From page 134 of volume 2 of his criminally underread trilogy, Law, Legislation, and Liberty:
Most people are still unwilling to face the most alarming lesson of modern history: that the greatest crimes of our time have been committed by governments that had the enthusiastic support of millions of people who were guided by moral impulses. It is simply not true that Hitler or Mussolini, Lenin or Stalin, appealed only to the worst instincts of their people: they also appealed to some of the feelings which also dominate contemporary democracies. Whatever disillusionment the more mature supporters of these movements may have experienced as they came to see the effects of the policies they had supported, there can be no doubt that the rank and file of the communist, national-socialist or fascist movements contained many men and women inspired by ideals not very different from those of some the most influential social philosophers in the Western countries. Some of them certainly believed that they were engaged in the creation of a just society in which the needs of the most deserving or ‘socially most valuable’ would be better cared for. They were led by a desire for a visible common purpose which is our inheritance from the tribal society and which we still find breaking through everywhere.”
Hayek, with his formal English, and penchant for 300-word sentences, can be intimidating to read, but it’s entirely worth it. I’ve found that it’s a skill, and once your mind has acclimated to his prose, you can glide through it. The insight and wisdom packed into these three slender volumes is priceless, and reading them pays enormous dividends in the understanding of the nature of a free society.
The above quote is timely in that it reminds me of the hysteria currently seething around the vaccine debate. A pro-vaccine propaganda blitzkrieg is presently underway, and has the same feeling as the all-encompassing propaganda campaigns immediately before the US starts another overseas war. The suppression of dissent is an integral part of these campaigns, and we see it now in the intense pressure placed on the social media giants to de-platform anyone who holds a heterodox viewpoint of vaccines, or expresses concern that the vastly under-reported autoimmune crisis could be caused by another product of Big Pharma. That appears to be an eminently reasonable concern. It was these pharmaceutical companies that gave us the opioid epidemic, laced our food with cancer-causing pesticides, and insanity-inducing antidepressants.
We shouldn’t be so quick to let our “moral impulses” be hijacked, and succumb to every manufactured crisis, particularly one in which the largest news organizations, governments, and corporations speak with one voice.
