Our discussion in class on Wednesday about Thoreau encouraging people to go their own away and not "becoming part of the machine," reminded me a lot of what we had talked about just earlier that morning in Political Theory. Thoreau emphasized being the importance of being the minority and not just mindlessly agreeing with the majority. In Poltical Theory on Wednesday we read an excerpt of a man named Michael Oakeshott who said, "Government should keep us afloat, not force us to row." It's clear that Oakeshott feels similarly: he believes the government should not be too involved in daily life, and that different ideas and opinions within government are extremely important. He seemed to think that participation in government would lead to problems. This struck a chord with me, especially after analyzing Putnam's "Bowling Alone" and doing all this research on voluntary associations. This led me to think about how diversity would (and does) work in our current government: we only have two (and a half) parties in congress, and it seems to cause more problems than solutions, what with the current budget controversy. In theory, I would definitely agree with Thoreau and Oakeshott's view that having little-to-no diversity in government could lead to Tocqueville's tyranny of the majority, but in practicality, how effective would this actually be? Especially if there were more than just two (and a half) opinions! No one would agree on anything and in turn, nothing would get done.
Senior year, I took sociology with one of the more popular teachers at my high school. Shea was pretty unconventional - he was from Pittsburgh so he had a "tell it like it is" demeanor and, in a way, was pretty insensitive. But he definitely taught us a lot. One of his favorite sayings was "The 80/20. 80% of people either don't know or don't care, so it's up to the 20% to lead and make the difference." One of his jobs as the sociology teacher was to create projects for us to get involved and improve our community, such as canned food drives, etc. But my school had a reputation in our area as being kind of disinterested and even unsuccessful (which isn't true, but that's a different story). My school was 50% white, meaning the other 50% were kids from minority backgrounds and slightly lower economic statuses than the rest of the town. It was hard to get students involved and care about the school when the majority of them didn't come from families that were able to be involved or care about their community because they were always working at their lower-wage jobs. Shea would get visibly frustrated with the students that clearly weren't interested about things that were pretty important, and would use the 80/20 analogy to get them to wake up. He would emphasize that the 80% were ignorant, disinterested, and generally did whatever everyone else did. (When he was really mad, he would say the ratio was 90/10). This definitely affected me, just because being part of the 80 (or 90) was so unappealing to me. I wanted to be part of the 10-20%: a leader, a free thinker, someone that was capable of making a difference and influencing others to do the same. But, he definitely had a point when he said the majority of people just go with the flow and do what they're told. And in a way, this is effective. The 20% students at my school would just spread the word about projects and food drives and encourage the other 80% to participate. Through this method, we were able to achieve results beyond our goals, and our projects were always successful.
Obviously, there are instances where the 20% aren't using their power for good. And in that case, we can only hope and pray that there are people in the 80% that are awake enough to question their leaders and even out the ratio in order to improve life for everyone.
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