The recent wave of weapons bans in Australia, swords, machetes, and other so-called "prohibited weapons," is not just an overreach of public policy. It is part of a broader cultural project: the gradual transformation of citizens into dependents, of adults into children, and of personal autonomy into managed compliance. It's not about safety. It's about control, in favour of Left wing woke ideology.
As libertarian thinkers like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek warned, once the state decides it must protect people from every conceivable harm, whether from economic hardship, offensive speech, or now, the mere existence of edged steel, it begins a dangerous slide into paternalism. It stops being the referee and starts being the parent. Worse still, as psychoanalysts like Freud and Jung described, this state increasingly resembles the "devouring mother": caring, maybe, but suffocating and possessive, raising a population of frightened, stunted children who fear risk more than they value liberty.
And make no mistake: this infantilisation is deliberate.
Australia once prided itself on being a land of rugged individuals, self-reliant, capable, and free. But today, the trend is toward risk-averse dependency. The language used by politicians and bureaucrats around the weapons ban is telling: "No one needs a sword." "The public must be kept safe." The citizen is no longer presumed to be capable of reasoned decision-making. He/she is presumed to be dangerous, or stupid.
And so, he/she must be disarmed, watched, instructed, corrected.
These policies are not driven by a crime wave, serious edged weapon violence with swords for example, remains statistically rare. Rather, they are driven by fear: a fear that any liberty, however symbolic or minor, might be misused. A sword in a cabinet, a machete on a farm wall, or a collector's antique becomes a symbol of resistance to the soft-totalitarianism of the nanny state.
As in the U.S., where Senator Ron Johnson recently warned that over 50% of Americans are now dependent on the state, Australia too has drifted toward a culture of expectation and entitlement. If the government gives you money, regulates your job, defines your speech, educates your children, and now decides what objects you may own in your own home — then what's left?
The once-free citizen is reduced to a state-managed dependent, more like a ward than a sovereign adult. And like any child raised under smothering supervision, the result is not gratitude, but emotional fragility, resentment, and moral confusion. And control.
Banning swords, knives, and tools that our grandparents would have used daily is not just a legal move, it's symbolic. It says: you can't be trusted, and won't be trusted. You, the average Australian, are now too fragile, too emotional, or too stupid, to own a steel blade. Better to leave such things in the hands of the police, the government, the experts.
But a free society cannot exist if its members are denied the basic respect of presumed competence.
We already see the consequences in our culture: rising anxiety, record mental health crises, and a generation of young people who have been raised to fear freedom and crave regulation. They demand safe spaces and hate speech laws not because they are evil, but because they have been taught to live in fear, of weapons, of ideas, of each other. It is then a culture of institutionalised cowardice, completely inconsistent with past societies.
If we continue down this path, the Australia of tomorrow will be a nation of managed dependents, not sovereign citizens. We will have traded the risks of freedom for the safety of infantilisation. We will have accepted, as Nietzsche warned, the tyranny of the "last man," comfortable, compliant, and incapable of greatness.
The sword ban is not just a policy. It's a mirror. It shows us how far we've drifted from our traditions of individualism, liberty, and personal responsibility. It's time to wake up — and grow up!
https://www.thefocalpoints.com/p/free-grownups-versus-needy-dependents
"As the Austrian economists, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek pointed out, unless strict limits are placed on the state, it will inexorably expand its role in all human affairs with the proposition that the state is necessary for protecting us from bad guys, regulating our affairs to keep us out of trouble, and taking care of us because we (and our market) are incapable of taking care of ourselves.
Thus, the state becomes analogous to what Freudian psychologists characterized as the "devouring mother"—that is, a mother who, by fulfilling all the child's needs while also being possessive and controlling—hinders the child from becoming an independent adult.
The child of the devouring mother often behaves in a spoiled and conceited way as he cannot come to terms with the reality that the world refuses to cater to his wishes and conform to his notions of the way the world should be.
In a recent Tucker Carlson interview, Senator Ron Johnson expressed his fear that over 50% of the American people are now dependent on the state. This is the outcome of a state that fosters dependency and never celebrates the strong and independent citizen who is capable of taking care of himself and his family.
Thus we have seen how, for decades, the state—and especially the Democrat Party—has fostered the growth of "Victimhood Culture," which comports perfectly with the promise to take care of those who purportedly cannot take care of themselves because they were victimized by some cohort of white, property-owning men in the past.
Disbursing ever larger sums of money—produced by the state out of thin air—gives the people the illusion that the state is akin to a generous father. What many people who receive these funds fail to realize is that the inflation produced by this arrangement undermines the real purchasing power of the funds they receive.
If the United States is going to remain the "Land of the Free" celebrated in our patriotic hymns, it needs to start celebrating and encouraging free and responsible grownups and disapproving of needy children."