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Well today I haven’t done much so far because I didn’t have class and I am still waiting for Active Appreciation tonight. In the meantime, I decided to read a little bit of John Stuart Mill, which got me thinking about Mill and his ideas. In John Stuart Mill’s time, there were two major countries that Mill felt the need to address: England and the U.S. England was in the Victorian Age and was ruled by a monarchy which, in turn, gave people little freedom. Words and actions were limited both by the monarchy itself and the strict social codes of the country. On the other hand, the U.S. was the exact opposite, as it was ruled by democracy and did not have strict social codes for people to abide by. Instead of being a nation ruled by a king and the aristocracy, it was a nation ruled by the majority. However, Mill saw that both nations were flawed and wrote about these problems in his book On Liberty. In the book, Mill sees these countries as flawed because of the limitations they put on liberty, leading to social tyranny, a lack of questioning of opinions, and the possibility of progression in society to stop. I believe that it was important for Mill to worry about these issues and his solutions to these problems, involving greater liberty, would be effective. Still, there would be some unresolved issues if Mill’s suggested solutions were implemented. One of the main issues that Mill was addressing was social tyranny. Mill says that social tyranny is when society pushes majority beliefs onto all of society, positioning the majority as tyrants to the minority. He sees this kind of tyranny to be just as bad, if not worse, than political oppression because when everyone is pushing a belief on everyone else in a society, it ingrains this belief much deeper within people than an actual tyrant simply telling people what to believe. Therefore, when the majority opinion is promoted the minority opinion falls through the cracks. Mill sees this as a bad thing because it is rare for one opinion to be completely true and another to be completely false. More often, the two opinions share some of the truth and they both need to be looked at in order to find the real truth. This means that by only looking at the majority opinion, people lack the full sense of the truth that is only attained by looking at all opinions. Mill continues on to say that by silencing the minority opinion, people are claiming that the majority opinion is perfect. Mill rejects this because to say that an opinion is infallible is to say that people are also flawless and incapable of errors in judgment, but in reality people are very flawed and make mistakes all the time. Mill takes his argument for considering all opinions so far as to say that even doctrines as rigid as the Bible and Christianity as a whole should be looked at with other ideas in mind in order to find the whole truth. This shows that no opinion, no matter how sacred, can be called the truth without being tested and looking at suppressed opinions. As a result of social tyranny, people were unwilling to question and challenge their own opinions and actions, which Mill also saw as a problem. Social tyranny not only applies to society as a whole, but also to groups within society. Mill saw that people who would stubbornly stick to their opinions and not accepting any challenges were not holding active truths but rather “dead dogmas”, or established, stubborn beliefs. This causes people to be closed-minded and ignorant to opinions that likely have some truth in them. When one does not allow for competition to his beliefs, those beliefs are incomplete, as he is unable to answer to those who debate against his beliefs. Mill states that these people who claim that they are certain in their own opinion are foolish as they are essentially saying they are the ultimate judge on certainty without even hearing the other side. Furthermore, Mill says that people treat actions the same way and are unwilling to do anything other than what is considered acceptable for their situation. Though Mill does say it is good for people, especially children, to know what others have learned in the past, people should still not simply follow others and let them decide what is best for that individual. He classifies the ability for one to act as they wish as a distinctly human characteristic and to imitate others is “ape-like” and inhuman. Thus, Mill finds that the tyranny of the majority causes individuals to simply imitate the majority and lose their sense of self.
