From his essay, Prohibition and Civilization:
“The principle of prohibition is extended to cover an endless range of conduct (though, significantly, drink is exempt). The home scheme of social fife is ordered with excellent and obvious rationality, but it is devoid of charm, it has no savor, and all its reasonableness cannot make up for the deficiency, cannot make the normal spirit really enjoy it. One feels the same restlessness and perverseness under it that William James declared he felt under the regime at Chautauqua. One doubts whether such smooth-running social order is worth having at the price. I remember some years ago, after a long time spent in observing the ghastly perfections of German municipal machinery, I came home ready to rejoice in the most corrupt, ring-ridden and disreputable city government that I could find in America, if only I might draw a free breath once more and forget the infinity of things that are verboten…
…he 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.“
This of course also applies to the COVID cultists, who are perplexed as to why all of society doesn’t immediately submit to their authoritarian vision of a hypochondriac police state. Life simply would not be worth living among the ice-covered landscape of a perfectly-ordered, totalitarian nightmare.
