Muggeridge: servile State to come to pass of itself without our noticing it

"A recurrent nightmare, with me, is that in our inimitable English way we are allowing a servile State to come to pass of itself without our noticing it; that one morning I shall wake up and find that, with the Monarchy still extant, Honourable and Right Honourable Members still meeting in Westminster, the Times and the Manchester Guardian, the New Statesman and the Spectator and Punch still regularly appearing, the cricket still being played at Lords, and the B.B.C. still providing its daily offering from “Bright and Early” to “Good-night everyone, good-night,” we have nevertheless become a totalitarian society. In this nightmare it seems clear that all the faceless men, the men without opinions, have been posted in key positions for a bloodless take-over, and that no one is prepared to join a Resistance Movement in defense of freedom because no one remembers what freedom means. The walls of Jericho fell down, not because the trumpet blast was strong, but because the walls themselves were crumbling. People, that is to say, are never enslaved unless they have become slaves already. They swim into the Great Leviathan’s mouth. He does not need to chase them." ~Malcolm Muggeridge