[gcruse]

I had friends living in Canada during the Cold War who had emigrated out of Hungary. They had friends who had voluntarily gone from Canada back to communist Hungary because freedom, as in freedom to fail, terrified them. The thought of not having a job for life along with the other ‘risks’ of capitalism worried them so much they preferred the communism that had defined their lives in Hungary. For some, evidently, serfdom was preferable to freedom.

[TrueKnightGalahad]

Borrowing a maxim from Heinlein, "Man is a rationalizing animal," I would wager (hmmm, seem to be a wagering man today) that those Hungarian returnees would vehemently deny that they were serfs, or anything less than free. Their rationale would lie in a re-definition of "freedom" that completely turns the concept on its head, much like the socialist definitions of freedom as "freedoms from" (hunger, joblessness, etc.) rather than freedom to.