“Those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it.”
(George Santayana)

Paul Gosselin (7/7/2025)

I was a bit disappointed after buying this book in that this turned out to be the light version of Hayek essay. I was not aware that there was original, unabridged version and a condensed version. Oh well...

Like others coming out of WWII, Hayek wanted to figure out how the West had sunk so low, unleashing wars on an unprecedented scale and unknown horrors. How did the West come to this? Hayek's book is a challenging read. Describing how the totalitarian mindset gains traction and overthrows traditional values, Hayek observes (1944/2013: 55)

The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those they have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognized before. And the most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words but change their meaning. Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as this complete perversion of language[1].

All of which reminds us of government propaganda and language manipulation during the Covid crisis as well as propaganda promoting the postmodern sexual jihad. Regarding the silencing of dissidents under the Covid crisis (or the Global Warming/Climate Change controversy), Hayek lectures us (1944/2013: 55)

It is not difficult to deprive the great majority of independent thought. But the minority who will retain an inclination to criticize must also be silenced. Public criticism or even expressions of doubt must be suppressed because they tend to weaken support of the regime. As Sidney and Beatrice Webb report of the position in every Russian [Soviet - PG] enterprise: ‘Whilst the work is in progress, any public expression of doubt that the plan will be successful is an act of disloyalty and even of treachery because of its possible effect on the will and efforts of the rest of the staff.'

The behaviour Hayek describes is a common trait of postmodern leaders in 2025, muzzling dissent. The herd must not venture out of the stockyard. This is the motivation for Cancel Culture and algorithmic censorship on social media (violations of community standards). Early on in his essay, Hayek makes the point that economic liberty, by means of private property, is the real, tangible basis for freedom (1944/2013: 41-42)

Our generation has forgotten that the system of private property is the most important guarantee of freedom. It is only because the control of the means of production is divided among many people acting independently that we as individuals can decide what to do with ourselves. When all the means of production are vested in a single hand, whether it be nominally that of ‘society' as a whole or that of a dictator, whoever exercises this control has complete power over us. In the hands of private individuals, what is called economic power can be an instrument of coercion, but it is never control over the whole life of a person. But when economic power is centralized as an instrument of political power it creates a degree of dependence scarcely distinguishable from slavery.

While I cannot ascertain whether CS Lewis had read Hayek or been influenced by him, but it is clear he had been chewing on the same issues... In an article initially published in 1958 (Is Progress Possible?), Lewis refers to a number of issues raised by Hayek's Road to Serfdom. (Lewis 1958/2002: 314)

The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good — anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name 'leaders' for those who were once 'rulers'. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them [the totalitarians - PG], 'Mind your own business.' Our whole lives are their business.
I write 'they' because it seems childish not to recognize that actual government is and always must be oligarchical. Our effective masters must be more than one and fewer than all. But the oligarchs begin to regard us in a new way.
Here, I think, lies our real dilemma. Probably we cannot, certainly we shall not, retrace our steps. We are tamed animals (some with kind, some with cruel, masters) and should probably starve if we got out of our cage. That is one horn of the dilemma. But in an increasingly planned society, how much of what I value can survive? That is the other horn.
I believe a man is happier, and happy in a richer way, if he has 'the freeborn mind'. But I doubt whether he can have this without economic independence, which the new society is abolishing. For economic independence allows an education not controlled by Government; and in adult life it is the man who needs, and asks, nothing of Government who can criticise its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology. Read Montaigne; that's the voice of a man with his legs under his own table, eating the mutton and turnips raised on his own land. Who will talk like that when the State is everyone's schoolmaster and employer? Admittedly, when man was untamed, such liberty belonged only to the few. I know. Hence the horrible suspicion that our only choice is between societies with few freemen and societies with none.

In the quote above, Lewis talks about the modern State, but he might have more pointedly used the expression totalitarian State or simply totalitarian ideologues. This would draw attention not only to Nazism under Hitler, Fascism under Mussolini, Communism under Stalin or even the workings of the Chinese Communist Party in the 21^st century, but also to neo-totalitarian views shared by many Western elites today. One must face the fact that the “it couldn't happen here” meme is a trap. It is an obstacle to asking serious questions about the state of the postmodern West. Like Hayek, Lewis nails the link between liberty generally and economic liberty. With a cashless society now being zealously promoted by ubiquitous Davos pawns (in the name of convenience or inevitable progress) this matter demands serious thought as the State or a One World Government is poised to control ALL aspects of our economic life[2], which in practical terms may express itself in a situation where wanting to help out a friend in need, you find yourself having to ask permission of the government to do so. Money you earned, not the government... The technology to do such things is already available. All you need is a crisis to justify imposing it.

Hayek makes a useful point about the Nazi form of totalitarianism. While since WWII Nazism has gained mythological status as the incarnation of Evil, yet regarding Communism progressists typically have a taboo about voicing any serious critique of this ideology or examining it's crimes. Hayek points out (pp. 48-49) that despite their mutual hatred, Nazism and Communism share the same mindset. Unfortunately, Hayek does not take his critique far enough as the mindset both these ideological systems share is derived from the Enlightenment. Hayek won't touch this. Few will. Should one (in the following quote) replace the term “collectivism” with “Enlightenment worldview”, not as an abstract philosophy, but as a program applied to real societies, this exposes the implications of opening this door (Hayek 1944/2013: 56)

Perhaps the most alarming fact is that contempt for intellectual liberty is not a thing which arises only once the totalitarian system is established, but can be found everywhere among those who have embraced a collectivist faith. The worst oppression is condoned if it is committed in the name of socialism. Intolerance of opposing ideas is openly extolled. The tragedy of collectivist thought is that while it starts out to make reason supreme, it ends by destroying reason.

Is it worth pointing out that in 2025 the destruction of reason in the West has been successfully completed? Would it be too cynical to postulate for example that the primary motive for trans propaganda in the postmodern sexual jihad may well be political, that is if you can get a significant percentage of a population to question something as basic as their sexual identity, then you have arrived at a point where you can get them to believe ANYTHING...

But Hayek's failure to connect the totalitarian dots back to the Enlightenment is a common enough mental blockage among Western intellectuals, even when they regard themselves as “critical thinkers”. The British literary critic George Steiner is one case of teetering on the edge of connecting the dots. For example, in his essay Grammars of Creation as he reflects on the atrocities that accompanied the two World Wars in the 20th century, Steiner observed (2001: 4):

When, however, allowance is made for selective nostalgia and illusion, the truth persists: for the whole of Europe and Russia, this century became a time out of hell. Historians estimate at more than seventy million the number of men, women and children done to death by warfare, starvation, deportation, political murder and disease between August 1914 and 'ethnic cleansing' in the Balkans. There have been hideous visitations of pestilence, famine and slaughter before. The collapse of humaneness in the twentieth century has specific enigmas. It arises not from riders on the distant steppe or barbarians at the gates. National Socialism, Fascism, Stalinism (though, in this latter instance, more opaquely) spring from within the context, the locale, the administrative-social instruments of the high places of civilization, of education, of scientific progress and humanizing deployment, be it Christian[3] or Enlightened. I do not want to enter into the vexed, in some manner demeaning, debates over the uniqueness of the Shoah ('holocaust' is a noble, technical Greek designation for religious sacrifice, not a name proper for controlled insanity and the 'wind out of blackness'). But it does look as if the Nazi extermination of European Jewry is a 'singularity', not so much in respect of scale - Stalinism killed far more - but motivation. Here is a category of human persons, down to infancy, were proclaimed guilty of being. Their crime was existence, was the mere claim to life.

Just after the quote above, Steiner goes on to note that the 20^th century European disaster included another peculiar trait; it caused an actual regression of civilization. The Enlightenment confidently predicted the end of torture by legal authorities and decreed that the revival of censorship, book-burnings and that even the burning of dissidents or heretics were now inconceivable. Nineteenth-century Western thinking took for granted that the development of education, accumulating scientific knowledge and increased opportunities to travel would be followed by an inevitable improvement of public and private morality as well as greater tolerance of political views. Steiner concedes each of these hopes proved false. By itself the First World War produced a shock, a great disillusionment, for the generation that experienced it[4], but this would prove to be a small matter considering what was to come... Steiner goes on to point out that higher education[5] has actually shown itself unable to nurture compassion or resistance to the logic of hatred and is shocked to see that a culture as refined and as advanced in artistic, scientific and intellectual terms as that of Germany which collaborated so readily and actively with the sadist ideology of the Nazi State. 20^th century history brutally mocked the grandiose promises of the Enlightenment.

