Individualism is intrinsic to democracy, and therefore, has a political nature. It eventually leads to the isolation of citizens. If individualism is an error in reason, we can trace it back to the intellectual error of equating freedom with autonomy, or the severance of nature from grace and reason from revelation. (See, for example, Tracey Rowland’s book Beyond Kant and Nietzsche: The Munich Defence of Christian Humanism, where she skillfully excavates the thought of six German Catholic scholars who worked against German Idealism during the inter-war and post Second World War period.)
Tocqueville writes that “individualism at first dries up only the source of public virtue; but in the long term it attacks and destroys all the others and will finally be absorbed in selfishness.” This is because democracy is not a fixed system of government, but an evolving way of looking at the world. Its principles may, at first glance, look fixed. One may even bullet-point them: equality before the law, the rule of law, individual freedom, civil rights, and so on. But beneath this is a view of the human person as autonomous. Equality and individualism are not static elements—they evolve over time, growing insatiable, and ultimately, leading to moral degeneration in society.
Unless checked and balanced by a human and/or divine force outside itself, democracy will evolve as the individual’s appetites evolve in response to social and technological developments. In democracy, that check—that boundary—is religion, which guides man’s reason, appetites, and duties. Once the boundary of religion is breached, there is no stop—his reason disconnected from a regulating principle will be able to “rationalize” anything. (See the discussion of the slave trade, social evils, and totalitarian ideologies in Pope Benedict XVI’s 2010 Address at Westminster Hall.) Man’s fallen appetitive nature will drive him to feed his appetites—for the appetite of man there is never an “enough.” The more freedom he gains, the more he wants; the more equality he gains, the more he wants. As individualism feeds the desire for equality, that equality, in turn, demands more freedom. What is interesting, however, is that Tocqueville observes that love of extreme equality leads to delirium.
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