An Open Letter from Alexis de Tocqueville to President Barack Obama and the American People

I think that the oppression threatening democracies will not be like anything there has been in the world before….

I see an innumerable crowd of men, all alike and equal, turned in upon themselves in a restless search for those petty, vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls….

Above these men stands an immense and protective power which alone is responsible for looking after their enjoyments and watching over their destiny. It is absolute, meticulous, ordered, provident, and kindly disposed. It would be like a fatherly authority, if, fatherlike, its aim were to prepare men for manhood, but it seeks only to keep them in perpetual childhood; it prefers its citizens to enjoy themselves provided they have only enjoyment in mind. It works readily for their happiness but it wishes to be the only provider and judge of it. It provides their security, anticipates and guarantees their needs, supplies their pleasures, directs their principal concerns, manages their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances….

Thus, it reduces daily the value and frequency of the exercise of free choice; it restricts the activity of free will within a narrower range and gradually removes autonomy itself from each citizen. Equality has prepared men for all this, inclining them to tolerate all these things and often even to see them as a blessing.

Thus, the ruling power, having taken each citizen one by one into its powerful grasp and having molded him to its own liking, spreads its arms over the whole of society, covering the surface of social life with a network of petty, complicated, detailed, and uniform rules through which even the most original minds and the most energetic of spirits cannot reach the light in order to rise above the crowd. It does not break men’s wills but it does soften, bend, and control them; rarely does it force men to act but it constantly opposes what actions they perform; it does not destroy the start of anything but it stands in its way; it does not tyrannize but it inhibits, represses, drains, snuffs out, dulls so much effort that finally it reduces each nation to nothing more than a flock of timid and hardworking animals with the government as shepherd.

I have always believed that this type of organized, gentle, and peaceful enslavement just described could link up more easily than imagined with some of the external forms of freedom and that it would not be impossible for it to take hold in the very shadow of the sovereignty of this people.

it reduces each nation to nothing more than a flock of timid and hardworking animals

With this one point I think De Toqueville missed. The timid animals will not,in the main, be hardworking and the society will not even be able to feed itself so must decline economically slowly. or maybe rapidly, but unremittingly.

I cannot take credit for this & cannot find my source — some reply to some blog somewhere — maybe FR — but i copied it because it pointed out something no one mentions. The destruction by the nanny state to the meaning of life and the loss of self-esteem when we realize that we cannot make any difference anywhere to anything or anybody because the state has taken over every function: “the personal pain of individual worthlessness to society.”

“The left understands the point, they just see an Orwellian Utopia as more ‘fair’ and ‘equal’ than the risky competition of individual achievement based on merit as an easier way to self sustaining stasis. The damage done to self esteem by devaluing individual contribution can be legislated at a later time and appropriate compensation can be delivered enhancing the benefit although not improving the personal pain of individual worthlessness to society.

The left isn’t really very good at mind experiments or consequential realities of unintended consequences because they act on emotion, not logic or reason.”

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