A passage from a journal

It's late and sleep eludes. So I'm reading some passages from the journal of Albert Jay Nock, 1873-1945. This one I'd like to share with you.

"Lord, how the world is given to worshiping words! Eschew the coarse word slavery, and you can get glad acceptance for a condition of actual slavery. A man is a slave when his labour-products are appropriated, and his activities are governed by some agency other than himself; that is the essence of slavery. Refrain from using the word Bolshevism, or Fascism, Hitlerism, Marxism, Communism, and you have no troubles getting acceptance for the principle that underlies them all alike--the principle that the State is everything, and the individual nothing."

Nock, a friend of William Jennings Bryan and one of the lights of the early Progressive movement, eventually found these advocates of "change" and "reform" to be "political Frankensteins." In the State, he held no trust. He viewed Statism as a cancer that would eventually throttle the power of independent moral judgment in its citizenry.