Karl Popper, in his Open Society and it's Enemies, runs into the same mental blockage as Hayek and Steiner. In order to avoid connecting the dots back to the Enlightenment, Popper devotes his whole book to attacking “Historicism”, all the while failing to notice that with few exceptions, all the authors he attacks (such as Hegel, Fichte, Auguste Comte, Gomperz, Karl Marx or Haeckel) are Enlightenment devotees... In the same book, Popper questions scientism[6], yet fails to link this to its source, the Enlightenment. Very few Western intellectuals dare seriously critique the Enlightenment, but there are some exceptions. After WWII, almost connecting the dots, Albert Camus made the following grim, cynical observations alluding to the fruit bourn by the Enlightenment in the West (1951: 177):

All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State. 1789 brings Napoleon; 1848, Napoleon III; 1917, Stalin; the Italian disturbances of the twenties, Mussolini; the Weimar Republic, Hitler. These revolutions, particularly after the First World War had liquidated the vestiges of divine right, still proposed, with increasing audacity, to build the city of humanity and of authentic freedom. (...) The prophetic dream of Marx and the over-inspired predictions of Hegel or of Nietzsche ended by conjuring up, after the city of God had been razed to the ground, a rational or irrational State, which in both cases, however, was founded on terror.

As Hayek examines geopolitics in the West, he notes that one obstacle to totalitarianism is what he calls individualism and points out the Christian roots of this concept (1944/2013: 42)

Individualism, in contrast to socialism and all other forms of totalitarianism, is based on the respect of Christianity for the individual man and the belief that it is desirable that men should be free to develop their own individual gifts and bents. This philosophy, first fully developed during the Renaissance, grew and spread into what we know as Western civilization. The general direction of social development was one of freeing the individual from the ties which bound him in feudal society. Perhaps the greatest result of this unchaining of individual energies was the marvellous growth of science.

But the term individualism is little more than a reframing of the age-old Judeo-Christian imago-dei concept, that is Man having value because of being made in God's image. This is the specific concept that enabled Western civilisation to do something unique in human history, that is abolish slavery, a lucrative business that no other civilization thought to eliminate[7]. In the same time period that Hayek was developing ideas that would appear in The Road to Serfdom, others were reflecting on the same issues and came to a similar conclusion. In his Open Society Karl Popper observed (1945/1962: 258-259)

I do not deny that it is as justifiable to interpret history from a Christian point of view as it is to interpret it from any other point of view; and it should certainly be emphasized, for example, how much of our Western aims and ends, humanitarianism, freedom, equality, we owe to the influence of Christianity. (...) What matters to Christianity is not the historical deeds of the powerful Roman conquerors but (to use a phrase of Kierkegaard's) what a few fishermen gave the world.

Rule of Law
One issue Hayek looks into is the contrast between what he calls “Planning” and “Rule of Law”. Hayek notes that rejection of Rule of Law is a distinguishing trait of totalitarianism (1944/2013: 57)

Nothing distinguishes more clearly a free country from a country under arbitrary government than the observance in the former of the great principles known as the Rule of Law. Stripped of technicalities this means that government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand – rules that make it possible to foresee with fair certainty how the authority will use its coercive powers in given circumstances and to plan one's individual affairs on the basis of this knowledge. Thus, within the known rules of the game, the individual is free to pursue his personal ends, certain that the powers of government will not be used deliberately to frustrate his efforts.
Socialist economic planning necessarily involves the very opposite of this. (...) When the government has to decide how many pigs are to be raised or how many buses are to run, which coal-mines are to operate, or at what prices shoes are to be sold, these decisions cannot be settled for long periods in advance. They depend inevitably on the circumstances of the moment, and in making such decisions it will always be necessary to balance, one against the other, the interests of various persons and groups.
In the end somebody's views will have to decide whose interests are more important, and these views must become part of the law of the land. Hence the familiar fact that the more the state ‘plans', the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.

