Fernando del Pino Calvo-Sotelo on the slowly diminishing personal liberties in western countries and the steady expansion of state power:
… freedom around the world is more and more defined just by one measure, that is, the fact of being able to put one vote (lost among other 24 million votes, in the case of Spain) in an urn every four years. But who cares about all the other, much more relevant, civil rights? Freedom is being able to vote, but it is way more than that. However, democratic power holders have distracted us with political freedom while taking away ever higher degrees of personal freedom – while we turned a blind eye to the fragility of democracies, which soon move away from the utopian “government of the people”. Indeed, as Mill points out, “the people who exercise power are not the same people over whom it is exercised”. As stated by the Iron Law of Oligarchy, regardless of the apparent form of government (republic, monarchy, democracy, dictatorship…), all political power presupposes the power of a very small group over the vast majority of the population. Secondly, “the people can aspire to the oppression of a part of it,” that is, democracy may become the tyranny of the majority over the minority (made up of Jews, blacks, the rich…), a sort of mob rule, as the US Founding Fathers feared. For this reason, Mill recommended keeping democracy constrained by the same controls that prevent the abuse of power typical of the tyranny of an individual.
But the oppression of political power is not the only form of tyranny. As Mill described in 1861 in a remarkably prophetic paragraph, society itself can also exercise the subtlest of tyrannies, “a social tyranny more formidable than that of many models of political oppression, which affects much more details of daily life to the extent of enslaving the soul (…), that is, the tyranny of dominant opinions and feelings that seeks to impose by force its own ideas and practices as a standard of conduct to mold characters according to the preconceived model”. Today, the oppression of political correctness, decided by the global power agenda of noisy, powerful and organized minorities, is trying to stifle the once sacred freedoms of conscience, opinion and expression in an era in which free and truthful journalism is all but gone and in which social networks, the most dangerous societal control weapon ever invented, impose their slogans and release their hordes to lynch the dissident. New totalitarian ideologies want to dominate as new state religions of mandatory belief. Such is the case of the absurd and manifestly unscientific gender ideology (that would just be another stupid fad were it not for its goal of deceiving the youngest in order to “enslave their soul”), or of the ideology of the also unscientific and superstitious climate catastrophism. Not content with controlling our actions and appropriating our money through abusive taxation, the tyrants of today’s democracies seek to control what we believe and what we feel (and particularly, what we fear!).
Possibly never in history has there been such a brutal attempt to steal man’s freedom, and never has man been so blind, so sheepish and so helpless before those who openly wish to enslave him. In fact, we are being ruthlessly pushed towards a society of slaves of the State and of political correctness. Will we break the chains, now that we are still in time, or will we allow our children to be born already slaves wondering why their parents conformed and chose not to fight for their freedom?
H/T to Small Dead Animals for the link.
