http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-welfare-state-of-mind
I was recently advised by my office manager, who was responding to the building manager’s office receipt of complaints, that I could not smoke outside near a side entrance to our office building, as I had been for years, because it offended non-smokers who were coming and going and who claimed to be super-sensitive to smoke, and also that somehow the smoke was also getting inside the building where the slightest trace of smoke also bothered them. I was advised to use the designated smoking area on the other side of the building. The catch was that this area, too, is subject to the same conditions.
I cite this incident because it underscores a phenomenon I have watched grow over five decades, from the first time I began to observe and evaluate men’s behavior to my current and far more incisive cogitations, which is how quickly and easily men submit to government authority and the consensus of the collective, and how inured they can become to being taken care of and protected. The anti-smoking campaign that has been waged for decades is merely one facet of the phenomenon. I suspect that much of the anti-smoking stances adopted by non-smokers is feigned and likely psychosomatic. Having been patronized and protected and legislated for by way of lobbies and pressure group warfare, they are amenable to more of the same.
My gut response to the advice could have been any one of the following: They don’t own the air. Shall I wear a Star of David, too, so that non-smokers can better identify and avoid me? What are they going to do about it? Beat me up? Call the Green Police? Behave like picture- and video- and insult-maddened Muslims? Pressure my employer to fire me if I don’t cave in? Ask the police to ticket me?
But the welfare state is not just laws or legislative acts that encourage individuals to become dependent on the State. The welfare state is first and foremost a “state of mind.”
A welfare state would not work if it did not inculcate, either by education, by mandated indoctrination, by incessant propaganda, or by cultural osmosis, the proper “state of mind” in a population, that is, to instill in men an individual’s alleged duty or obligation to submit to a consensus propagated by a variety of authorities, especially government authorities. A welfare state would evaporate almost immediately without first having pulled a fraud on the electorate. However, a welfare state could not establish itself without the overt or tacit approval of a large component of a country’s population. This consensus requires as well the consensual sanction or silence of the targets of a welfare state and its vanquished, ill-informed, or willing population and electorate. And if the opponents do not consent, they are simply ignored.