Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 16:57:42 -0500
To: Matthew Gaylor <freematt@coil.com>
From: Matthew Gaylor <freematt@coil.com>
Subject: The Regime of Fear by Joseph Sobran
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< http://www.lewrockwell.com/sobran/sobran220.html >


The Regime of Fear

by Joseph Sobran

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's 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 modern 
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 are 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's 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.

December 20, 2001

Joe Sobran is a nationally syndicated columnist. He also edits 
SOBRAN'S, a monthly newsletter of his essays and columns.

He invites you to try his new collection of aphorisms, "Anything 
Called a 'Program' Is Unconstitutional: Confessions of a Reactionary 
Utopian." You can get a free copy by subscribing or renewing your 
subscription to Sobran's. Just call 800-513-5053, or see his website, 
www.sobran.com. (He's still available for speaking engagements too.)

Copyright (c) 2001 by Griffin Internet Syndicate. All rights reserved.

Joseph Sobran Archives





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