As “Democracy in America” reveals, Tocqueville believed that equality was the great political and social idea of ​​his era, and he thought that the United States offered the most advanced example of equality in action. He admired American individualism but warned that a society of individuals can easily become atomized and paradoxically uniform when “each citizen, being assimilated to all the rest, is lost in the crowd.” He believed that a society of individuals lacked intermediate social structures – such as those provided by traditional hierarchies – to mediate relations with the state. The result could be a democratic “tyranny of the majority” in which individual rights would be compromised. Tocqueville was impressed by much of what he saw in American life. He admired the stability of its economy and the value of religion. He also made a distinction between the irony of the freedom-loving nation's mistreatment of Native Americans and its embrace of the slave trade. Tocqueville argues that equality is dangerous because it reduces human motivation since every man believes he is equal in every aspect. I believe there are necessary benefits to existing inequality because it creates healthy competition among citizens. Furthermore, everyone contributes to society in their own role, so not everyone can be equal in all aspects. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay To understand Tocqueville's perspective, we must look back to the works of Plato and Montesquieu. According to Tocqueville, equal social conditions foster and shape human passions in ways that may be incompatible with freedom. First, equality lowers human aspirations. In democratic times, as the differences between men are reduced, the notion of honor weakens, and when these differences disappear, "honor will also fade." Generally “heroic devotion and every other sublime, brilliant and pure virtue” becomes rare, there is neither desire for great erudition nor genius. Tocqueville's criticism is more moderate than that of Plato, who tells us that equality will become so widespread in democracies that it will completely destroy virtue by making equality the standard of all social relations: children will not be ashamed or afraid of their parents, students do not respect their professors. But although Tocqueville's critique of democracy is fairer than Plato's, he agrees with Plato on the issue of the strength of equality. In his finding, equality can lead to two types of general disorders that will reduce human aspirations: “It must be admitted that equality, while it brings great benefits to humanity, opens the door… to very dangerous instincts. It tends to isolate men from each other so that everyone thinks only of themselves. It makes the soul open to an immoderate love for material pleasures.” The questions posed here are: why does democracy foster the desire for physical pleasures and why is materialism such a dangerous disease at that time? Tocqueville responds by explaining that the desire for material goods increases in democracies due to the instability and anxiety of these times. The aristocrat, whose tastes and needs for physical comfort are "satisfied without trouble or anxiety", and turns his attention to other pursuits. Democratic citizens live in an age where fortunes are always won and lost. Tocqueville writes: "the poor conceive an ardent desire to acquire comforts, and the rich think of the danger of losing them... the owners [of fortunes] never acquire them without effort nor indulge in them without anxiety." Once again,Tocqueville's statement seems incomplete. While his claims about anxiety seem reasonable, his argument about democratic attachment to material goods is a broader question. Montesquieu, for example, writes on the contrary that healthy democracies are characterized by frugality, due to the tendency of equality to promote distributive policies because equality makes the acquisition of large fortunes impossible. Although Montesquieu recognizes that laws are necessary to promote these habits, his explanation of the natural tendencies of equality is different from Tocqueville's. Plato is also instructive, as he provides a theory that explains Tocqueville's thesis that democracy leads to materialism. While equality tends to lower humanity's hopes and aspirations, it is also dangerous because of its tendency to isolate and separate. Despotism is the exercise of absolute power, especially in a cruel and oppressive manner. Despotism, as Tocqueville learned from Montesquieu, first and foremost requires such separation of human beings because isolation is the best guarantee of impotence. Isolation is a necessary characteristic of despotic rule since equality tends to cause it to become dangerous. Tocqueville's reasoning is not simple, because equality can divide but also unite at the same time. On the one hand, with the end of social hierarchies, democratic citizens become much less divided than ever. The equality of social circumstances leads human beings to identify emotionally and intellectually with each other. There are also economic reasons for this greater attention to oneself. Equality destroys privilege but only brings competition, insecurity and anxiety, and therefore greater concern for oneself. Because “when all men are more or less the same and follow the same path it is very difficult for any of them to walk faster and stand out from the uniform crowd that surrounds and surrounds them.” As the principle of equality spreads into the country's institutions and customs, the rules of progress become more rigid, slowing progress. This is because competition naturally demands more from people and produces progress. For this reason the lives of citizens are constantly full of worries, Tocqueville describes Americans as serious people. According to Tocqueville, equality strengthens one of the strongest passions: vanity or pride. Equality appeals to pride, since equality of social conditions teaches that everyone is as good as anyone else. Sovereignty reinforces this notion because each person is given an equal say in governing, confirming that they have the same value as anyone else. Individual pride is also strengthened thanks to the philosophical foundation of the dogma of popular sovereignty: teaching that everyone is equal in their ability to reason and judge. A democratic citizen begins to assume that he is equal to everyone else in every respect. In fact, it has no equal: some are more successful, richer than others. Equality fuels his hopes of truly being equal to everyone, creating perpetual dreams that will remain unfulfilled. Citizens will never get the equality they desire. They will continually get closer to their dream, but it will recede and as it recedes it creates in citizens the desire to continue following their dream. This explains why Tocqueville claims that democratic peoples will always be restless and why equality is burdensome: the “constant conflict between the desires inspired by equality and the means it provides to satisfy them torments and tires the mind”. Tocqueville's account of democratic equality describes a world of restless desire after desire that ends only in death..