Yesterday @toddstarnes retweeted one tweet out of a thread of mine. The thread was an ANTI-totalitarian thread making a point AGAINST totalitarianism. But it was a thread, and the single tweet, taken out of context, looked PRO-totalitarian.

I’m going to explain the whole thread here.

WHY do people willingly submit themselves to totalitarianism in the first place? It is always because they are in some crisis and the State promises to solve it. They are hungry. They are sick. They are at war. They are freezing.

They believe the promise that the government could solve their problems if only it had more power. Why do they believe it? Because sometimes it seems very plausible.

We know how a virus spreads. If you deny people the liberty of movement, you can stop a virus. Taken to the extreme, if you were to imprison the entire population—isolate everyone—then the government could actually stop the spread of a virus completely. But at what cost!?

Would they let you out of prison when it was over?

That’s an extreme illustration of the point, but this is always the manner by which totalitarianism starts—by promising to solve some terrible societal problem.

The first tweet in my thread simply acknowledged that maybe it is possible that once in a century a problem comes along that makes you think, “Hey, the government could solve this problem if we relinquished our liberties and gave it more power.”

The point of my tweet thread was to urge my fellow countrymen not to fall into that trap.

Because the SECOND tweet in that thread—the one @toddstarnes didn’t tell you about (and perhaps didn’t read himself) made the point: But then, even if totalitarianism somehow DID solve your 1-year problem, your stuck living under totalitarianism for the OTHER 99 years.

I ended with a quote that has been used for decades when people living in democracies face some crisis and wonder whether democracy is up to the task—Democracy is the worst form of government, EXCEPT FOR ALL THE OTHERS.

I may be a poor writer. And I for sure ought to heed @Jonathan_Howe’s suggestion to use my blog more and twitter less (so that people have to share the entire article or nothing at all). But there’s not a pro-totalitarian bone in my body.