Tocqueville the Seer

Roger Kimball has a point and a quote from Tocqueville:

The state's near monopoly on instruments of violence is merely one token of a much broader and deeper calculus of control. Tocqueville got to the nub of the issue in his famous paragraphs, in Democoracy in America, on "Democratic Despotism" Where old-fashioned despotism tyrannizes over men, democratic despotism infantilizes them. Such despotism would, Tocqueville writes

resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves... It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living? … [This power] extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; … it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.

Food for thought, no?

Yes! Welcome to Brave New World! You can grind people under the heel of a jack boot, but eventually they tire of that and will shrug it off. But the possibilities of distraction are endless. Environmentalism = Social Justice = Fordism. Religion may be the opiate of the masses, put the members of some congregations do not even know they are in church.

The Leftist says, "I am good, you are not coming up to the standard of good, but I am exempt from that standard."

The Christian says, "I am bad, I am forgiven for being bad because of the sacrifice of Jesus, with His help I am trying to come up to the standard of good, and this is what the standard is."

via Wilson Fu