How does a dictator keep the masses under control? Historically it is done by preventing them from exchanging information and ideas. It is done by preventing knowledge, from outside the realm, which will contaminate the message of the leader. To contain the populace you need to have a force that will create fear that is more powerful than the desire for knowledge. Mr. Thompson had Dr. Stadler to develop Project X to scare the masses into submission. The problem was that the lazy fools had already made such a mess of everything that there was no fear that was greater than the loathing already created by their policies. When they appealed to John Galt, they had already lost.

Even in closed societies like Russia and China, knowledge has been leaked in by the internet. Reason and individual rights can be discussed and the concepts compared to whatever is being fed to the people as a substitute. The lure and pride in producing value for exchange of values produced by others is a natural state of man’s desires. The feeling of accomplishment, the freedom to determine how one uses his life for his own sake is rational and natural and any attempt to resist it is like defying gravity. You can force a pyramid to stand on its point by propping it up with beams and perhaps some Egyptian built one like that but we will never know because over time it succumbed to gravity while those that used the nature of gravity still stand.

In a recent post about Bethlehem Steel, I referred to a video by Leslie Chang on the lives of working women in China. They are moving at an astounding pace toward Capitalism and unless their government uses nuclear weapons on themselves they will not be able to stop the forces that have been unleashed in that country. I am a sports fan of my Alma Mater, West Virginia University and we have a tradition where the students and team gather to sing Country Roads after a victory. Someone referred to an article mentioning that Chinese are particularly enamored by this song and provided a video of a contestant on Chinese TV’s version of “The Voice” singing it. http://boingboing.net/2014/01/30/chinas-...
The judges and audience were in rapture. I have never seen anything like it. Suddenly, I felt the force of 1.34+ billion people that have been turned in an entirely new direction from their communes while we are exploring the failed ideas of collectivism. The good news is that whatever mistakes we make will not last. The genie is out of the bottle, released by the internet and the minds of people around the world will never be controlled as they have been in the past. We are the spoiled ones with the short attention spans, desiring hope and change out of boredom and intellectual laziness, ignoring nature of man, but that won’t and can’t last.