I just finished A Discourse on Inequality by Rousseau. Difficult to read, but I finished it. The discourse is in two parts, the second is much easier to read than the first, although at times it too endeavored to put my ass to sleep. There were times I had to read paragraphs a few times to understand what the hell he was saying, in part because it was boring, in part because sentences run on and on. It is stuff like this that Alexander Hamilton educated himself on, and I don't know how he did it.

Anyway, there were a few interesting points he made. Here is the first I will bring up, which is part of the last paragraph of the book...

It follows... that as there is scarce any inequality among men in a state of nature, all that which we now behold owes its force and its growth to the development of our faculties and the improvement of our understanding, and at last becomes permanent and lawful by the establishment of property and of laws. It likewise follows that moral inequality, authorized by any right that is merely positive, clashes with natural right, as often as it does not combine in the same proportion with physical inequality: a distinction which sufficiently determines, what we are able to think in that respect of that kind of inequality which obtains in all civilized nations, since it is evidently against the law of nature that infancy should command old age, folly conduct wisdom, and a handful of men should be ready to choke with superfluities, while the famished multitude want the commonest necessaries of life.

Very difficult to read and root out the gist of what he is saying. I read it a couple of times, then looked at the note from the editor of the copy I have...

Rousseau is not demanding the equalization and the levelling of conditions; he wishes only that civil inequality should be proportionate to the natural inequality of talents.

I don't think this was the editor himself, but a comment of another he found. The comment is very nicely done, and succinctly brings out the essence of the meaning Rousseau sought to relate.

Here's another that caught my attention....

I could prove, in short, that if we behold a handful of rich and powerful men seated on the pinnacle of fortune and greatness, while the crowd grovel in obscurity and want, it is merely because the first prize what they enjoy but in the same degree that others want it, and that, without changing their condition, they would cease to be happy the minute the people ceased to be miserable.

Basically Rousseau is saying that people only enjoy their riches when others are doing without the those same riches. In effect, it is not the things people enjoy, but the superiority, or the feeling of superiority people get from having things others don't but covet just the same. He obviously holds people in very low regards indeed.

Rousseau is a sexist pig. That is what my wife would call him anyway, after reading this next tidbit...

Let us begin by distinguishing between what is moral and what is physical in the passion called love. The physical part of it is that general desire which prompts the sexes to unite with each other; the moral part is that which determines that desire, and fixes it upon a particular object to the exclusion of all others, or at least gives it a greater degree of energy for this preferred object. Now it is easy
to perceive that the moral part of love is a factitious sentiment, engendered by society, and cried up by the women with great care and address in order to establish their empire, and secure command to that sex which ought to obey.

You have to read it carefully, but if I am reading it right, basically he says that women use sex to control men, whom they, the women, should be obeying.

The theme is supposed to be, I thought before reading the book anyway, that man in society with his brothers is the root of inequality, because it is then they notice the differences, which leads men to see and capitalize on inequalities. Yet throughout he talks not of society in general, but possessions as a part of social man that is the primary motivator for those that instigate the inequalities. In one paragraph where he talks of this, he leads up to it with a short discussion of how the whole social thing started, the social thing and the beginnings of the division of labor. He speculates that when women started spending most of their time tending the kids and keeping the homestead, the men did most of the hunting and gathering.

Here I have to pause and relate the brief discussion I had with my wife on this. I was giving a synopsis of the lead in paragraph, as I did above, but she had her own version...

"He sets up the scenario by first describing how the division of labor was instigated by the coalescing family, where the woman began more and more to stay behind and tend the kids and the home while ..."

"While the men went out and did whatever the fuck they want."

That was her take on it. Anyway, here is what Rousseau says...

In this new state of things, the simplicity and solitariness of man's life, the limitedness of his wants, and the instruments which he had invented to satisfy them, leaving him a great deal of leisure, he employed it to supply himself with several conveniences unknown to his ancestors; and this was the first yoke he inadvertently imposed upon himself, and the first source of mischief which he prepared for his children; for besides continuing in this manner to soften both body and mind, these conveniences having through use lost almost all their aptness to please, and even degenerated into real wants, the privation of them became far more intolerable than the possession of them had been agreeable; to lose them was a misfortune, to possess them no happiness.

The point here I think is that in his opinion man has become slave to his property. One of the reasons we in the modern age desire the big home is so that we can fill it with shit. I think the proper phrase would be 'have nice things', but of course my vulgar phrase is more fitting, if not more appropriate. This sounds like something he would have borrowed from christianity.

In audio I am just about half done with Lasher by Anne Rice. Way too many details, it's almost like having to deal with a history book.....