FALSE ALTERNATIVES
For most people, it is no surprise to hear that their rights are slowly dissolving. They are aware of the creeping totalitarian flavor of Western society, the intensifying scrutiny of outcasts and outsiders, and the methodical approach of various "first-world" governments to dismantling a centuries-old framework of civil liberties. Even in cases where the person in question may have practically no concept of what has historically gone into the construction of the freedoms they take for granted, they are at least subconsciously aware that their lives are becoming more planned and arranged by forces beyond the individual's control.
Most of these people will take sides in what they think is a debate between liberty and security. On those terms, however, the fight is not winnable for the libertarian: it takes no soaring feat of logic to equate absolute social lock-down with apparent "security" for the masses, and that logic has been beaten into the public consciousness now for two entire generations. The government is our Protector, responsible for the overall security of the State; the government knows what's best for us, having access to privileged information we mere citizens would be unable to handle; and in some nations the government is even our Provider, taking care to make sure at least our basic needs are always met.
All of these things are convenient — moreso than the responsibilities that come with liberty — but have required us at each phase to give up a little autonomy and a little capacity for critical thinking. Where, a century ago, it would have been thought imprudent at best to rely on the Government for daily necessities, today we are so indebted to Government assistance that we forego the formality of looking into what is going to be expected of us in return. Culturally, we have cultivated an environment of subsistence on Government whim, from the arbitrary assignment of the value of our work to corruption-prone systems of regulation which affect nearly all of us on a very personal level.
In past ages, a society full of people collectively working toward a goal of zero responsibility would have been fatal to any nation. But today, thanks to great advances in science, technology and medicine, personal responsibility can be shirked without the larger threats to national cohesion or security. With large government and corporate bureaucracies devoted to micromanaging personal finances, medical care and liability, the effect on the large scale is similar to what might happen if we were managing these things ourselves. When one looks at the resulting society as a whole, it has a bustling economy, a healthy work force, a common culture, projects large and small under way, and it appears to be a functional society.
But if one looks at the average person caught up in all this, we can tell that something about our big successful State has changed fundamentally. His personal affairs are now a matter of government record and decree; his job, if not already assigned by a government office, is only the logical end of whatever education he is able to obtain. He arouses suspicion in supervisory bodies if his bank statements go out of line with what is mathematically expected; he is the target of psycho-demographic advertising campaigns which have narrowed his entire life experience down to a point on a chart. He is hardly responsible for anything except to keep doing what is expected of him: show up for work, go out once in a while and have too much to drink (but only drink), you know, the normal "This is what you do because you're here, because that's what we do because we're here" routine.
The average citizen can be easily made aware of all this, if he is not already, and most times you won't encounter an argument when you bring it up, but you will have the subject changed rather quickly. People know about this but they do not want to discuss it. If you do get a discussion going, it will most often reveal that people have been fed a very useful lie about their situation in life, and usually adhere to a false dichotomy when it comes to this subject.
On one hand, they say, "Complaining won't do any good." That is true, but when they say that, what they really mean is, "There's nothing to be done about it — it's just the way things are," which is not true. There is something to be done about it, which is why they immediately (sometimes without saying so out loud) will follow that statement with, "and neither will voting." Which, of course, is also true. People know the system is failing (or has failed), but rather than take what they assume to be a radical position against the system, they balk at the idea of change and feign a woeful resignation to the "way things are." These people know they are trapped — but they are wrong about why they are trapped, and by whom, or what. This first lie they believe is that they have no options and no power to change their situation.
Because most people will never receive higher education or directly encounter philosophical discussions beyond armchair politics, they are ill-equipped to process the information and events streaming at them continuously. It really is an information overload for anyone to try and assimilate everything that's happening in the world, even in a single day, much less global events over a span of centuries; nevertheless, the public is bombarded on a daily basis with video and headlines from all over the planet. Without the slightest inkling of established methods of dealing with these larger picture, often with the undertone that they ought to know what all of this means — and almost no interest in history — their natural defense is to grasp onto something familiar and ride it through the onslaught of events.
This creates a false antithesis of the lie that that people cannot change their situation to a very large degree. If they are trapped and losing ground, if they are feeling the crunch of the new way the world works, then it is because (they believe) the old way is under attack, and the only hope for survival now is to cling steadfastly to outdated ideas. We see resurgent religious movements in America; we see a drive toward the former "glory" of the Soviet era in Russia. These people are open to the idea that their freedom is under attack, and they will stop at nothing to turn back the forces of whichever evil they have been persuaded to blame, usually by political opportunists.
So, now they know they are trapped, and they think that there is either nothing to be done about it (and thus hate the topic and refuse to discuss it), or the only thing to do about it is to turn around and attack the perceived source of their persecution, the identity of which is always open to debate thanks to a naturally short human attention span (exacerbated by the media) and a generally uneducated population. The false assumption here that is always maintained (out of fear of what the reverse would mean) is that the threat to our freedom is some great external force or group or nation. (This, incidentally, is where the chief ideological difference between modern "conservatives" and "liberals" is rooted, as well — conservatives always blaming the crisis of the moment on some tangible human foe and liberals always doing their best to make a crisis of the moment out of any one of a thousand non-human issues like climate change or poverty or health care — although after the case against some enemy has been made, what proceeds directly afterward is usually pretty much the same thing either way).
But what if the threat is not an external one? What if the real threat — not the threat to our national pride, which is contrived anyway, or the threat to our "collective unity," which doesn't exist except in name, but the threat to our own individual right to exist as more than a self-aware blip on a Government or corporate diagram — is entirely internal? What if, by decades of building a Government to take care of us so we don't have to do it ourselves, we have created a system as interested in its own survival as we are?
