Way back in the 1830s, the brilliant Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting the American experiment of “democracy,” found a nation of persons afraid to disagree with the “tyranny of the majority.” Despite Ralph Waldo Emerson’s inspiring Self-Reliance of 1841, there remained very few free-thinking individualists to be found. Some 10 years later, when Thoreau published Walden […]
Have you ever thought that who you are as a person is determined in part by the government you live under? Political philosophers have been considering such a possibility going all the way back to the early Greeks. Government shapes us either by engaging and empowering us through participation or by assuming all power unto itself and leaving us to go our separate ways alone and isolated.
Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door.
— Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again
