by Michael Greaney

Created on: April 08, 2009

America - all countries on the face of the earth, in point of fact - are afflicted with a "collective dumbness" that, to people operating within traditional concepts of society, expresses itself in wrong (or, more accurately, inappropriate) behavior. Behavior that is appropriate from a strictly individual point of view is frequently not the best way to act in a social situation. Appropriate behavior between and among individuals is guided by individual ethics, which - while similar - are not the same as social ethics.

Nor is the situation corrected by imposing individual ethics in a presumably "social" way. That results in mere collectivism, making the individual a nullity and trapping groups, even nations into situations that quickly appear hopeless. Social situations are never truly hopeless, however. They just seem so to people "trapped" within the wrong paradigm. The human person being both an individual and a social (or, more accurately, political) creature, any system that emphasizes individuality above humanity's social nature is almost as wrong-headed as a system that ignores or rejects individuality in favor of purely collective behavior or "groupthink."

The key to overcoming collective dumbness in America or any other country or group on the face of the earth is the same as it has always been. At one point, in the 1830s, the perspicacious French observer Alexis de Tocqueville examined "democracy in America" (and wrote the first great work of sociology in the process in 1835) and concluded that, in America, the people of this amazing new nation had managed to reach the perfect union of individuality and social behavior.

De Tocqueville observed that Americans did not, like the French, wait for the State to do what needed to be done, or, like the English, stand around until some rich, socially-minded aristocrat decided to take a personal interest in a problem. Instead, de Tocqueville was intrigued to discover that Americans faced with a problem or a project that was too big for a single individual to solve immediately organized with like-minded others for the purpose of solving the problem or carrying out the project. This habit of organizing for social purposes was so pervasive that de Tocqueville declared that in the United States, the central government - or any government at all - could scarcely be said to rule. Instead, the people ruled themselves by organizing in free associations with like-minded others, with the occasional assistance (by providing

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