of expediency; the compulsory uprooting and transportation of hundreds of thousands becomes an instrument of policy approved by almost everybody except the victims’. Ordinary compliant and obedient citizens will ignore acts that would tend to cause a revolt because they are not subject themselves to these inequities.
Collectivists are neither compassionate nor kind, despite the rhetoric they espouse. A distinguished American economist, Professor Frank H. Knight, correctly notes that the authorities of a collectivist state ‘would have to do these things whether they wanted to or not: and the probability of the people in power being individuals who would dislike the possession and exercise power is on a level with the probability that an extremely tender-hearted person would get the job of a whipping master in a slave plantation’.
Hayek then brings it home with a sobering set of passages outlining the normalization protocols found in collectivist states:
“A further point should be made here: collectivism means the end of truth. To make a totalitarian system function efficiently it is not enough that everybody should be forced to work for the ends selected by those in control; it is essential that the people should come to regard these ends as their own.
The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those they have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognized before. And the most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words but change their meaning.
Even among us we have planners who promise us a ‘collective freedom’, which is as misleading as anything said by totalitarian politicians. ‘Collective freedom’ is not the freedom of the members of society, but the unlimited freedom of the planner to do with society what he pleases. This is the confusion of freedom with power carried to the extreme.”
Any system that necessarily eschews truth as part of its operating is inhumane by definition. The requirement for citizens to substitute their own will for that of the state could only be supported by the pathologically naïve or the remorseless psychopath. Public funds will be used to whittle our humanity through the use of coercive propaganda campaigns until we become destabilized to the point of malleability. The end of the road to serfdom arrives soon thereafter.
There are aspects of socialist policies that may benefit the broader context, but even then, there are many arguments that different approaches would prove more fruitful. Regardless of what you believe, the progression of collectivist ideologies that result in a totalitarian state with a dominant centralized planning structure will engineer a world that none one of us want to live in. Only the tyrant and the coward are at home in such dismal waters.
Liberalism needs to be reinvigorated regularly with freedom as its epicenter, lest it give way to socialism, the foreplay of totalitarianism.
Curiously, most socialists seem to forget that they are merely useful idiots in the cause to capture power, and they will be the first ones shot when they have outlived their usefulness.
Their ignorance of history is consistent with their ignorance of humanity.
(1) All excerpts from Hayek, F.A., The Road to Serfdom with The Intellectuals and Socialism, 2005, Reprinted 2010, The Institute of Economic Affairs, London.
Posted: 26 Feb 2023
