“In a democracy, people acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands…Thus, not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him: it throws him back forever upon himself alone, and threatens, in the end, to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville
Tocqueville in this excerpt identified what can be known with paradoxical apprehension; that the thing pursued so interminably as the great ideal of Western society has turned to offer its own list of entrenching malaises. To be sure it was by virtue of individual value that literacy and education were made accessible beyond the elite, that the single conscience was given the freedom to act upon its own conviction, and that the governing voice extended to embrace those formerly excluded on the basis of class. Even so—as we can now presently see—when the individual is detached from the collective, the sense of individuality provides room for latter systemic egoism.
The egotistical “solitude of the heart” of which Tocqueville spoke, has come to be—as he predicted elsewhere—the catalyst for political disengagement: an egoism spawning paralysis—something that each political election reveals this in ever decreasing voter turnout. This must not, however, be misconstrued to be an inevitable outcome of democracy itself; rather it must be seen as an outcome of the individual value which first demanded democracy—at least that value stretched beyond its reasonable limit to preclude accountability and belonging within the past, present, and future collective. It is not Democracy, as some nefarious edifice, which causes Man to forget his ancestors, hide his descendants, and separates contemporaries; such an accusation can only lie with the individual who chooses to make himself out to be the world while the world exists unknown by him. Unfortunately, in large measure, this “individual” in so many ways has come to be our universal principle.
In a Mirror Dimly 