CosmosStag ·
Next we discuss Jean Jacques Rousseau. An examination of his life reveals him as a particularly disgusting degenerate even for the relatively cruel times in which he lived. Father of five children who were all given up for adoption never to be heard from again, his political and social writings show a similar lack of care, both for the people of society that he is writing about and for the more basic issues of clarity and logic. In particular, his writings show an astonishing antipathy towards human flourishing even though he himself was successful in more than one field. His essay, On the Origin of Inequality, is generally credited with founding the myth of the noble savage. His idealization of pre-civilized, pre-conscious man as a state of tranquility and goodness, written without any experience or scientific interest in real tribal people of his day, makes sense if we understand him as someone who is not strongly motivated to distinguish fantasy from reality, who prefers fantasy to reality, who is projecting his own infancy, before his troubles truly began as a toddler, onto human history. His book Emile, a treatise on the education of children (as if he would know something about that), is characterized by frank callousness and the absolute unquestioned belief that children are blank slates who will become whatever the teacher wants them to be through the application of behaviorism. It is a perfect description of narcissist parenting. Rousseau's supposed greatness among political philosophers I can only explain by theorizing that many political philosophers are similarly disturbed. The negative qualities which I read into his work can all be used to serve the function of self-aggrandizement and parasitism.