But Hayek does not take his analysis far enough as he neglects to point out that Rule of Law is the concept that even heads of State and supreme court judges are subject to a Higher Authority. This is a recurring theme in the Bible. Prophets often reminded Jewish and pagan kings that even they MUST submit to God's Law. In the book of Daniel (chapter 4), one finds the remarkable confession of the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar who describes God's judgement in his life after having despised God's laws. The New Testament reiterates this principle when John the Baptist reminds King Herod he has no right to take his brother's wife. This principle is again reiterated when the apostles are forbidden by the Sanhedrin to preach the Gospel to which they reply: “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5: 29). Later on this principle would lead to persecution of Christians as they refused to participate in the Emperor cult, dropping a pinch of incense as an offering to the divine Caesar. This was viewed as treasonous and anti-patriotic behaviour. The Christian's response was simply: “Christ is Lord!!”. Under the Reformation, Rule of Law was vigorously restated by Samuel Rutherford's book Lex Rex (1644) which declared that God's Law is above Kings and heads of State. The American philosopher Francis Schaeffer explains Rutherford's influence (1976/1995: 109-110)

Samuel Rutherford's work and the tradition it embodied had a great influence on the United States Constitution, even though modern Anglo-Saxons have largely forgotten him. This influence was mediated through two sources. The first was John Witherspoon (1723–1794), a Presbyterian who followed Samuel Rutherford's Lex Rex directly and brought its principles to bear on the writing of the [American] Constitution and the laying down of forms and freedoms. (…)
The second mediator of Rutherford's influence was John Locke (1632–1704), who, though secularizing the Presbyterian tradition, nevertheless drew heavily from it. He stressed inalienable rights, government by consent, separation of powers, and the right of revolution. But the biblical base for these is discovered in Rutherford's work. Without this biblical background, the whole system would be without a foundation. This is seen by the fact that Locke's own work has an inherent contradiction. His empiricism, as revealed in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), really leaves no place for "natural rights". Empiricism would rest everything on experience. But "natural rights" must either be innate to the nature of man and not based on experience (thereby conflicting with the concept of empiricism) or they must have an adequate base other than man's experience. Locke's difficulty was that he did not have Samuel Rutherford's Christian base. He stated the results which come from biblical Christianity without having the base that produced them.

Hayek's term Planning (opposed to Rule of Law ) is little more than a pointless diversion as it is more useful to simply distinguish between States and/or ideologies that accept Rule of Law and those that reject it. In his article The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment, CS Lewis illustrated a practical legal outcome occurring when a State rejects Rule of Law (1949)

The Humanitarian theory, then, removes sentences from the hands of jurists whom the public conscience is entitled to criticize and places them in the hands of technical experts whose special sciences do not even employ such categories as rights or justice. It might be argued that since this transference results from an abandonment of the old idea of punishment, and, therefore, of all vindictive motives, it will be safe to leave our criminals in such hands. I will not pause to comment on the simple-minded view of fallen human nature which such a belief implies. Let us rather remember that the ‘cure' of criminals is to be compulsory; and let us then watch how the theory actually works in the mind or the Humanitarian. The immediate starting point of this article was a letter I read in one of our Leftist weeklies. The author was pleading that a certain sin, now treated by our laws as a crime, should henceforward be treated as a disease. And he complained that under the present system the offender, after a term in gaol, was simply let out to return to his original environment where he would probably relapse. What he complained of was not the shutting up but the letting out. On his remedial view of punishment the offender should, of course, be detained until he was cured. And or course the official straighteners are the only people who can say when that is. The first result of the Humanitarian theory is, therefore, to substitute for a definite sentence (reflecting to some extent the community's moral judgment on the degree of ill-desert involved) an indefinite sentence terminable only by the word of those experts — and they are not experts in moral theology nor even in the Law of Nature — who inflict it. Which of us, if he stood in the dock, would not prefer to be tried by the old system?

