Once made fit for tyranny, a man is soon fit for little else.
Corrollary: Once you have accepted the loss of your identity, from where would the desire to rebuilt it come?
This is very abstract, but I think there is something there.
What is the point of freedom? Historically, it has almost always arisen as a desire for RELIGIOUS freedom. Religion and identity are closely intertwined. The freedom Americans sought cannot be understood apart from the desire to practice religion freely. The need for freedom depends upon the fact of intellectual and behavioral diversity. Obviously, if everyone thinks and does the same, there is no need for freedom to be different.
William James, at the beginning of his lecture series published as “Pragmatism”, pointed out that virtually everything worth knowing about a man can be known if you understand his sense of the world, of how reality is constructed and what his role, if any, is. Do you believe in God? This is a big question.
True Socialism depends on atheism, on the sense that the notion of quality is empty. All men are equal because all are composed of atoms that will one day be somewhere else. There is no nobility of soul, because there is no nobility, and there is no soul.
ONLY once these basic postulates are granted does their project make sense. What it is is a controlled collapse, a controlled descent, a prolongation of what the adherents of this doctrine feel is the eventual certainty of moral nihilism and the necessity of suicide.
And as I say often, this whole thing rests upon an empirically false foundation. There IS a God. We can research these things in scientific ways, through investigations of mediums, through studying psi, through personal experience in altered states.
I sometimes imagine a sane society, one with beautiful cathedrals filled with the sincerely pious, worshipping based upon UNDERSTANDINGS built from personal experiences. We can create, even now, the sorts of ceremonies seen in Avatar. We can create Lothloriens. We can bring Spirituality into the universities. Other than the piggish and brutal bigotry of academics, there is nothing to oppose it.
We will all be held to account one day for what we should have seen but didn’t. This will be an unpleasant experience for many.