Hillaire Belloc, the famous historian and friend of GK Chesterton, wrote a book called The Servile State. In the book he explains how a society will move towards a socialist, State -controlled regime because we value security over freedom.
Now all of us value stability and security - but at what cost? Belloc states that the man who desires these above all else lives under two principles of intoleration: "The two things intolerable to them as a decent citizen (though a very stupid human being) are insufficiency and insecurity." In other words, this man would give up his freedom to have food on his table or this man would stay imprisoned in a career he hates simply because it gives him good benefits and a good pay cheque. It gives him security.
It seems that this type of man is the norm today? There are very few who live a life fraught with risk. Most wish to settle into a routine, receive the pay cheque, have the comforts they desire and live in relative autonomy. Perhaps this is because our hunting for food has been reduced to trying to stock up on toilet paper before others buy it all out. Or perhaps because our Benevolent State of Canada has supplied all our needs according to its riches in glory.
But what happens when the State tells you that you must educate your child in a specific ideology or that all your children have to vaccinated in order to attend a Cadet's camp or what pronoun to use or that you have to STAY HOME till the State tells you can leave your home? The man that values stability and security will stay home. He'll allow his freedoms to be taken away. He'll, in fact, give up his freedoms and condemn those that don't. He will become servile to the State.
Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World, states, "as political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase." William Gairdner, the Canadian political philosopher, in The War against the Family explains how sexual freedoms are used as opiate to keep people servile. All kinds of sexual deviances are pushed to have public acceptance, they are taught in schools and celebrated on the streets in parades. In doing so the 'Stupid' man is satiated and sits and masturbates to easily accessible pornography and lets the State dictate to him what the new rights are that need to defended, what minority group he is racist against, in what ways his male privilege has robbed society and what rights of his must be given up for the 'common good.'
On the flip side, there is the man who values liberty above all else. This man is epitomized in the character of John Gault in Ayn Rand's book Atlas Shrugged. John Gault, a brilliant engineer discovers a new motor that would conserve energy to a unprecedented degree. And then the he is told by the 'State' that his work is for the 'common good' and that he must relinquish his plans for the good of the people and so on and so forth. John Gault, a man who values justice wherein each man gets what he deserves, leaves the motor unfinished and pursues a different life - but a free life. He watches from the outside as American people embrace security and State control until the State collapses into the consequences of socialism.
Remember the words of Our Lord to Pilate: Nobody takes my life. I choose to lay it down and take it up again. Christ was a man that embraced freedom.
Belloc explains that most men will choose the Servile State. This is why his distributism theory would be difficult to implement.
However, there are the few that will not.
That simply will not.
Semper Fidelis,
Kenton E.