Tyranny During Its Reign Is Unrecognized by Its Victims

AIER

How does tyranny arrive and survive?

Tyranny is unalloyed evil that is pressed down mercilessly upon the unfortunate masses. In the minds of us enlightened denizens of 21st-century democracies, tyranny is the Reign of Terror in revolutionary France. To those of us who conduct real and regular elections, tyranny seems to be confined to such regimes — regimes distant in time or place and, hence, culturally remote from us.

Tyrants Are Always Believed

Yet the popular attitude toward them is dangerously immature. Every tyrant convinces large numbers of the people under his rule that he uses force exclusively for the greater good. Tyrant wannabes who fail to convince The People of these wannabes’ noble purposes never grab the power they crave. Each actual tyrant points to some problem — perhaps real or perhaps fabricated yet unfailingly exaggerated — the persistence of which will inflict on his beloved People unprecedented harm.

Tyranny is what happens to other people — to people less enlightened or much less fortunate than us — to people whose oppressors, unlike our own familiar leaders, rant crazily in foreign tongues, often while dressed in military costumes. Tyranny, it is believed, does not happen to us, for it’s not really tyranny if its stated goal is our salvation — if it promises to protect us from dangers that we are assured are real, large, and looming. And those few ideological freaks who recklessly insist on calling our saviors «tyrants» do not appreciate the need for quick and decisive action from the top. Tyranny, again, doesn’t happen to us.

We, after all, are complying voluntarily with our leaders’ commands, knowing that these are for our own good. If we were suffering the oppression of tyrants, we’d resist.

Hygiene Socialism Is Tyranny

Because tyranny always enjoys its victims’ widespread support, most people living under it are unaware of their ghastly fate. And so it is with today’s tyranny of hygiene socialism. Yet as with all tyranny, the truth will eventually emerge. In the future, people’s eyes will open to the exaggerations, half-truths, distortions, and outright lies used to excuse today’s tyrannical restrictions.

Someday people will look back on 2020 and see it as a year in which tyranny darkened the globe. Our children and grandchildren will shake their heads in amazement that the adults — the «adults» — of 2020 were so credulous as to fall for the hysterical overstatements and the deceits and duplicity used to justify this tyranny.

Read more…

Source: Donald J. Boudreaux | AIER

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *