Democracy In America Tocqueville Analysis

Like the man in the image above, the art of censorship covers up the direct senses of people, manipulating a person’s reality. By restricting a person’s voice and what they view, you can easily manipulate them to a image. The morality of this has been debated for hundreds if not thousands of years. Great minds have made greater points for each side of this controversial topic. It is my belief that censorship is not a healthy practice for the wellbeing of the populace, nor the culture of a nation, as it skews the truth and causes even the brightest minds to have inaccuracies in their world view. The other side argues that people need protection from sensitive material, and that the human mind is to volatile to deal with the reality of our world without a filter. There is a clear difference of philosophy between the sides of this debate. One side maintains the philosophy of freedom
In Alexis de Tocqueville’s work, Democracy In America, Tocqueville spoke on the dangers of censorship in a democracy. "First you bring writers before juries; but the juries acquit, and what had been the opinion of only an isolated man becomes that of the country ... You hand the authors over to permanent magistrates, but judges have to listen before they can condemn, ... and what would have been obscurely said in one written work is then repeated in a thousand others." This sentiment describes a major fault of censorship in democratic countries, that when the people do not hold up the opinion of the censors, the whole populace is exposed to what was tried to silence. Tocqueville offers that the idea of censorship is counter productive in the case of trying to hide something from the public, as if the information trying to be hidden is discovered, than the public will become suspicious with respects to what was trying to be hid. This strikes at the very credibility of the argument for