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| Landon Lauder |
By Landon Lauder, Class of 2017
Having taken Sociology and reading through Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, I’ve been able to more fully develop my personal philosophy of societal issues and government intervention.
I’ve always known of issues in society, but Sociology has allowed me to understand the core root of the issues by examining them from a systems perspective. The systems perspective is where you realize the individual attributes of people contribute to a group and therefore the group (now being a melting pot of attributes) behaves in a certain way.
Both liberals and conservatives as we now know them in popular media are wrong in my view.
Both sides fail to understand people behave differently than the group and vice versa, and thus they fail to recognize societal issues have multiple causes which cannot be solved with just one or two “magic bullet,” “solve-all” fixes. Additionally, because they view society with tunnel vision, both sides incorrectly place the government into situations as a problem-solving entity.
When Tocqueville observed American society, he was surprised to see how citizens in a certain area would band together to serve the common man: “Wherever, at the head of a new undertaking, you see in France the government, and in England, a great lord, count on seeing in the United States, an association.”
These “new undertakings,” Tocqueville noticed spanned all types: “…they have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, [intellectual,] serious ones, useless ones, very general, and very particular ones, immense and very small ones.”
Barbara Elliot, a recent seminar leader and lecturer at the McConnell Center, led the discussion of these “private voluntary associations,” or “civil societies.” Discussed was the degradation of these private collective organizations as we continuously pursue the need for materialistic desires and thus society places more emphasis on the government to provide for societal issues these private voluntary associations used to effectively manage.
Modern-day “political” and “popular” conservatives fail to fully recognize issues in American society and fail to accurately designate the root of the problem. Liberals may over recognize issues and instead of carefully solving these issues, prefer to throw all of government towards it, leaving it to be ineffective.
In the end, the ideal American society would have a complex network of private voluntary associations, helping micromanage issues in communities instead of a dilute government program.
Tocqueville said it best: “The principal aim of good government has always been to make the citizens more and more able to do without its help. That is more useful than the help can be.”
Landon Lauder, of Russell, Ky., is a freshman McConnell Scholar at the University of Louisville. He is studying psychology and political science.