People find themselves regulation bound under socialism. People become acclimatised to that state that they seldom plan and carry out under their own steam any new social excursion or enterprise. People look forward to no future period at which a sinewy faculty of responsibility is likely to be of service to himself or others. The young people are obliged to stomach so much external and, as it seems to them, meaningless control that they seek escape and recuperation in an absence of discipline as complete as they can make it.
Here is Tocqueville’s prediction of the “new kind of servitude”: The socialist, if successful, will have taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp, and fashioned them at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic charactrers cannot penetrate to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered but softened, bent and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes and stupifies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrial animals, of which government is the shepherd. Tocqueville stated that he thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which he describes above might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom and that it might even establish itself under the wing of sovereignty of the people.
The biggest challenge to Tocqueville’s thinking is how long a government would remain in the hands of benevolent despots when it would be so much more easy for any group of ruffians to keep itself indefinetly in power by disregarding all the traditional decencies of political life. The unforeseen but inevitable consequences of socialist planning create a state of affairs in which totalitarian forces get the upper hand. In other words, socialism leads to totalitarianism.
From the point of view of fundamental human liberties, there is little to choose between communism, socialism, and national socialism. They are all examples of the collectivist or totalitarian state.
