by Alessandro Fusillo
The enemies of humanity and fundamental rights (private property and personal freedom, from which all others derive) know perfectly well what formidable obstacle has always stood in the way of realising their aims: the unpredictability of human action, the impossibility of calculating the individual decisions of billions of people. Collectivist ideologies are manifold—from ancient mercantilism to modern globalism, taking in Jacobins, communists, nationalists, socialists, fascists, social democrats, national socialists, statists, adherents of the "World Economic Forum", and so on—yet they are all characterised by a common, defining element: dirigisme or constructivism. This is a way of understanding society and human relations grounded in the notion that the centralised regulation of human behaviour is possible according to top-down rules designed to shape coexistence along lines determined by a narrow group of individuals who arrogate to themselves the right to know better than anyone else what must be done and how. The specific content of such a mindset is irrelevant. It might be the vanguard of the proletariat intent on building the future communist society; Aryans bent on purging the master race of Jews deemed to defile its genetic purity; politically correct democrats seeking to silence anyone who does not share their reform agenda in the name of the common good; or, most recently, scientists pursuing the goal of protecting a recalcitrant population through the forced inoculation of pharmaceuticals deemed suitable to save them from diseases and plagues. The technique is single and unchanging: to create rules and enforce them through forms of violence ranging from physical abuse to imprisonment, from pecuniary penalties to the death penalty, from a pleasant "nudge" to the concentration camp. The common denominator, the recurring thread running through all these ideologies, their contents, and their techniques of domination, remains always the same: a more or less extensive group of psychopaths who, rather than devoting themselves to productive pursuits such as the production of goods and services and their free and voluntary exchange with fellow human beings, believe they have the right and duty to regulate the activities of others, and to do so at the expense of those regulated, who are coerced into paying for such an unsolicited "service".
The error of all constructivist approaches, as observed by Hayek (The Fatal Conceit), lies in the central regulator's pretence of knowing the preferences and decisions of the victims of its intervention. Such knowledge is by definition impossible, given that there is no possibility of calculating and forecasting the behaviour of billions of individuals. The stumbling block, therefore, for any collectivist is free human will. It is hardly surprising that this has long been under attack: both from a scientific and cultural perspective, at the hands of manifold doctrines and theories advocating various forms of determinism—whether philosophical-religious, or grounded in the natural laws of physics and chemistry—and, far more perilously, by increasingly effective systems of controlling the thoughts and wills of the general public. The dream of remotely controlling an army of willing worker ants has been pursued for more than a century through diverse techniques and with varying degrees of success. First and foremost, there is what is termed propaganda, or what might more accurately be described as mass hypnosis. Control of the media is one of the most effective systems for influencing and directing the opinions, thoughts, and consequently the decisions of vast numbers of people—indeed, of almost all subjects. Another element of crucial importance for controlling free wills is the education system, encompassing schools and universities: whoever can shape young minds from the moment of their upbringing has placed a serious and perhaps definitive mortgage on their future decisions and opinions. Further and more disturbing hypotheses involve mind control through pharmacological techniques, through the still only partially explored potential of electromagnetism, and using nanotechnologies that are now capable of replicating, at a microscopic and highly refined level, the crude animal mind-control experiments once conducted by implanting electrical probes into the brains of laboratory animals. A vast literature exists on all these techniques; some may appear, and perhaps still are, purely hypothetical, whilst others have a long and established history, making their existence difficult if not impossible to deny.
Moreover, these techniques have historically demonstrated remarkable and undeniable success. One need only consider the paradigmatic case of a civilised nation with a long and noble cultural heritage, such as Germany, enlisted almost in its entirety in the service of National Socialist madness.
Yet, until now, the efforts of constructivists have regularly and systematically foundered upon a small minority of people who have remained staunchly unyielding, impervious to any attempt to control their free will and independent decisions. Throughout history, this at times tiny band of courageous, irreconcilable individuals has been the safeguard ensuring our species remained human and did not mutate into the dystopian beehive envisioned by collectivists. Perhaps the mass administration of an experimental vaccine is intended to take stock of the resisters—those who have not been swayed by a propaganda apparatus unprecedented in human history. Perhaps we are few—though I am not convinced of this—yet that must not lead us to underestimate the significance of what we are doing. As long as a single person preserves their free will and finds the courage to say no to the collectivist criminals who wish to forge a dystopian new world, there remains hope for humanity. And I could not help but recall the closing lines of Jack Finney's "The Body Snatchers":
«There were others, of course, individuals and small groups who had done what we'd done—who'd fought, struggled, or simply refused to capitulate. Some must have won, some lost, but all of us who weren't caught and imprisoned beyond hope of escape had fought relentlessly. A fragment of a war speech went through my mind: “We shall fight them in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” It was true then for one people, it has always been true for all of humanity. And I knew that nothing in the vast universe could ever defeat us.»