“A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.” Ezra Pound. Life is full of misery, loneness and suffering.” Woody Allen. “Misery is a communicable disease.” Martha Graham. “Misery love company.” Old saying. “Like most misery it started with apparent happiness.” Marcus Zusak.
Obviously slavery is misery, unless, of course you know no other life condition then it just becomes a rigorous form of life necessary to get through each day. Of course, you compare your condition with that of your slave masters but other than oral tradition of how it was so much worse in the bad old days you have no other comparisons to make. Of course, it is the slave masters who control the narrative so that you know how much better your life is now than it was “Then.” You dream of being lifted out of your condition and raised to the lifestyle of an overseer but you know in you heart that isn’t going to happen.
But there is in the dark recesses of the mind and spoken about only in secret another oral tradition of how once, not so very long ago, your people had free will and could use that free will to construct social compacts that allowed for the liberty to do what you would so long as you did not unnecessarily impinge upon the freedom of other individuals within the social compact. You traded part of your free will for the protection of a society wherein individuals achieved according to their abilities. It wasn’t perfect but it was much preferable to the other types of societies that existed. Then you were seduced to trade even more of that individual freedom for other things. People who did not succeed as well as others thought it proper to institute equity of outcome and when applied by those who styled themselves as intellectuals possessed of the arcane wisdom of how to structure society, but in truth were simply political overseers, it acted as a disaffecting mechanism for those who did try to achieve. Why work when the government will take the better part of your success and gift it to others; and so the achievers quit and signed on to the dole.
With government support for recreational drugs and laws like those of hate speech where hurt feelings are considered the same as physical assaults plus government and media collusion about what can and can’t be reported publicly you have now become a society of slaves. That’s what authoritarianism is all about: slaves and overseers. The history of authoritarianism is rooted in the myth of the greatest good for the greatest number and the promise that no one is any better off than anyone else. It can come about through revolution or it can happen through incrementalism. The latter is what has overtaken the United States. Incrementally, the citizens, under pressure from politicians, social justice warriors, the media and yes, foreign entities interested in destroying the US as a major player in world decisions, have gradually traded their freedom of action and thought for the safety of collectivism.
Getting there is very easy. Getting back is almost impossible. So perhaps we should be concentrating more on not going in the first place. “1984” wasn’t just the dystopian imaginings of Eric Blair, it was a warning of what happens when you trade freedom for security, whether it’s security from physical harm or just being offended. As Zusak warns, “Like most misery it started with apparent happiness.”