Tocqueville: 'The real tyrant in democracy is not so much the group as the individual'

Alexis de Tocqueville ( 18051869 ) was a French diplomat, essayist and political thinker.

His work traces roots of grievance culture to human nature and to the pre-modern cascade of social transformations that culminated in novel, American forms of tyranny: a tyranny of the entitled masses.

For Tocqeville , the real tyrant in democracy is not so much the group as the individual.

Fragility may arise when a system exhibits too few or too many possible states.

A healthy dynamic for a system involves reaching the mathematical point of criticality near the boundary between order and chaos.

The mutual recognition of each other’s fragility is our species’ greatest strength, and lies at the root of our evolutionary success.

Tocqueville foresaw fragility itself as both the defining condition and the ultimate demand of the masses.

Equality, in other words, brings everybody down to the same level, in the most literal affective sense.

He foretold the disaster that is competition over fragility gone wild on social media, and the systemic allergy to nuance.