Oct16

A Treatise of Passivity (part 2)

by Charles Sasser on October 16, 2020 at 10:16 pm
Posted In: What I Think

A TreatiseCollectivism is the insidious belief that the group is of more value than the individual and that the standard of value lies in the tribe, the race, the community, the state. Personal liberty throughout most of humankind’s stay on earth has been the exception rather than the rule.

It appears collectivism, the roots of which are subservience and obedience, must dwell within the human soul. Those who seek power through the state demand subjugation of citizens and authority over them in exchange for assuming responsibility for them. If this is a bad crop year and the gods need to be mollified, why shouldn’t rulers take your virgins and sacrifice them for the good of the people?

A radio talk show host who knew my humble background in rural poverty asked how it was possible I could have accomplished so much, not only as an author but also as an associate history professor, police homicide detective, combat correspondent, Special Forces soldier. . .

“I couldn’t have done it today,” I conceded. “The first thing that happens to a poor kid today is that government welfare workers show up, preach that it’s not his fault he’s disadvantaged, and that he’ll accomplish nothing in life without government’s help. The kid believes it and gives up his independence, his will to succeed, his self-respect. Next thing you know, he’s dependent on government to take care of him while he resigns himself to living in slums in Detroit or Chicago and blaming “the rich,” “prejudice,” etc., for keeping him down.”

Dependency always leads to slavery.

A Scottish professor named Alexander Tytler explained his “Tyranny-Liberty Cycle” in which humankind historically and endlessly goes through the same cycle: Bondage to spiritual faith; spiritual faith to great courage; great courage to liberty; liberty to abundance; abundance to complacency; complacency to apathy; apathy to dependence; and thus, back to bondage.

Not one empire in history, ancient or modern, has not traveled—or is not currently traveling—Tytler’s Cycle. In the United States with the current turmoil and rush toward “social justice” and socialism, we are witnessing what will lead to the ultimate cultural, political, and economic fall of America and Western Civilization.

Aldous Huxley wrote in his Brave New World that “a really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive or political forces and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”

In my books Going Bonkers: The Wacky World of Cultural Madness (2003), Crushing The Collective: America’s Last Chance to Remain Free and Self-Governing (2017), and, forthcoming, Looneyville USA: America’s Descent into Chaos and Madness, I explore the history of how humankind from our most primitive days has evolved away from the individual towards the collective—and how such societies always end, always, in tyranny.

“We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope for man on earth,” President Ronald Reagan observed, “or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness.”

That is our destiny—darkness–unless we wake up and resist the direction in which this nation is being driven.

Journalist/author/historian Charles W. Sasser is author of over 60 published books and thousands of magazine articles.