It is past time for us to realize that the major obsession, regardless of its named excuse, among all the petty bureaucracies, the municipalities large and small, and the many branches of the Federal government, as well as quasi-governmental bodies, is to extend power over us in all our life activities. In considering these matters, I had recourse to Alexis de Tocqueville, whose masterpiece I had never read. He foresaw the kind of oppression with which democratic peoples are threatened:
…[A]n immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone
takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over
their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and
mild. It would resemble paternal power, if, like that, it had as
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?
So it is that every day it renders the employment of free
will less useful and more rare; it confines the action of the
will in a smaller space and little by little steals the very use of
free will from each citizen…
Thus, after taking each individual by turns in its
powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign
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 break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and
directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly
opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents
things from being born; 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.2
Tamzin A. Rosenwasser, M.D., is board certified in internal medicine and dermatology and now practices dermatology. She serves as president of AAPS [Association of American Physcians and Surgerons - http://www.aapsonline.org/ ) Contact: juperbeatrix@aol.com.
REFERENCES
1 Dante Alighieri. Divine Comedy
2 Alexis de Tocqueville. Democracy in America Mansfield HC,Winthrop D.,
ed., trans. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press; 2002:663
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