The original, altruistic intentions and noble-sounding slogans of [Socialists] are irrelevant. Once they are no longer constrained by law, it’s just a matter of time—and usually a very brief time—before they become tyrants. Initially their tyrannical actions will be directed at their political opposition, and then at anyone who criticizes or even questions them.

At the end of Arthur Koester’s 1940 novel Darkness at Noon, the protagonist Rubashov is so worn down with the interrogations that he accepts his fate with the following rationalization and resignation.

"And so every leap of technical progress brings with it a relative intellectual regression of the masses, a decline in their political maturity. At times it may take decades or even generations before the collective consciousness gradually catches up to the changed order and regains the capacity to govern itself that it had formerly possessed at a lower stage of civilization."

John Leake