(no subject)
I am reading Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America for my anthro honor's thesis. It is abso-fucking-incredible. It was written in 1830 by a French ex-aristocrat after the French Revolution. He came to America to see how a democratic society worked, and to see if and how it could work in a French society. Now, I know you're probably thinking "How could something written by a former French nobleman 176 years ago have any relevance to American society today?" But the thing is, some of the things Tocqueville talks about are practically prophetic. Its creepy.
"Our contemporaries are constanly wracked by two warring passions: they feel the need to be led and the desire to remain free. Unable to destroy either of these contrary instincts, they seek to satisfy both at once. They imagine a single, omnipotent, tutelary power, but one that is elected by the citizens. They conbine centralization with popular soveirgnity. This gives them some respite. They console themselves for being treated as wards by imagining that they have chosen their own protectors. Each individual allows himself to be clapped in chains because he sees that the other end of the chain is held not by a man or by a class but by the people themselves."
"Individual rights in democratic nations are usually not very important, of quite recent date, and highly unstable. Hence they are often sacrificed without difficulty, and almost always violated without remorse.
Now, in nations and times where men conceive a natural contempt for individual rights, the rights of society may naturally be extended and consolidated. In other words, men become less attatched to particular rights at the very moment it becomes most necessary to hold on to and defend the few such rights that exist.
Hence it is above all in the present democratic age that the true friends of liberty and human grandeur must remain constantly vigilant and ready to prevent the social power from lightly sacrificing the particular rights of a few individuals to the general execution of its designs. In such times there is no citizen so obscure that it is not very dangerous to allow him to be oppressed, and there are no individual rights so unimportant that they can be sacrificed with impunity. The reason for this is simple: when the particular of an indivdual is violated in an age when the human mind is steeped in the idea that rights of this kind are important and sacred, harm is done not only to the person who is deprived of his right; to violate a similar right today is to deeply corrupt the national mores and to place the entire society in jeopardy, because among us there is a tendancy for the idea of rights of this kind to deteriorate and be lost."
That is exactly what is happening with the Patriot Act today! And isn't strange that this man said that democratic societies yielded these kinds of problems so long ago?? Or if not democratic societies in general, at least America's version of it??
Maybe it's just me....
"Our contemporaries are constanly wracked by two warring passions: they feel the need to be led and the desire to remain free. Unable to destroy either of these contrary instincts, they seek to satisfy both at once. They imagine a single, omnipotent, tutelary power, but one that is elected by the citizens. They conbine centralization with popular soveirgnity. This gives them some respite. They console themselves for being treated as wards by imagining that they have chosen their own protectors. Each individual allows himself to be clapped in chains because he sees that the other end of the chain is held not by a man or by a class but by the people themselves."
"Individual rights in democratic nations are usually not very important, of quite recent date, and highly unstable. Hence they are often sacrificed without difficulty, and almost always violated without remorse.
Now, in nations and times where men conceive a natural contempt for individual rights, the rights of society may naturally be extended and consolidated. In other words, men become less attatched to particular rights at the very moment it becomes most necessary to hold on to and defend the few such rights that exist.
Hence it is above all in the present democratic age that the true friends of liberty and human grandeur must remain constantly vigilant and ready to prevent the social power from lightly sacrificing the particular rights of a few individuals to the general execution of its designs. In such times there is no citizen so obscure that it is not very dangerous to allow him to be oppressed, and there are no individual rights so unimportant that they can be sacrificed with impunity. The reason for this is simple: when the particular of an indivdual is violated in an age when the human mind is steeped in the idea that rights of this kind are important and sacred, harm is done not only to the person who is deprived of his right; to violate a similar right today is to deeply corrupt the national mores and to place the entire society in jeopardy, because among us there is a tendancy for the idea of rights of this kind to deteriorate and be lost."
That is exactly what is happening with the Patriot Act today! And isn't strange that this man said that democratic societies yielded these kinds of problems so long ago?? Or if not democratic societies in general, at least America's version of it??
Maybe it's just me....