Oh wearisome Condition of Humanity!

Oh wearisome Condition of Humanity!
Borne under one Law to another bound:
Vainely begot, and yet forbidden vanity,
Created sicke, commanded to be sound.

—Fulke Greville, Mustapha, Chorus Sacerdotum, quoted in C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century.

Welfare State

The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good – anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name 'leaders' for those who were once 'rulers'. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, 'Mind your own business.' Our whole lives are their business.

I write 'they' because it seems childish not to recognise that actual government is and always must be oligarchical. Here, I think, lies our real dilemma. Probably we cannot, certainly we shall not, retrace our steps. We are tamed animals (some with kind, some with cruel, masters) and should probably starve if we got out of our cage.

—C.S. Lewis, Willing Slaves of the Welfare State.