As Lewis points out, when Rule of Law is rejected by those in power, the masses are then fully exposed to the elite's purely arbitrary desires. Perhaps it is time to realize that this is the motivation shared by progressives who despise constraints such as Constitutions, documents which in their view are only of symbolic value, because they are obstacles to their unfettered thirst for power. These are the same who, when elections appear not to be going their way, threaten violence. All of which leads us to a critical question: What is the ideological basis for the rejection of Rule of Law? Any serious investigation of this issue leads back to the Enlightenment... Fyodor Dostoevsky rather succinctly nailed this matter: “If God is dead, anything is permitted”[8] Reflecting on such issues, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche brutally expressed his distain of the hypocrisy of those who would reject the Christian God, yet attempt to preserve Christian moral laws (and the rights that are derived from such moral laws). In his 1889 essay Twilight of the Idols (ix.5), Nietzsche cynically observed:

G. Eliot. They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality. That is an English consistency; we do not wish to hold it against little moralistic females à la Eliot. In England one must rehabilitate oneself after every little emancipation from theology by showing in a veritably awe-inspiring manner what a moral fanatic one is. That is the penance they pay there.
"We others hold otherwise. When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident: this point has to be exhibited again and again, despite the English flatheads. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one's hands. Christianity presupposes that man does not know, cannot know, what is good for him, what evil: he believes in God, who alone knows it. Christian morality is a command; its origin is transcendent; it is beyond all criticism, all right to criticism; it has truth only if God is the truth _ it stands or falls with faith in God.
"When the English actually believe that they know 'intuitively' what is good and evil, when they therefore suppose that they no longer require Christianity as the guarantee of morality, we merely witness the effects of the dominion of the Christian value judgment and an expression of the strength and depth of this dominion: such that the origin of English morality has been forgotten, such that the very conditional character of its right to existence is no longer felt. For the English, morality is not yet a problem.

In any case rejection of the Rule of Law frees the postmodern neototalitarian from any duty to conventional law and allows him to do ANYTHING he wills. Trampling on the rights of those under him is his right... All of which brings us to Nietzsche...

Nietzsche and the Totalitarian Mindset
While Hayek's discussion of the Rule of Law is important to understanding the totalitarian mindset, Nietzsche provides another piece of the puzzle explaining the ideological motivation for rejection of the Rule of Law. This has to do with Nietzsche's Übermench/Superman concept. This concept in fact sets up an elite, which views the masses with pure contempt and for whom the masses rights mean nothing. The masses are tools and resources for the Übermench, nothing more. In The Will to Power, (1901/1913: Books III and IV) Nietzsche describes the Übermench, that cold and cruel Nazi technocrats, such as Dr. Mengele[9] at Auschwitz, made their model.

962. A great man, --a man whom Nature has built up and invented in a grand style,--What is such a man? First, in his general course of action his consistency is so broad that owing to its very breadth it can be surveyed only with difficulty, and consequently misleads; he possesses the capacity of extending his will over great stretches of his life, and of despising and rejecting all small things, whatever most beautiful and "divine" things of the world there may be among them. Secondly, he is colder, harder, less cautious and more free from the fear of "public opinion"; he does not possess the virtues which are compatible with respectability and with being respected, nor any of those things which are counted among the "virtues of the herd." If he is unable to lead, he walks alone; he may then perchance grunt at many things which he meets on his way. Thirdly, he asks for no "compassionate" heart, but servants, instruments; in his dealings with men his one aim is to make something out of them. He knows that he cannot reveal himself to anybody: he thinks it bad taste to become familiar; and as a rule he is not familiar when people think he is. When he is not talking to his soul, he wears a mask [of hypocrisy - PG].. He would rather lie than tell the truth, because lying requires more spirit and will. There is a loneliness within his heart which neither praise nor blame can reach, because he is his own judge from whom is no appeal.

