Transcript for:
L'influence et les contradictions de Rousseau

rousseau is often credited as the original social justice warrior the mastermind behind the ideas of the french revolution and a supporter of the totalitarian democracy and the predecessor to karl marx and all of those descriptions of him are accurate russo believed in equalizing the social inequalities but not biological inequalities for which he might be cancelled for in the current year he was a big opponent to the idea of individual self-interest but nevertheless rousseau had advocated for the collective general will which was used to justify many tyrannical ideologies such as marxism and fascism and most importantly for what he is remembered for the french revolution where napoleon was proclaimed as the great lawgiver and the truest manifestation of the january will a will that's supposed to represent the collective interests of a group and dump on the individual as the classical liberal would say funnily enough while saying that rousseau thought that it would maximize liberty he is a man of contradictions as jacob thomann puts it and i quote rousseau could never decide what he wanted to release human nature or to moralize it by breaking it to be alone or a part of a human company he could never make up his mind whether man was made better or worse happier or more miserable by people his spiteful beliefs and the damages to the world are plenty of to name ranging from the noble savage myth his reactionary beliefs about the education and his personal moral failings that had underpinned his spiteful and hyper-rationalistic philosophy of organizing a society for the sake of implementing a just but highly contradictory system as he understood it i can go on and on criticizing the implications of such a philosophy and pointing out many holes in it as well as attacking his personal character but one cannot ignore his contributions to political signs contributions that are actually applicable and relevant in our modern age and i could bash for so as long as i want but i could not simply close my eyes to the other side of her soul a side of rousseau that may be the diagnosis to the former side of rousseau at least its spiritual manifestation which is still carried out by modern versions of despiteful side of rousseau in other words i will tear apart resource dual personality into two pieces analyzing them in the contemporary reality making a very relevant point you should remember and concluding why he is still important his first side is the spiteful and the utopian side a side of constant dreaming and theorizing of a world tree of inequality and full of social justice and liberty at least to a degree in which he understands it and eventually i will release a video just on that as there are many things needed to be said about it but in any event the modern rousseau's share a dream of a utopian globalism an implementation of a liberal or a marxist philosophy throughout the world turning it into a large multiculturalist paradise for the people that are going to engage in constant masquerade of the internal diversity bound by the collective goal to dismantle whatever is stands in their way while they all consume a drink from starbucks together with the oreos cookie the other side is the pragmatic side a more down-to-earth kind of side that all people have but they often suppress when they want to dream of something ideal this side understands that for a utopia to be implemented a certain set of required conditions must be met and it is that side of rousseau that i'd like to talk about today and in particular how it is relevant to the current state of the west the collection of basic political writings of jean-jacques rousseau had covered the most important core ideas of rousseau including his thoughts on inequality freedom political systems and most importantly his version of the social contract which had based itself on the idea that it should implement the general will of the people defined not by the majority as it will be in a democracy but by their collective self-interests now i will not go into detail showing how this is extremely utopian dictatorial and not realistic this video is not going to be about it as there are very few people who believe in collective wills anyways instead what i would like to capture your attention on is that for that will to be generated there needs to be a high degree of a social trust to a point where in book 4 he had argued that a society needs to implement a secular religion in order to bound the people together and the french had understood it literally i bring it up because unlike the utopians of the present he perfectly understood that for a successful mode of government to be achieved whether democracy or an aristocracy or something else there needs to be a high degree of social trust a sort of gentleman's agreement of mutual respect and an idea that both parties share the same common goals and cultural identities and even if one loses to another he must respect that loss unfortunately into the current state of multiculturalism as the largest and the only massive meta-analysis has concluded that in all cases diversity decreases social trust when people are not bound together by similar perspective on the world they tend to suspect each other and it is also a contributing reason to why the unions are in such a diminished state right now now we can determine to what an extent biology and culture contributes to that but one cannot deny that this is happening right now it is happening and not just on the racial basis it happens on the political and cultural levels as well people do not see each other as friends but as enemies and would you respect your enemies liberties if your interests go against each other many people would say no to that as people are adopting consequentialism and utilitarianism instead of virtue ethics as a result of that we have reached a peak level of polarization to a point where we do not trust the election results and justifying censorship and violence