Read this excerpt from In Praise of Prejudice by Theodore Dalrymple, then ask yourself if the situation described does not make a deep connection with the direction government in America is heading (or has been heading) in recent years.  In keeping with my commitment to small government conservatism, this strikes quite a few chords with me.  I highly recommend the book, or any of Dr. Dalrymple’s many works.

“A philosophy that sets out to destroy the influence of custom, tradition, authorities, and prejudice, does indeed destroy particular customs, traditions, authorities, and prejudices, but only to replace them by others.  The new, in this aspect of human existence as in all others, may be better than the old, but it may also be worse.”

Continued on the jump…

Improvement has to start somewhere, but so does deterioration.  The philosophy (or attitude) of radical individualism instills a deep prejudice in favor of oneself and one’s own ego, and in the process establishes customs that are social only in the sense that many people have them, and customs only in the sense that they will encourage conduct that will survive from generation to generation if uninterrupted. 

Life is conceived of as a limitless extension of consumer choice, a trawl around the existential supermarket, from whose shelves lifestyles can be picked with no deeper or more meaningful consequences.

Such radical individualism has another paradoxical effect; what starts out as a search for increased if not total individualism, ends up increasing the power of government over individuals.  It does not do so by the totalitarian method of rendering compulsory all that is forbidden–a process that in all human history has gone farthest, perhaps in North Korea–but by destroying all moral authority that intervenes between individual human will and government power.  Everything that is not forbidden by law is [i]ipso facto[/i], permissible.  What is legally permissible is morally permissible.  “There is no law against it” becomes an unanswerable justification for conduct that is selfish and egotistical.

This of course makes the law, and therefore those who make the law, moral arbiters of society.  It is they who, by definition, decide what is permissible and what is not.  All stigma is removed from conduct that is too expressly and actively forbidden.

Given the nature of human nature, it hardly needs pointing out that those who are delegated the job of moral arbiter for the whole of  society enjoy their power and come to think they deserve it, that they have been chosen for their special insight into the way life should be lived.   It is not only legislators who succumb to this temptation, but judges also, and who can blame them if there is no other source of collective authority?  Radical individualism is thus not only compatible with radical centralization of authority, but is a product of it.  The individual is left to live his life as his whim dictates, but the central power gratefully accepts the power-generating responsibility of protecting him from the consequences of doing so.

If anything is addictive, prescriptive power is addictive.  Once you have it (at any rate if you are so inclined by temperament) you can never have enough of it.  The lack of any intervening authority between the individual on the one hand, and the sovereign political power on the other, enables the latter to insinuate itself into the smallest crevices of daily life.  An infinite power comes to think of itself as infinitely good because it is infinitely responsible for the welfare of its subjects (who, not surprisingly, soon become objects of its ministrations).  Decision-making divides into two spheres; the serious business of life is left to the sovereign authority, while the individual is left to his own Brownian motion in an ever more compressed space. 

…

The lack of intervening authorities, such as family, church, professional organizations, etc., accustoms us to expect, and accept, the central direction of our lives, even when it results in absurdities.  And thus the corporatization of society proceeds pari passu with the extension of unbridled egotism.

El Cabra:This is more or less, how I view the grand plans of most Democrats.  A decent into absurdity under the guise of government do-gooderism, that will unwind society until it is such a shambles that government is then the only thing left that can sustain our miserable existence.  it may not be completely correct, but I would rather come down on the side of caution.

Read the book.  It is excellent.