Do-Gooder Tyranny, by Clifford Angell Bates, Jr.

By Clifford Angell Bates, Jr., Chronicles, October 17, 2025

History is littered with examples of well-intentioned people and movements promising liberation but delivering coercion, suffering, and decay. What begins as a shining dream of justice and equality often curdles into a nightmare of surveillance, denunciations, and repression. The French revolutionaries who pledged liberty and fraternity sent thousands to the guillotine in the name of virtue. Twentieth-century communists sought to create a classless paradise but instead produced famines, gulags, and cultural devastation. Even at the level of everyday life, sententious busybodies—whether bureaucrats or self-appointed neighborhood scolds—erode trust and corrode the organic bonds that hold communities together.