Society and its Purpose
Appendix 9. (370).
It may be helpful here to note an error that I have tried to indicate on several occasions. There is a common belief that suffering has the power to motivate a fallen people to undertake the road to renewed prosperity. Such an affirmation ignores human nature and history. I have already observed that misery is not a sufficient stimulus to set in motion the use of flaccid intellect either in the case of individuals or nations when they need to find ways of abandoning their unhappy state. Tocqueville has the following comments, which confirm what I say, on the Indians of America.
| You see before you peoples whose primitive education is so debased and
their present character such a strange mixture of passion, ignorance and
mistaken ideas about all things, that they could never discern the causes of
their own misery. They succumb to evils of which they know nothing. I have travelled through vast lands once inhabited by powerful Indian nations who exist no more. I have lived with stricken tribes who see their numbers diminish daily, and the splendour of their savage glory grow dim. I have heard these same Indians foretell the final destiny of their race. There is no one in Europe who cannot see what should be done to save these unhappy peoples from irreparable destruction. They themselves do not see it, however. They experience the evils that accumulate year by year, but reject the remedy and perish to the last man. You would have to use force to make them live. |
Tocqueville goes on with the following reflections on the nations of South America:
| Some people are amazed when they see the new nations of South America
engaged for a quarter of a century in unending revolutions, and expect from day
to day that these countries will return to what people call their natural
state. But who can say that the present revolutions are not the natural
state of the Spaniards of South America? Society in this area has touched the
bottom of the abyss, and it will not climb out by its own power. The people who live in this beautiful half of the hemisphere seem obstinately desirous of tearing out their own intestines. Nothing can renew them. Exhaustion makes them rest for a moment; rest gives them strength for new frenzies. When I stop to consider these alternating states of misery and bloody crime, I am tempted to believe that they would benefit from despotism. (De la Démocratie en Amérique, t. 2, c. 5) |