In order to understand the rise of socialism, you have to understand the psychology of rescuing. It’s not just that some people wish to control others; they wish to rescue others. That’s why so many people (women in larger numbers than men, and women vote Democratic-socialist more than men) want the government to “do something” or “pass a law” or issue a directive to alleviate suffering. Their fantasy is two-fold: (1) that the unhappy circumstances of the suffering person never, ever have anything to do with his or her own faulty choices; and (2) that the government actually can or will do something about that suffering. The fallacy of the latter is easy to prove: When you give people huge, unprecedented sums of money to spend on the “needy,” they’re going to keep or otherwise redirect it toward their own ends. If USAID and the fraud in Minnesota — the most spectacular and expensive grifting operations in all of human history — won’t convince you, then nothing will.
Worse than the grifting? The false belief that every individual is his brother’s keeper, AND that it’s the job of government to regulate him (and enslave him if necessary) in order to enforce that belief. The fantasy of rescuing — which seems benevolent enough, on the surface — leads us down a toxic, dark road that involves barbaric control and even censorship and political prison camps, or concentration camps. The well off American citizen has been made well off by the rise of the middle class under capitalism, something that ONLY happens under capitalism. In their middle class guilt, they feel pain for those who aren’t as happy as they are; and they command government to lower everyone’s standard of living in order to somehow make it all better. It’s almost as if it’s a form of self-punishment arising out of guilt — a feeling that “I’ve rescued the needy and the suffering,” simply by voting for the Democrat or other socialist who will keep most (if not all) of the redistributed loot for himself. It’s a con game, but it’s a con game that people suffering from the rescuing complex psychologically demand.