>>> Part 2 of 5...
The answer is simple.  It is because, whatever we feel about the virtues 
of our own lifestyles, we all agree on one greater and fundamental 
virtue: liberty.
We will therefore tolerate everything except the imposition by others of 
their creed on us; and the tyranny of democratic bans is every bit as 
bad as naked totalitarianism for the individual who wishes to be left 
free; the Inquisition of the Grand Wizards of Total Healthism equals in 
its moral monstrosity the Inquisition of the Mediaeval Church.  Both 
smiled and promised salvation as they turned the rack and sought to 
liquidate those who preached a different creed; both brooked no other 
way, tolerated no compromise, allowed no dissent.
The significance lies not in the message but the means.  I have no 
quarrel with those who advance an argument in favour of the health risks 
of smoking; nor those whose message might be that smoking is pleasurable 
and relaxing.  Indeed, individual freedom is enhanced by the widest 
possible availability of free information, facts, arguments, opinions; 
consent is better for being informed consent; the moral being enhanced 
by having to choose and bearing responsibility for that choice.  But 
when either side seeks to suppress the other's argument, to deprive 
individuals of their right to information, their freedom to choose, then 
we have entered a dangerous world.  When social pressure is whipped up 
and joined with moral imperatives so to intimidate the individual that 
they feel it useless to resist, that is when a democratic society has 
been subverted by a form of totalitarianism.
I know, because I have experienced it.  When I choose to become one, 
vegetarianism was by no means accepted.  The adult world tried every 
means to make me conform by threats, derision, dire warnings, 
humiliation - and even starvation.  I was made to feel an outcast, 
abnormal.  They said my health would suffer, I would be stunted and 
feeble, there was something wrong with me, I was not like the others.  
The school meal supervisors warned I would be in trouble.  And when I 
failed to recant I was given no proper alternative food so I was left 
hungry.  I would, they said, forever be a weakling ...  Maybe, after 
all, they were right.
But what they in fact taught me was never to give in, to stick like a 
limpet to my principles.  And to defend everyone else's right to do the 
same.
Free Conscience and Free Choice
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It was a similar but more profound experience which taught the 
persecuted Protestant faith the virtues of a free individual conscience.  
And, as over the subsequent years society enfranchised personal liberty, 
so choice and initiative enabled Mankind to leap forward to a new era of 
industrial development, enabled by Capitalism, itself rooted in the 
individual ethic.
The early champions of liberty knew too that Man was spiritually 
enhanced by having to choose, and bearing that responsibility.  Man 
could never redeem himself without the opportunity to choose, humanity 
was diminished if the choice was ready-made.
The Opponents of Liberty
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This triumph of liberty was not without its opponents; nor at any stage 
in its development was individual freedom unchallenged by those who 
wished to impose upon society their own ideological straitjacket.
Whether they were religious or political, despotic, Marxist or Fascist, 
the common thread was the same - a desire to impose a single set of 
views, curbing dissent.
Such tendencies can be traced back almost to the origin of thinking man.  
Thus Plato quoted Socrates in an early Athenian Health Education 
Authority publication called "The Republic", weighing into the diseases 
of civilisation.  He said:  "It is disgraceful to need a doctor not only 
for injury and regular disease, but because by leading the kind of life 
we have described, luxurious food from Syracuse and Sicily, Corinthian 
girls and Attic confectionery, we have filled our bodies with gases and 
discharges, like a stagnant pool, and have driven the medical profession 
to invent names for our diseases, like flatulence and catarrh."  
The Puritan despair for the evils of civilisation were reflected much 
later in the musings of the French medic, Tissot, who wrote in the 18th 
century: "Before the advent of civilisation, people had only the 
simplest, most necessary diseases.  Peasants and workers, living a 
simpler life, have none of those variable, complex, interminded, nervous 
ills, but down-to-earth apoplexia or uncomplicated attacks of mania."
The supporters of Statist thinking have waxed and waned in strength, 
interestingly in an almost traceable cyclical form, correlating with 
similar fluctuations in the strength of Puritanism in society.  Indeed 
it might even be possible to establish a degree of cause and effect; 
that an upturn in strong Puritanical tendencies encouraged the growth of 
totalitarian movements.
The Puritanical Mentality
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It is certainly true that most authoritarian regimes are also 
 >>> Continued to next message...
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 X Blue Wave/DOS v2.30 X
--- Maximus 3.01
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