The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, an “independent” agency funded, staffed, and appointed by a federal agency, has recommended that all adults 64 years and younger be screened for anxiety. The task force has already recommended screening for children and teens from 8 to 18.

As Daniel Henninger writes in the Wall Street Journal,  “The ultimate pandemic is now life itself.” And the consequences of such a dubious policy is to further expand the power of the regulatory state at the price of our freedom.

Our inability to accept the “slings and arrows” not just of “outrageous fortune,” as Hamlet put it, but of everyday slights, worries, disappointments, and fears that necessarily follow from being imperfect humans in an imperfect world, has dangerous implications beyond weakening our characters. As nearly three years of the pandemic have shown, chronic anxiety creates a rationale for the technocratic nanny-state to expand its reach into our private and social lives, threatening our freedom and unalienable rights.

This recommendation by credentialed “experts” exposes several of the bad ideas that characterize the modern West. One of the worst is hubris of technocracy, the idea that a permanent nature of human beings and the tragic dimensions of human existence can be eliminated and utopia made real. Destructive passions and impulses that account for much of human misery require only technological or allegedly scientific intervention by “technicians of the soul,” as Stalin put it, to create “heaven on earth,” the perennial promise of Marxism and its various iterations like progressivism.

Such optimistic assumptions about human perfectibility have been going on for two centuries, despite the copious evidence against such presumptions––the persistence of massive state violence throughout the “Age of Enlightenment,” the industrialized carnage of both world wars, the grotesque evils of genocides and gulags, the brutality and indiscriminate destruction the Russians are currently inflicting on Ukraine, and the daily murder and mayhem, some of it sheer sadism, we can see in the streets of Democrat-controlled cities and on YouTube.

That most of contemporary Westerners have not directly suffered such horrors, however, is not evidence of the improvement of human nature. All that seeming improvement reflects how rich we are compared to the vast majority of humans who ever existed. Yet despite the unprecedented comfort, safety, nutrition, leisure, and freedom from daily pain, many of us are still dissatisfied and chronically anxious, especially Millennials and Generation Z.

Take the creation of “microaggressions” afflicting “snowflake” college students. Some of the most privileged adults in America cannot tolerate any perceived slights or discomfort caused by the words or ideas of others, no matter how subjective or often invisible such affronts  or “dog whistles” are, to the point that meticulous exegesis is required to demonstrate how heinous such insults are.

Then follows the demand that the universities provide “safe spaces,” some of them including stuffed animals, for soothing the aggrieved. But much more dangerous is the censorship of such “hurtful” speech, and the social and professional “cancellation” of these heartless miscreants. So it is that an institution supposedly committed to the “free play of the mind on all subjects,” as Matthew Arnold said of a liberal education, and to academic freedom and the First Amendment, now routinely violates those core principles in order to placate hypersensitive petite Robespierres.

Such phenomena follow from the endlessly escalating standards of well-being, happiness, and fulfillment that our wealth has created. It’s not enough that we are relatively safe, comfortable, well-fed, and continually entertained. Our sense of self, our perceptions of who we are, our transient feelings all have to be confirmed and celebrated by the whole world, and never contradicted or mocked, no matter how absurd.

Moreover, these threats to our identity or well-being, whether real or imagined, must be mitigated by government action. Hence the unscientific, extreme covid protocols like masks and social distancing that were obsessively followed by healthy young people who were at a very small risk of dying from the virus.

All our comfort and wealth also lead to the illusion that we can achieve perfection here on earth. Suffering and unhappiness and anxiety become unjust anomalies created by the selfish and greedy, or the ignorant who still believe in illusions like God and faith, or the evil “racists” who want to “turn back the clock” by creating “Jim Crow 2.0,” as Joe Biden put it, or the enemies of “Green energy” who are willfully “destroying the planet.”

These enemies of “heaven on earth,” then, must be reeducated and their First Amendment rights cancelled, along with the other unalienable rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights. And the instrument of that correction, that removal of the impediments to the nirvana of perfect happiness, is the technocratic state that progressives have been constructing for over a century. Their biggest impediment is the Constitution, which is designed precisely to keep such a concentrated, centralized power from taking over.

But first the ideas behind the Constitution’s order must be discredited. The Founders did not believe in utopias, or the perfectibility of human beings. From their Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman cultural heritage they saw that humans in the main are motivated not by noble ideas but by “passions and interests,” as Madison put it, “sown in the nature of man.” Our vulnerability to the lure of power, and power’s tendency to aggrandize itself and wax even more extensive and intrusive, meant that it must be divided and balanced, with limits on its scope, and accountability to the people for its use. Forestalling tyranny and protecting freedom were the ultimate aims.

From the beginning progressivism has sought to undo this order. Only leftover religious obscurantism and blind fealty to tradition stood in the way of “reforming” the political order so that human perfection could blossom. The notion of unalienable natural rights, for example, beyond the reach of the state, “can be sustained,” progressive historian Charles Beard wrote in 1912, “on no other theory than that of anarchy. It rests upon a notion as obsolete and indefensible as the doctrine of natural rights.”

So it’s not surprising that Beard’s heirs today are working vigorously to dismantle foundational principles like the natural rights to bear arms and to speak freely in the town square without retaliation or censorship. The Constitutional order has to be be replaced by federal agencies staffed by “experts” who must be empowered to run roughshod over the rights of people and the states, relying on presidential executive orders, or the so-called “Auer deference to federal agencies in interpreting regulations, that leapfrog over the Constitutional guardrail of divided government.

Finally, infantilizing the sovereign people and making them dependent on the state and its agencies was presciently predicted almost two centuries ago by Tocqueville as the way to impose tyranny on a free people, what he called “soft despotism.” Such a regime would not rely solely on violence, and “would be more extensive and more mild” and “would degrade men without tormenting him.” It would possess “an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and watch over their fates.”

To achieve this aim the regime would, like our federal agencies, have to “cover the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform.” And it must seek “to keep [the people] in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided that they do nothing but rejoicing.” This “kinder and gentler” tyranny becomes “the sole agent and only arbiter of their happiness.”

Much of this prophecy has been realized for decades now in America. From FDR’s Second Bill of Rights to Obama’s “Life of Julia” political ad; from Joe Biden’s scheme to have taxpayers pay off the college debt incurred by future cognitive elites, to the “woke” school curricula and “antiracist” policies reprogramming white people in thrall to systemic racism, Tocqueville’s predictions have come true.

Diktats like screening for “anxiety,” a universal, permanent contingency for most of us, illustrate how the redistributionist entitlement state infantilize we the people. But this particular regulation adds insult to injury since much of today’s anxiety––over covid, or inflation, or an elevated murder rate, or the tanking economy, or the alleged climate apocalypse justifying an assault on the fossil fuels that created the modern world and still powers it––is the result of bad progressive policies.

Nor are government “experts” necessary for dealing with anxiety. Americans historically have had the resources for coping with life’s challenges. Individual virtues, churches, communities, families, and other institutions of civil society provided comfort and traditional wisdom for navigating life’s storms, rather than relying on so-called “experts” practicing some form of dubious scientism.

“Anxiety,” Kierkegaard wrote, “is the dizziness of freedom.” It’s the price we pay for being free to choose and act, always with the proviso that those actions and choices will have unforeseen consequences. To be free is the whole purpose of the Constitution, not solving problems or creating utopia. And being free means accepting responsibility for managing our own lives. Anything else is tyranny, no matter how “brave” the “new world” appears.