In The Roads to Serfdom, Theodore Dalrymple cites Austrian Economist Hayek’s thoughts on collectivism and its moral consequences:
Hayek — with the perspective of a foreigner who had adopted England as his home — could perceive a further tendency that has become much more pronounced since then: “There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which at the present time provides special food for thought. It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem and which consequently become rarer are precisely those on which the British people justly prided themselves and in which they were generally agreed to excel. The virtues possessed by the British people in a higher degree than most other people . . . were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility . . . non-interference with one’s neighbour and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority.”He might have added the sense of irony, and therefore of the inherent limitations of human existence, that was once so prevalent, and that once protected the British population from infatuation with utopian dreams and unrealistic expectations. And the virtues that Hayek saw in them — the virtues immortalized in the pages of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens — were precisely the virtues that my mother and her cousin also saw when they first arrived in Britain as refugees from Germany in 1938. Orwell saw (and valued) them, too, but unlike Hayek did not ask himself where they came from; he must have supposed that they were an indestructible national essence, distilled not from history but from geography.
Dalrymple’s main theme in his writing:
The state action that was supposed to lead to the elimination of Beveridge’s five giants of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor, and Idleness has left many people in contemporary Britain with very little of importance to decide for themselves, even in their own private spheres. They are educated by the state (at least nominally), as are their children in turn; the state provides for them in old age and has made saving unnecessary or, in some cases, actually uneconomic; they are treated and cured by the state when they are ill; they are housed by the state, if they cannot otherwise afford decent housing. Their choices concern only sex and shopping.No wonder that the British have changed in character, their sturdy independence replaced with passivity, querulousness, or even, at the lower reaches of society, a sullen resentment that not enough has been or is being done for them. For those at the bottom, such money as they receive is, in effect, pocket money, like the money children get from their parents, reserved for the satisfaction of whims. As a result, they are infantilized.