Society And its Purpose
Book 4 - Psychological Laws and the End of Civil Societies
CHAPTER 32
Continuation — The natural movement of society
819. The contented spirit has all it desires. There are, however, different kinds of contentment dependent on different kinds of desire. A person who desires twenty and has twenty is content, just as another who desires a hundred and has a hundred is also content. Nevertheless, although both are equal relative to contentment, the contentment of the first is formed of twenty degrees of good and pleasure, and that of the second of one hundred degrees. Equally content, their enjoyment is different; the second individual enjoys four times as much as the first.
820. It cannot be denied that I have benefited an individual, if I succeed in leading him from one of these two states to the other. While keeping his spirit fully contented, I have provided him with eighty degrees of greater enjoyment which he previously lacked. This passage from contentment containing fewer degrees of good to contentment containing more degrees of good is a kind of natural, legitimate movement for mankind and for society.
821. Let us suppose now that we have an individual who has a capacity for twenty and possesses twenty. I stimulate his capacity and succeed in enlarging it to one hundred. Made restless and active by his new desire, he succeeds in obtaining for himself sixty, let us say, of the desired objects. Forty degrees of his capacity are still unsatisfied; he now experiences forty degrees of unrest although his enjoyment, which has now reached sixty, has increased threefold. But is the increase in enjoyment of any help, granted the loss of contentment of spirit and consequent unhappiness? His enjoyment, increased by two-thirds, has not bettered but worsened his state. My mistaken benefice has rendered him very bad service.
822. The service I render him is bad even though we are dealing with determined, not with unsatisfiable and infinite capacities. The difference between the two is infinite. As I have said so often, unsatisfiable capacities are those by which individuals seek an object proportioned to some good, abstractly contemplated, which lacks an adequate object.(353) Such capacities constitute states of absolute unhappiness. On the other hand, capacities, if determined, may or may not be satisfied. If they remain unsatisfied, individuals lack contentment, but are not necessarily unhappy as a result. The disquiet and penalty they suffer is limited, just as the capacity to which it refers is limited. States of non-contentment exist, therefore, which are not in fact states of true unhappiness. Nevertheless, they are defective, and must not be encouraged in individuals under the pretext of increasing enjoyment. The contentment lost by these individuals is worth infinitely more than the enjoyment they acquire.
823. These observations enable us to conclude that the determined desires of which we are speaking are not harmful in certain peoples who possess the means for satisfying them. The same desires amongst other peoples without the means of satisfying them cannot be encouraged without serious error on the part of government. If, for example, we compare the conditions of the new American nations with those of the old nations of Europe, we can all see that the desire for material wealth, which encourages hard work amongst the former, could only be extremely harmful to the latter if the same desire were opened with the same intensity. As one renowned author says:
| In Europe we are accustomed to look upon restlessness of spirit, an unlimited desire for wealth and extreme love of independence as a great social harm. All these things are precisely the guarantee a of long, peaceful future to the American republics. Without these restless passions, the population would be concentrated in certain places and would experience, as we do, needs difficult to satisfy. In France, we regard simplicity of taste, a quiet lifestyle, family spirit and love of one’s birthplace as guarantees of tranquillity and prosperity for the State. In America, nothing would seem more harmful to society than such virtues. French Canadians, who have faithfully preserved the traditions of their old ways of life, today find difficulty living off their territory; this tiny, recently born nation will soon be a prey to the miseries of ancient nations. In Canada, those who are more enlightened, more patriotic and more humane make extraordinary efforts to dissuade the people from the simple well-being that is still sufficient for them. They laud the advantages of wealth as they would perhaps praise amongst us the attractions of middle-class living. They do more to excite human passions than others do elsewhere to calm them.(354) |
824. Two causes already mentioned account for this singular phenomenon in the United States, where great desires for wealth produce activity which is not harmful in the present conditions of society. They are:
1. American desires are determined. The object of this people is not an
abstract idea, but real things.
| Americans love the order necessary for prosperous business, and value above all the regularity in ways of life which serves as a foundation for good families; they prefer the good sense that creates fortunes rather than the genius which dissipates them; their spirit, accustomed to positive calculations, fears general ideas; practice is more admired by them than theory.(355) |
2. Americans have abundant means for satisfying promptly such
determined desires.
| In the United States new needs cannot be feared because all such needs are satisfied without difficulty; there is no need to be afraid of arousing new passions because every passion finds easy, helpful nourishment; people cannot be made too free because they are almost never tempted to make bad use of their freedom.(356) |
Notes
(353) Every abstract excludes limits. If its objects are limited they can never come to the point of being adequate for the abstract itself. For example, the abstract of physical pleasure indicates pleasure without limiting it in any way; at the same time, every real, physical pleasure is limited to some extent. Consequently, physical pleasures, however much they are multiplied, never exhaust pleasure conceived by means of abstraction. On the contrary, physical pleasures remain infinitely distant from it.
(354) De la Démocratie en Amérique, vol. 2, c. 9. — In this chapter, the author describes the immense eagerness with which Americans take possession of vast new territories, which are never lacking. He notes that the population in Connecticut, which still has not more than fifty-nine inhabitants to the square mile, has not increased by more then a quarter in the course of forty years as a result of the continual migrations of people who seek their fortune in the wilderness. In the Congress of 1830, there were thirty-six members who had been born in the little State of Connecticut, of whom only five were deputies of the State; the others belonged to families established and grown rich elsewhere. Ohio has been in existence for fifty years only, but its population has already set out again on its march west despite the presence in Ohio itself of uncultivated territories.
(355) Ibid.
(356) Ibid.