John Stuart Mill · Politics
Mill’s warning that the gravest threat to freedom in a democracy is not the tyrant but the crushing pressure of mass opinion to make everyone the same.
Earlier thinkers feared the tyranny of kings and governments. Mill identified a subtler, more pervasive danger that grows precisely as societies become more democratic: the tyranny of the majority. When the people rule, ‘the people’ can mean the most numerous or most active part, who may wish to oppress the rest - and they wield not just the law but something that penetrates deeper than any law: the crushing weight of social pressure, custom, and public opinion.
Against this levelling pressure Mill mounts a passionate defence of individuality - of people developing their own characters, choosing their own paths, conducting what he calls ‘experiments in living.’ This is not mere indulgence of the odd. Different ways of living are experiments from which everyone learns; the person who chooses their own life develops faculties of judgement, will, and character that the conformist never exercises. And new truths, new arts, new better ways of living almost always begin as the deviation of some individual from the custom of the mass. A society that crushes its nonconformists starves itself of the very source of progress.
Mill identifies a single great standing obstacle to human progress, and gives it a name: the despotism of custom. Custom - doing things as they have always been done, believing what one’s society has always believed, living as ‘people of our station’ have always lived - is the default state of humanity and, Mill argues, the perpetual enemy of improvement. Its tyranny is peculiarly insidious because it does not feel like tyranny at all; it feels like simply ‘how things are.’ Custom presents itself not as one option among many but as the natural and obvious way to live, so that most people never even conceive of an alternative, and the few who do are met with the full weight of social disapproval. Where custom reigns absolute, there is no progress, because progress is, by definition, departure from custom - the trying of something new, the questioning of the inherited, the deviation that turns out to be an improvement.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Mill feared social conformity more than legal tyranny. Explain why he thought ‘experiments in living’ matter for everyone, not just the eccentric, in your own words.
Leads to Friedrich Nietzsche.
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