Doesn't this describe people like Anthony Fauci, French President Emanuel Macron, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau or Australian PM Anthony Albanese?? The globalists presently in power in the West (with few exceptions) are in fact elitist Nietzschian Übermensch wannabes who no longer mask their contempt for ordinary people. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche openly expressed this mindset. (1886: section 61)

And finally, to ordinary men, to the majority of the people, who exist for service and general utility, and are only so far entitled to exist,

Yes you read that right, “ordinary people” are allowed to exist IF they serve the Übermensch's interests. Nietzsche goes on to add (same sentence, dripping with condescension) that religion is a useful tool to the Übermensch as it conveniently shuts ordinary people up and makes them docile (1886: section 61)

religion gives invaluable contentedness with their lot and condition, peace of heart, ennoblement of obedience, additional social happiness and sympathy, with something of transfiguration and embellishment, something of justification of all the commonplaceness, all the meanness, all the semi-animal poverty of their souls.

Conclusion
When all is said and done, it is reasonable to claim that Hayek's Road to Serfdom is probably more significant today than when it was written.

The main thing that has changed since Road to Serfdom was written is that postmodern elites, neototalitarians and Davos pawns in presently in power in the West have learned from the hard lessons of the 20^th century. Generally they are less openly brutal than 20^th century totalitarians, preferring algorithmic censorship in social media, language control and manipulation to keep the herd in line. Yet when censorship, manipulation and intimidation prove ineffective to keep the herd under control, they have no real scruples against using violence. This was clearly demonstrated as in 2021 during Covid restrictions as Belgian police employed Nazi violence against people only guilty of enjoying a spring day in a park. Many such instances occurred during Covid[10].

Postmodern neototalitarians are more hypocritical in their methods and, contrary to 20^th century Nazis or Marxists, avoid at all costs laying down their core beliefs or their program for all to see. They also avoid becoming associated with easily recognized symbols such as a swastika or the hammer and sickle. In contrast to Nazis, 21^st century neototalitarians despise nationalism. Why? Because, power over one nation is not enough. With few exceptions, they are One World Order zealots. Power over the planet is their goal. This explains why they consistently express hatred of populist movements (immediately labelling them “extreme right”) such as Make America Great Again, the Canadian Freedom Convoy in 2022, the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vest) movement in France, nationalist political parties in France, Italy or Germany and use the power of the State to marginalise and shut down such movements. Immigration policies are another means for neototalitarians to express their hatred of nationalism or national identity. Like Freemasons[11], 21^st century neototalitarians are highly adept at infiltrating and taking over established neutral social institutions that contain circles of power and influence, leaving the impression that nothing has changed, while in fact everything has changed. All of which leads us to the present-day fulfilment of Aldous Huxley's “prophecy”... (1958/2007: 393-394)

Under the relentless thrust of accelerating overpopulation and increasing overorganization, and by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms — elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest — will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial — but democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.

One may ask: Are we there yet? The answer is yes...

References

Arendt, Hannah (1948/1976) The Origins of Totalitarianism. Harvest Book New York xliii-576 p.

Camus, Albert, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962)

Gosselin, Paul (2021) The Theory of Evolution and 20th century Totalitarian Regimes... (Samizdat - May - 2021)

Gosselin, Paul (2022) Edward Veith's Modern Fascism : A Review. (Samizdat - Sept. 2022)

Gosselin, Paul (2024) La Tentation totalitaire par Jean-François Revel : Un compte rendu. (Samizdat - 13/9/2024)

Hayek, FriedrichA. (1944/2013) The Road to Serfdom: with The Intellectuals and Socialism. Institute of Economic Affairs London (coll. Occasional Paper 136) 129 p.

Hoffman, Samantha, et al. (2020) The flipside of China's central bank digital currency. (Australian Strategic Policy Institute – 14/10/2020)

Huxley, Aldous (1958/2007) Brave New World Revisited. Vintage Canada xvi - 407 p.

Lewis, CS (1949) The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment. (20th Century: An Australian Quarterly Review, vol. III, no. 3 1949) republished in God in the Dock Lewis, Clive Staples; Hooper, Walter (ed.) (2002/1970) W. B. Eerdmans Grand Rapids MI 346 p.

Lewis, CS (1958) Is Progress Possible? Willing Slaves of The Welfare State. (The Observer, 20 July 1958) republished in God in the Dock Lewis, Clive Staples; Hooper, Walter (ed.) (2002/1970) W. B. Eerdmans Grand Rapids MI 346 p.

