The First Intellectual

[PoliticalChic]

Rousseau, as typical of the Left, reverses the actual meaning of words.



15. “Though Rousseau writes about the General Will in terms of liberty, it is essentially an authoritarian instrument, an early adumbration of Lenin’s ‘democratic centralism’. Laws made under the General Will must, by definition, have moral authority. ‘The people making laws for it- self cannot be unjust.’ ‘The General Will is always righteous.’ Moreover, provided the State is ‘well-intentioned’ (i.e., its long-term objectives are desirable) interpretation of the General Will can safely be left to the leaders since ‘they know well that the General Will always favours the decision most conducive to the public interest.’ Hence any individual who finds himself in opposition to the General Will is in error…

Rousseau’s state is not merely authoritarian: it is also totalitarian, since it orders every aspect of human activity, thought included….This procedure demanded total submission.

You must, therefore, treat citizens as children and control their upbringing and thoughts, planting ‘the social law in the bottom of their hearts’.”
Paul Johnson

Hence, the mission statement of government school.



'In ‘The Social Contract’ Rousseau advocated death for anyone who did not uphold the common values of the community: the totalitarian view of reshaping of humanity, echoed in communism, Nazism, progressivism. Robespierre: “the necessity of bringing about a complete regeneration and, if I may express myself so, of creating a new people.”
Himmelfarb, , “The Roads to Modernity,” p. 167-68.





BTW.....Hillary Clinton wrote something very similar to that in her college thesis.





So, once ‘truth’ is determined, anyone who doesn’t accept it was “either insane or wicked and morally evil" and should be dealt with as a wild beast.

 

[PoliticalChic]

16. Central to Rousseau’s totalitarian design is government school.

“The State would thus ‘possess men and all their powers’, and control every aspect of their economic and social life, which would be spartan, anti-luxurious and anti-urban, the people being prevented from entering the towns except by special permission. In a number of ways the State Rousseau planned for Corsica anticipated the one the Pol Pot regime actually tried to create in Cambodia, and this is not entirely surprising since the Paris- educated leaders of the regime had all absorbed Rousseau’s ideas. Of course, Rousseau sincerely believed that such a State would be contented since the people would have been trained to like it. He did not use the word ‘brainwash’, but he wrote: ‘Those who control a people’s opinions control its actions.’ Such control is established by treating citizens, from infancy, as children of the State, trained to ‘consider themselves only in their relationship to the Body of the State’.


Again, this anticipates Mussolini’s central Fascist doctrine: ‘Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.’ The educational process was thus the key to the success of the cultural engineering needed to make the State acceptable and successful; the axis of Rousseau’s ideas was the citizen as child and the State as parent, and he insisted the government should have complete charge of the upbringing of all children.” Johnson, "Intellectuals."



Written before Obama was known, see how Johnson anticipated him, and the Democrat description of him: “…making the legislator, who is also a pedagogue, into the new Messiah, capable of solving all human problems by creating New Men. ‘Everything,’ he wrote, ‘is at root dependent on politics.’
Just what the Democrats called Obama!


Rousseau was the alpha, and pick any current Democrat as the omega in this tale of totalitarianism.

 

[initforme]

As long as we don't let the rich write the rules and laws we will be ok.

 

[PoliticalChic]

As long as we don't let the rich write the rules and laws we will be ok.

There is no perennial group in America known as 'the rich.'


Let's check:

"...economic mobility. About 60 percent of the households that were in the lowest income quintile in 1999 were in a higher quintile ten years later. During the same decade, almost 40 percent of the richest households fell to a lower quintile. This is a nation where you can rise or fall. It is a nation where you can climb the economic ladder based not on who you are born to, or what class you are born into, but based on your talents, your passion, your perseverance, and the content of your character." https://imprimisarchives.hillsdale.edu/file/archives/pdf/2013_05_Imprimis.pdf