Questions on Why Americans are Restless

2. A society compeltly devoted to complete equality weakens the individual on a number of levels. One problem that makes this a debilitating factor to the individual is what Tocqueville stated on page 167: “When men are more or less equal and are following the same path, it is very difficult for any of them to walk faster and get out beyond the uniform crowd…”. What he means here is that with complete equality no single person can become successful in any meaningful way, as he/she would be sorounded by the other people and taken up with them. Another problem faced by the idea of equality is two fold. The two are that (as Tocqueville said) that any minute difference in treatment would cause a huge upset, and that intelligence would also prevent complete equality. The former that I mentioned is that if there are any small changed in fairness, such as a person has an extra 20 dollars for food, then everyone would freak out and decry the turn of events. But this is flawed, for maybe the person worked an extra hour to get the extra money, but this is often overlooked in such cases. An example of how this is going on today in our society would have to be the celebrities. Many of the celebrities and rich people can get away from doing crimes. Not to name names, but one person only got a house arrest for a few weeks before being released for freaking out. Considering the charge, any other person would have gotten a few years of real jail time, and they would have cared less if the had mental breakdowns. In this respect it is this type of action that makes many of us livid, and it could be compared (in a much minor way) of how the nobility in Charles Dickens Book, A Tale of Two Cities, acted when commiting crimes, for at the least the Juridictive system is meant to prosecute those as if they where “blind”: no difference between race, “class”, background, etc. The last one is intellegiance. The problem, if even there is complete equality in physical sense, people who are naturally more witty can go around the system, and there is no way (in any moral/humanity way) to get brains on an equal level.

5. I think Tocqueville thinks that what we want is unattainable because most Americans are always looking for the “ultimate joy”. So Americans know what they want, but they do not know how it is going to manifest itself. Americans work hard for most of their life, which is a good thing, but sometimes Americans might think that the reward is far greater in gratifacation than the labor, and sometimes it is the little stuff that counts more than the one time big stuff, for it can last longer and can be looked forward to every day.