The standard answer was that even though humans were born into a condition of perfect freedom, life in the state of nature tended to be, as Hobbes famously observed, “nasty, brutish and short.”

For this reason, men – either of their own accord or through the prior decision of their progenitors – were apt to leave the state of nature and join themselves to a political body – giving up some of their rights to life, property, and privacy in order that the government may secure the balance of those rights.

However, at the moment when these transactions took place – at the very moment when individuals entered into social contract with a body politic – an unalterable law commences in which the powers of the state tend to expand while the liberates of the governed tend to contract.

Means have been devised to check the expansion of the state’s reach into the lives of its citizens – and the general trajectory of human governments has happily gone from absolute monarchies to more constitutional forms of governance – but even still, the unseen law that always seeks to consolidate absolute power into a single locus is ever present and is always at work.

Now the particular thing to notice is that whenever this happens – whenever political power concentrates to a critical mass – it is at this moment that human governments tend to become more or less demonized.

Who can deny that it was something more devious than human agency which dreamt up the bombs of Hiroshima, the gas chambers of Auschwitz, and the crucifixion of God’s own son. Inconceivable atrocity has always been the fruit of unchecked power, as Orwell has so hauntingly taught us.

1984 is not a pleasant read but it is a prophetic one – reminding us that the world will most certainly end badly, that human government will always solicit our worship, and that now – even now – we are being watched.