Nguyen Ly, Mimi + Jan Jekielek (2022) US Trending Toward China's Social Credit System, Enabled By Big Tech: Former Facebook Analyst. (The Epoch Times - Zero Hedge - 16/2/2022)

Nietzsche, Friedrich (1882/1924) The Joyful Wisdom [The Gay Science]. (trans. Thomas Common, P. V. Cohn & M. D. Petre) MacMillan New York (Volume X: Complete works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Oscar Levy ed.) 370 p.

Nietzsche, Friedrich (1886) Beyond Good and Evil. (Project Gutenberg)

Nietzsche, Friedrich (1895) Twilight of the Idols. (translation by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale)

Nietzsche, Friedrich (1901/1913) Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values. vol. II. [Translator:, Anthony M. Ludovici] TN Foulis London xx-432 p.

Popper, Karl R. (1945/1962) The Open Society and its Enemies. Vol. 2. Routledge & Kegan Paul London 420 p.

Schaeffer, Francis (1976/1995) How Should We Then Live?: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture. Crossway Wheaton, IL 288 p.

Steiner, George (2001) Grammars of Creation. Yale University Press New Haven 347p.

Whitehead, John W. & Nisha Whitehead (2022) Digital Tyranny: Beware of the Government's Push for a Digital Currency. (The Rutherford Institute - 14/3/2022)

Notes

[1] - Here is an example of totalitarian language manipulation provided by Hayek (1944/2013: 47-48)

To make this argument sound plausible, the word 'freedom' was subjected to a subtle change in meaning. The word had formerly meant freedom from coercion, from the arbitrary power of other men. Now it was made to mean freedom from necessity, release from the compulsion of the circumstances which inevitably limit the range of choice of all of us. Freedom in this sense is, of course, merely another name for power or wealth. The demand for the new freedom was thus only another name for the old demand for a redistribution of wealth.

And of course the totalitarians get to decide how redistribution of wealth works out...

[2] - Chinese citizens know all about this.

[3] - Cheap shot... Steiner provides no evidence of this. And were one to investigate the matter more fully, one would have to take into account Christians infected by Enlightenment thinking...

[4] - The scale of this war caused those who survived it to call it “The Great War”, a war on an unprecedented (global) scale. Some who experienced it thought it inconceivable that there be another war like it and called it (optimistically) "The war to end all wars"...

[5] - Grounded in the Enlightenment worldview...

[6] - Hayek seems to agree that scientism gives rise to the technocrat, scientific experts, such as Fauci, shaping society, giving and taking away our freedoms (1944/2013: 118)

In particular, there can be little doubt that the manner in which during the last hundred years man has learned to organise the forces of nature has contributed a great deal towards the creation of the belief that a similar control of the forces of society would bring comparable improvements in human conditions. That, with the application of engineering techniques, the direction of all forms of human activity according to a single coherent plan should prove to be as successful in society as it has been in innumerable engineering tasks, is too plausible a conclusion not to seduce most of those who are elated by the achievement of the natural sciences.

[7] - Under Islam, slavery still survives and in China under Communism, slavery (very profitably) survives in the Laogai...

[8] - In his novel The Brothers Karamazov.(1880)

[9] - One must wonder whether words such as those of Nietzsche were not found in the mouths of Nazi concentration camp commanders as well as those of their subordinates in order to stifle the voice of their conscience (Nietzsche 1882/1924: sect. 325):

What Belongs to Greatness. Who can attain to anything great if he does not feel in himself the force and will to inflict great pain? The ability to suffer is a small matter: in that line, weak women and even slaves often attain masterliness. But not to perish from internal distress and doubt when one inflicts great suffering and hears the cry of it‚ that is great, that belongs to greatness.

[10] - One should not forget that during the Covid crisis, authorities in various Western countries openly used violence as a tool of intimidation, getting critics of the Covid narrative out of the way (Press file on Pressures to suppress dissent under Covid). Regarding violence, there is a pattern developing in the West as many Western nations lurch into neo-totalitarianism, clearly violating their citizen's rights. Here are a few cases. The first occurred in April 2021, as during Covid restrictions people were peacefully enjoying fresh air and sunshine in a park in Brussels, yet were treated worse than criminals, attacked with pepper spray, dogs, police on horseback and water canons...

