Voluntary Slaves 

I’m writing this on April 15. I don’t have to tell you what day that is. If any day of the year should remind Americans that they have become slaves of the state, it’s this one, when we have to cough up a large fraction of our earnings — or else. Yet the implications of this never seem to sink in with most people.

“Well, we live in a democracy. Ultimately, we the people rule. That is what self-government means.” Really? What does ultimately signify? As a practical matter, it doesn’t help much.

Has someone from the government ever come to your door? If so, was he coming to do you a favor, or to demand something from you, with an implied or express threat of punishment if you didn’t obey him?

And was this government agent someone you voted for? Did he win his job in an election? Did you have any practical means of controlling him or removing him from office? Sure, you might be able to defend yourself by hiring a lawyer, but having to defend yourself against your government and its unelected, virtually unremovable agents hardly sounds like “self-government.” Elected officials don’t make house calls.

The slogans of democracy are empty, because the state, democratic or not, is organized force. That’s all it is. The usual moral norms of human dealings don’t apply to it. It claims authority no other institution does, including the authority to rob and even kill.

But don’t we still enjoy precious freedoms? Yes, indeed, and we’d better hold on to them very tightly. Most of them, like habeas corpus, are a legacy of Anglo-Saxon law, not democracy. They weren’t created by the men who rule us today. In fact the present regime would never have created our civil liberties, lives with them grudgingly, and often disregards them or actively works to reduce them.

Like roiling water, war often brings interesting things to the surface. During the long buildup to the Iraq war, allegedly (like all our wars) a war for “freedom,” advocates of war challenged the moral right of others to oppose the war, even in the planning stage. They grudgingly admitted the legal right to oppose it, but they clearly felt that such opposition was a form of insubordination, even disloyalty and treason, rather than an exercise of self-government and freedom itself. If you didn’t support our rulers in their desire for war, you were apt to be called “anti-American.”

Throughout the bitter debate, I was struck by the way pro-war people referred to the government — or that part of it that sought war — as “we.” If you opposed the war the Bush administration wanted, you were against “us,” on the side of “our” enemy.

A friend of mine observes that the state achieves its real victory when the people call the state “we.” It means that the people have become so servile that they no longer consider themselves separate from their masters.

When you reflect on this, it is simply amazing. I got the most furious reaction of my writing career recently when I criticized the U.S. Government for killing and maiming Iraqi civilians. I was accused of attacking “us.” I was given tortuous justifications for “our” policy.

Why do people feel they must justify those who tyrannize them? I think it’s because their self-respect is at stake. They don’t want to feel or recognize that they have become voluntary slaves of the state. That would be too humiliating. So they consent to their own servitude with a vengeance.

By defending the state, they can feel that they are on the side of power — which is true. They can also feel, in spite of the most obvious facts, the illusion of freedom. Like children sucking up to a schoolyard bully, they can pretend they are not in abject fear of what they defend.

What we are really seeing is total submission to the state masquerading as patriotism. Nobody wants to feel like a slave, to admit that his acts are governed by fear. All the rhetoric of democracy is designed to disguise these discomfiting realities of power.

The state wants us to think we are free. Our rulers themselves want to feel they are merely protecting freedom. Nobody seems to stop to measure the regime against the principles of the 1776, when April 15 was still a day like any other.

Joseph Sobran