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Food for thought
"If the citizens continue to shut themselves up more and more narrowly in the little circle of petty domestic interests and keep themselves constantly busy therein, there is a danger that they may in the end become practically out of reach of those great and powerful public emotions which do indeed perturb peoples but which also make them grow and refresh them.
Seeing property change hands so quickly, and love of property become so anxious and eager, I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all for fear of being carried off their feet. The prospect really does frighten me that they may finally become so engrossed in a cowardly love of immediate pleasures that their interest in their own future and in that of their descendants may vanish, and that they will prefer tamely to follow the course of their destiny rather than make a sudden energetic effort necessary to set things right.
People suppose that the new societies are going to change shape daily, but my fear is that they will end up being too unalterably fixed with the same institutions, prejudices, and mores, so that mankind will stop progressing and will dig itself in. I fear that the mind may keep folding itself up in a narrower compass forever without producing new ideas, that men will wear themselves out in trivial, lonely, futile activity, and that for all its constant agitation humanity will make no advance."
(Italics by me).
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote this in "Democracy in America" (1835).
I wonder what he would think of America if he travelled the United States today. What, for example, would he think of the narrow-minded Bible-belters I encounter every day? Those ultra-conservatives who claim to be Christians, yet oppose the public social security system (which, by they way, many of them benefit from on a daily basis in the form of retirement income and Medicare - which MY, the babyboomer, generation is paying for) and who call mandatory health insurance "social medicine", which, in their opinion, is a work of the devil because it has the word "social" in it, and everybody knows that that is the same as "socialist" and that, of course, is satanic.
No, I'm not going to start ranting and raving about my remote corner of the world. If I do, the urge to move away from here will become unbearable, and I simply don't have the money to do so. Weighed down by bills and more debts than I ever had in my life, I am trapped in a Tocquevillian circle of petty domestic interests and wear myself out in trivial, lonely activities.
My monthly Great Books Dinner & Discussion group meeting is a beacon of light in the gloom of my everyday life.
Guess what we're going to discuss tonight? ;D
Seeing property change hands so quickly, and love of property become so anxious and eager, I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all for fear of being carried off their feet. The prospect really does frighten me that they may finally become so engrossed in a cowardly love of immediate pleasures that their interest in their own future and in that of their descendants may vanish, and that they will prefer tamely to follow the course of their destiny rather than make a sudden energetic effort necessary to set things right.
People suppose that the new societies are going to change shape daily, but my fear is that they will end up being too unalterably fixed with the same institutions, prejudices, and mores, so that mankind will stop progressing and will dig itself in. I fear that the mind may keep folding itself up in a narrower compass forever without producing new ideas, that men will wear themselves out in trivial, lonely, futile activity, and that for all its constant agitation humanity will make no advance."
(Italics by me).
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote this in "Democracy in America" (1835).
I wonder what he would think of America if he travelled the United States today. What, for example, would he think of the narrow-minded Bible-belters I encounter every day? Those ultra-conservatives who claim to be Christians, yet oppose the public social security system (which, by they way, many of them benefit from on a daily basis in the form of retirement income and Medicare - which MY, the babyboomer, generation is paying for) and who call mandatory health insurance "social medicine", which, in their opinion, is a work of the devil because it has the word "social" in it, and everybody knows that that is the same as "socialist" and that, of course, is satanic.
No, I'm not going to start ranting and raving about my remote corner of the world. If I do, the urge to move away from here will become unbearable, and I simply don't have the money to do so. Weighed down by bills and more debts than I ever had in my life, I am trapped in a Tocquevillian circle of petty domestic interests and wear myself out in trivial, lonely activities.
My monthly Great Books Dinner & Discussion group meeting is a beacon of light in the gloom of my everyday life.
Guess what we're going to discuss tonight? ;D