Nazi Brown Shirts would have been proud of such tactics... This is how neototalitarians get their fun. Of course Australia had its share of State violence. Here are a couple cases

Elderly Australian Woman Knocked Down & PEPPER-SPRAYED by Police During Melbourne Protest Against Lockdowns. (RT - Infowars - 19/9/2021)

Australia's brutal Covid lockdown sees cops stopping mourners from watching funerals from their CARS. Aliki Kraterou

Justin Trudeau's Canada was not far behind as during Freedom Convoy protests rumours were circulating that tanks could be called in to break up the trucker protests. In any case, police on horseback were called in and actually trampled old ladies on mobility scooters.

Ottawa Police On Horseback Trample Peaceful Protesters, Accuse Victims of Exhibiting 'Assaultive Behavior'. (Chris Menahan/Information Liberation - InfoWars - 19/2/2022)

Elsewhere in Canada pastors were arrested simply for holding meetings in their church (and defying Covid restrictions). The best-known cases are the churches of Jim Coates and Polish pastor Artur Pawlowski, both in Alberta. During an initial police intervention in his church, Pawlowski gave government thugs a tongue-lashing and reminded them that their actions were comparable to the behaviour of Nazis and Communists. Poles are in a good position to raise such issues as having witnessed such things with their own eyes...

'Gestapo Is Not Welcome Here' – Canadian Police Thrown Out of Easter Service by Polish Pastor. (Jack Montgomery - Breitbart - 4/4/2021)

'OUT OF THIS PROPERTY NOW': Police Came to Disrupt A Canadian Church Service And The Pastor Was Not Having it. (Jordan Lancaster- Daily Caller - 4/4/2021)

And in Quebec, in January, in the middle of a Quebec winter, a censored video showed police officers raiding the home of a woman who was “guilty” of inviting her brother and mother over for supper. She was arrested and taken out of her house in her stocking feet (socks) in the snow with –10C temps...

Of course in all of these cases, none of the authorities who allowed the use of such violence have faced legal consequences for their actions. Rule of Law does NOT apply to them.

[11] - When I was in university in the late 70s and early 80s I'd heard of a comment made by Hannah Arendt, the Jewish political scientist, that totalitarian parties such as Nazism or Communism were structured along the lines of secret societies. I only recently read the book in question and the whole quote is rather interesting (1948/1976: 376-377):

The totalitarian movements have been called "secret societies established in broad daylight." Indeed, little as we know of the sociological structure and the more recent history of secret societies, the structure of the movements, unprecedented if compared with parties and factions, reminds one of nothing so much as of certain outstanding traits of secret societies." Secret societies also form hierarchies according to degrees of "initiation," regulate the life of their members according to a secret and fictitious assumption which makes everything look as though it were something else, adopt a strategy of consistent lying to deceive the noninitiated external masses, demand unquestioning obedience from their members who are held together by allegiance to a frequently unknown and always mysterious leader, who himself is surrounded, or supposed to be surrounded, by a small group of initiated who in turn are surrounded by the half-initiated who form a "buffer area" against the hostile profane world. With secret societies, the totalitarian movements also share the dichotomous division of the world between "sworn blood brothers" and an indistinct inarticulate mass of sworn enemies." This distinction, based on absolute hostility to the surrounding world, is very different from the ordinary parties' tendency to divide people into those who belong and those who don't. Parties and open societies in general will consider only those who expressly oppose them to be their enemies, while it has always been the principle of secret societies that "whosoever is not expressly included is excluded." This esoteric principle seems to be entirely inappropriate for mass organizations; yet the Nazis gave their members at least the psychological equivalent for the initiation ritual of secret societies when, instead of simply excluding Jews, from membership, they demanded proof of non-Jewish descent from their members and set up a complicated machine to shed light on the dark ancestry of some 80 million Germans.

To be clear, Arendt never specifically mentions Freemasons. The other students I heard discussing this odd quote, pooh-poohed this observation by Arendt and never checked it out. More recently I suspect Arendt was in fact talking about Freemasons... Regarding their general influence, this American Freemason site openly boasts about how many US presidents were Freemasons (along with many other notables, even clergy...)