The mass-man sees in the State an anonymous power, and feeling himself, like it, anonymous, he believes that the State is something of his own. Suppose that in the public life of a country some difficulty, conflict, or problem presents itself, the mass-man will tend to demand that the State intervene immediately and undertake a solution directly with its immense and unassailable resources. This is the gravest danger that to-day threatens civilisation: State intervention; the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State.
– José Ortega y Gasset, Revolt of the Masses (the Spanish original was first published as a series of articles in the newspaper El Sol in 1929 and as a book in 1930)… via the redoubtable serial commenter RRS.
And that, boys and girls, is why Massachusetts skews statist.
Today even the so called “independent sector” of “voluntary socieities” is, in large part, funded and regulated by the state – and run by professional (paid) managers hired from ads in the left press.
Civil society is very close to being dead.
For more on the “mass man” see Oakeshott’s “On Human Conduct”, the “mass man” is a type all too common in European history.