False Prophets

Last night I watched Fritz Lang's 1927 classic "Metropolis". Made in Germany shortly before the Great Depression, and anticipating the ascendency of the National Socialists, the film painted a stark picture of a dehumanized working class being manipulated and exploited by wealthy industrialists. This, of course, was a common theme presented by progressives over the decades preceeding the film's release.


Fast forward 22 years to the release of Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four". In this classic novel, published following the close of the Second World War and anticipating the Cold War, the dehumanized working class are manipulated and exploited by intellectual elites. Orwell's work, like other fiction and scholarly works of the time, was in response to the rise of such repressive socialist regimes as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.


I mention these two works to illustrate how similar are the tactics used by those who would seek to control us. In each case, individuals advance to positions of power behind claims of intellectual and moral superiority. Though they are ultimately indistinguishible from one another, each group rails against the excesses of the other. Each marches behind false prophets claiming to know more than we do about how we must live our lives. Each gathers the forces of media to ensure a clear, united message assuring us that our obedience is a small price to pay for their magnanimity.


While it's easy for us, today, to identify the forces of progressivism which threaten our freedom, we must not allow the opposite forces to gain the same power we've ceded to those currently in power. If we do, we can be sure that the outcome will be the same: the loss of liberty.