against those who disagree with the dominant world view never in post world war ii history has the society been so disintegrated with so many cultural enclaves and counter cultures being formed this is not the 1960's picnics and hippies now we have gamers eager social justice warriors incels the lgbtq plus racial identitarians and many many more who quite recently had rejected the common hegemonic identity of a nationality religion and culture as the dominant meta-narrative has withered away and was replaced by the liberal anti-culture as patrick denin would put it in a place of a once existing dominant culture which pretty much had held everything together you can see there is a hole a hole that is quickly filled by different cultures with people who following them pursuing their own best interests and it is that situation which quite ironically breaks apart resource first dream of a new political system in our current state of the west as the conditions are simply not met we don't share the same goals in mind nor do we trust each other anymore according to rousseau in order for the rules to be implemented we need a common consensus although he would disagree and say that we just need the manifestation of the general will but the general will is practically speaking the consensus of the dominant ones of how the society must be run ideally in order to further the interests of the collective a collective that particularly does not exist at this point as people do not feel connected to their nationality as their nationality is now being shared by people who they trust less of at a higher state of a multiculturalist society where people do not pretend to follow the common rules anymore we can conclude that the final form of liberalism has been reached before transferring to something else as there cannot be a vacant dominant culture for so long whether we will get the constant culture wars of different groups advocating for their own personal interests or whether another dominant culture would arise such as islam or even the church of woke and replaced the collective identity in place of the falling western cultural identity we don't know yet however any new meta-narrative or a collective governance would need to convince the plebs into following it it is that understanding of the necessity of a mutual trust and collective agreement that rousseau had in mind while he was advocating for the social contract and it is the same kind of understanding that is missing among our contemporary elites who focus on the utopian concepts and supplying materials for further mass consumption another critique from rousseau that can still be applied today is that the elites are not that connected to the people they supposed to represent as they let their wallets replace their duty which is just another contributing reason that will lead to the ultimate destruction and downfall of our western liberal democracies as we see it as the only reason to why liberal democracies are so dominant is due to the value that we place in them a value by participating in it in god we trust as depicted in every single american dollar bill and similarly goes the situation with bitcoin it is determined by people placing value in it the downfall of a liberal democracies would be marked when people will stop valuing it and partially it is already the case as they do not strongly value it nor they participate in it anymore and partially it has to do with multiculturalism and other cultural disintegrations as people do not feel connected as much to the wider community as they used to and as a result they focus onto their individual wills and the wills of their identity groups which are antagonistic to the general will of the country in the future one may see an even stronger decline in participation as people start to care more for themselves and their secluded communities than for the state as a whole and this is pretty much why according to rousseau democracies turn into chaos today we can also see a rise in the separatist movements in the west as the people of texas or california do not see themselves together in one country anymore and that's perfectly understandable and one can thank the children of liberalism for that who had allowed to question the dominant narrative that had kept the west and provided social cohesion for its people liberalism was once a great achievement of the west but it is important that that achievement could only be achieved due to the base of the west that had kept it together for about a thousand years before liberalism it is that cultural heritage of the west which was the base of the superstructure that is liberalism making the people trust in liberalism early on when they had this base but now as this base is withering away due to a manifestation of anti-culture so will eventually the superstructure and as no house can stand without a fundament liberalism will collapse and be replaced with a new ideology that will likely come with a new base if those things are to continue in the direction that they are going depolarization will only increase as more and more of the original meta-narrative that had kept the west in relative stability is deconstructed and dismantled social trust will continue to decline and as a result groups competing for power will continue to do so and if rousseau should be remembered for something in our contemporary world he surely should be remembered for understanding the value of social trust and cohesion that is absolutely necessary to be present if one wants to live in a trusting and lawful society and for those of you who are still here i will post one final video in this month before i will take a few week break as i will be very busy with exams and essays for school however this new video should be great and the script is already done it will cover how the ride had to organize on youtube and elsewhere so if you're looking to start a youtube channel or help the right you should absolutely not miss it anyhow that was all for today and thanks for watching