The myth of benevolent totalitarianism is pernicious and incredibly dangerous. Totalitarianism, the politicization of everything, NEVER ends well - no matter how benevolent and high-minded the totalitarians claim to be.
There is no way to pluck the "good" features from collectivist systems while discarding the "bad" stuff. There is no way to use totalitarianism to reprogram the public in a positive way, building a utopia by controlling the speech and thought of the public.
There is no "deeper freedom" that is nourished and preserved by cracking down hard on the "superficial" freedoms of speech, assembly, and property. That's one of the sickest lies of Marxism - the promise to "liberate" people from capitalist responsibility and material need.
Totalitarianism always goes hideously wrong because power is addictive and jealous. Those who wield power will NEVER surrender it willingly because the "crisis" has passed or social problems have been "fixed." They will never feel it's "safe" to allow dissent once again.
Totalitarianism makes obedience the coin of the realm, the most important resource in society - and like every other resource, obedience obeys the law of diminishing returns. You have to work harder and harder to milk increasingly small quantities of it from the population.
You can already see this happening with the increasingly bizarre speech codes the Left enforces on campus, media, and increasingly everyday life. They have to push harder, hector us more, leave us with fewer reservations for free speech.
The totalitarians must dig ever deeper to mine little nuggets of power. Disobedience grows intolerable. For a glimpse of your future, look at how Chinese state media describes all dissent as sedition, theft from the People and their State, a threat to national security.
There is no road that begins with the hyper-politicization of everything and ends with a happy populace living in peaceful harmony. The totalitarians pretend they're "discovering" some deep unity hidden in our souls all along, but they're really enforcing conformity. /end
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