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Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(Painted Portrait)
He believed that man is basically good and nature is innocent. He exclaimed, “Man is born free” and “Let us return to nature!”
Intending to be his own god, he called for complete freedom from restraint. He rejected commitment and responsibility. Renouncing marriage, he had five children with a mistress and gave all of them up to orphanages. “Rousseau and his followers ... saw the restraints of civilization as evils: ‘Man was born free, but everywhere he is in chains!’ Rousseau saw the primitive as innocent and autonomous freedom as the final good. We must understand that the freedom he advocated was not just freedom from God or the Bible but freedom from any kind of restraint--freedom from culture, freedom from any authority, an absolute freedom of the individual--a freedom in which the individual is the center of the universe” (Francis Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live?). Rousseau exalted experience and feeling above reason. “Reason was the hero of the Enlightenment; emotion became the hero of romanticism” (Schaeffer).
In these things, Rousseau had a major influence on Bohemianism, the jazz era, and the hippy movement. Rousseau’ philosophy is a major element of the global pop culture with its themes of rejection of authority licentiousness and mysticism (exalting experience over reason).
- “I’m free to do what I want any old time” (Rolling Stones, 1965).
- “Nothing’s forbidden and nothing’s taboo when two are in love” (Prince, “When Two Are in Love,” 1988). [This refers to eros love, which is self-centered, romantic, sexual love, not agape love, which is a self-sacrificing, committed, giving love.]
- “... the only rules you should live by [are] rules made up by you” (Pennywise, “Rules,” 1991).
- “And ain’t nobody, and ain’t nobody, Ain’t nobody gonna tell me how to live” (Kid Rock, “Don’t Tell Me How to Live,” 2021).
- “A feeling is so much stronger than a thought” (U2, “Vertigo,” 2004).
According to Rousseau, a good social institution is one that causes the individual to “exchange his natural independence for dependence: to merge the unit in the group, so he no longer regards himself as one, but as a part of the whole, and is only conscious of the common life.” This is a plan for the big statism that is increasing throughout the world. The individual must not think or speak or act contrary to the “politically correct” position. He must be “woke.” Any opposing voice must be “cancelled.”
Rousseau is one of the fathers of the humanistic, government-controlled educational system. In his book Emile, he advocated withdrawing children as much as possible from their parents to be educated and influenced by tutors in the pay of the government. The father’s role is to provide “citizens to the state.” Rousseau praised Plato’s Republic as “the finest book ever written on education,” though Plato advocated, “The wives of our guardians are to be common, and their children are to be common, and no parent is to know his own child, nor any child his parent” (Republic, book 5).
Modern statist education is molding exactly the type of individuals envisioned by Rousseau, and Rousseau’s father, the devil, and is preparing the way for the Antichrist and his world government.
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