Another Sobran column, near the same time as the other one. Also more true
now than in 2001 when it was written.

The Regime of Fear

by Joe Sobran

December 4, 2001

A new Andrews McKenna Research poll has asked an interesting question and
gotten an interesting answer. It asked: "Which do you worry about more:
receiving an audit notice from the IRS in the mail [or] receiving anthrax
in the mail?" The IRS beat anthrax handily — 50 per cent to 32 per cent.
And the IRS did it without benefit of hysterical publicity.

This little datum throws a blinding beam of light on the phrase "terrorist
state." The modern state is, in essence, a terrorist organization. At this
point we can hardly imagine any other kind of state.

The prophet of the terrorist state was Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), author
of LEVIATHAN. Hobbes argued that men were driven by appetite and aversion,
and would exist in a state of mutual war — "every man against every man"
— without a common power, the state, to "keep them all in awe." He
conceived the ruler as strongman, and the subject as living in fear. It
was a profoundly amoral view of law and governance. The subject obeyed the
ruler out of fear for his life.

Hobbes' doctrine shocked people who had grown up in the Christian
tradition, which held that divine or natural law, not human will, must
justify positive law. St. Thomas Aquinas and others had taught that any
Law contrary to divine or natural law was invalid; this is the basis of
limited, constitutional government.

But Hobbes saw law as nothing more than the ruler's will. There could be
no moral limit on it. This doctrine leads logically to the modem
totalitarian state, which must be obeyed no matter what it demands. People
obey the Leviathan state because they are afraid of it, not because they
regard its demands as morally right.

The modern state at its most hysterical is portrayed in George Orwell‘s
great novel NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR. Orwell realized that modern conditions
had made possible, and very real, a Leviathan that went far, far beyond
anything Hobbes could have imagined. No seventeenth-century ruler enjoyed
the weaponry, financial power, bureaucracy, or instruments of propaganda
and surveillance available to a Stalin or a Franklin Roosevelt. In Hobbes'
day, and long after, a residue of personal liberty could still be taken
for granted. The complete abolition of privacy was inconceivable.

That has changed. We now accept the regime of fear as normal.

Not that today's United States outwardly resembles Stalin's Soviet Union.
But the principle is the same. The state rules arbitrarily, amorally,
threatening penalties for disobedience. You may get a bland, impersonal
form letter from the IRS or any other agency informing you that you are
"subject to" fine and imprisonment for "failure to comply." That's not a
gun at your head, but it's a threat all the same — from someone you have
never met who has unspecified power over you. I once knew a woman in her
nineties who received such a letter. It spoiled her whole day.

In the 1830s Alexis de Tocqueville, after visiting America, foresaw the
emergence of a new and mild-seeming kind of "democratic" despotism — a
centralized state, without overt terrors or tortures, ruling through "a
network of petty, complicated rules," which might be "combined, more
easily than is generally supposed, with the external forms of freedom."
How right he was.

Under such a regime, the individual may feel little terror and may even
feel free. He becomes like a cow in a pasture surrounded by an electric
fence. The cow feels an unpleasant jolt the first time she brushes against
the fence, but it doesn't kill her; after a spasm or two of terror, she
just gets in the habit of staying away from it, and ceases to think about
it. The active feeling of fear soon goes away, but the habit of avoidance
remains.

A state that threatens violence too openly may rouse the population to
resistance and revolution. But a state that threatens lesser penalties
with subtlety and apparent legality, gradually creating habits of
timidity, may find little opposition. Its subjects will hardly recognize
their own fear as fear. They may even believe the state when it assures
them that they are free — and that it is "defending" their freedom!
(Until they "fail to comply," that is.)

Terror tempered by tact — that's the secret of ruling most men. Leave
them some freedoms until they’ve forgotten what liberty means. Then you
can suavely pocket the rest.

--
"Evil preaches tolerance until it is dominant, then it tries to silence good."
-- Archbishop Charles J. Chaput

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