You people are up late. Alright, here’s more, this time from Nock’s essay, Prohibition and Civilization, which must be read in its entirety:
“The advocates of prohibition ought to get a clear grasp of the fundamental objection to their theory, and meet it with something more substantial than feeble talk about the influence of “the liquor interests.” Our objection is to Puritanism, with its false social theory taking shape in a civilization that, however well-ordered and economically prosperous, is hideous and suffocating. One can at least speak for oneself: I am an absolute teetotaler, and it would make no difference to me if there were never another drop of liquor in the world; and yet to live under any regime of prohibition that I have so far had opportunity to observe would seem to me an appalling calamity. The ideals and instruments of Puritanism are simply unworthy of a free people, and, being unworthy, are soon found intolerable. Its hatreds, fanaticisms, inaccessibility to ideas; its inflamed and cancerous interest in the personal conduct of others; its hysterical disregard of personal rights; its pure faith in force, and above all, its tyrannical imposition of its own Kultur: these characterize and animate a civilization that the general experience of mankind at once condemns as impossible, and as hateful as it is impossible.”
There aren’t really any words that come to mind that could add to this perfect, most Nockian effusion. You read it and can immediately gauge how our own society is being pulled, perversely, toward some Puritanical hell-on-earth. Not narrowly religious, either, but the crude, mob-like desire to have government impose a certain value system on all of society, to police speech, thought and our private actions, the voyeuristic society that demands the elimination of all privacy, the handing over to government to do all manner of things to us. Of course, the closer we are pulled toward the Puritan Ideal, the greater the number of society-wide witch hunts become. Just look at the news. Outrage is manufactured on an industrial scale, aimed like an ICBM at desired political will o’ wisps, then manipulated into a movement that can be safely funneled to one of the two major political parties. Voters for life.
These “quotes on liberty” posts will be daily now, as an effort on my part to revisit the best articulations of that which we seek to achieve. “Back to the lab”, or back to first principles, it’s something that too few liberty activists take time to do. In fact, I’ve noticed a yawning gulf between liberty activists and liberty scholars in the sense that the activists I know of do not read the great works of libertarian scholarship, and the scholars rarely get up and become active in actually working toward the goal of liberty in our lifetime. A cadre of “scholar activists” would be a powerful force, but it might be a chore to prevent internecine conflicts and factionalizing, which has blighted the libertarian movement for decades. I still think libertarian activists should read more, and by that I mean actual books. Pot and kettle, this.
