“Human sensibility is the basis of the social contract,” says a key point from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s On the Social Contract.
Multiple times, Rousseau brings up the nature of human beings running on the assumption that both the people and its leader will do the right thing. He brings it up when it’s about governing, when it’s about places and statuses within a family, when it’s about slavery.
That’s a lot of loaded topics, coming from a white man. Let’s see if it holds up.
At first, Rousseau brings up something straight from the zero-sum game theory. He says, “He who believes himself the master of others does not escape being more of a slave than they.” Though he says he could only come up with a prognosis for it, he doesn’t elaborate further. …show more content…
It might sound like white privilege hogwash, but I actually agree completely with Rousseau on this point of his argument.
I had pointed this out in the conservatism v. liberalism debate a few days ago, but as a country, the Philippines never had the mindset that things should get worse before they get better, or at least that’s what I’d learned from mostly Luzon-centric texts. As people, we’ve become so privileged to think that the occasional slap on the wrist for bad behavior is so uncalled for, always taking our colonized history out of context.
We were colonized, yes, and we waited for the most part before we struck against our colonizers, yes. In consequence, it made us so complacent with being colonized that we didn’t even notice the new ones taking over. We are right to be enraged by that leniency from our own government at that time but blanketing that over our modern issues, saying that every unpleasant experience we are subjected to by our own government is uncalled for, is the incorrect use of the phrase “history repeats
Multiple times, Rousseau brings up the nature of human beings running on the assumption that both the people and its leader will do the right thing. He brings it up when it’s about governing, when it’s about places and statuses within a family, when it’s about slavery.
That’s a lot of loaded topics, coming from a white man. Let’s see if it holds up.
At first, Rousseau brings up something straight from the zero-sum game theory. He says, “He who believes himself the master of others does not escape being more of a slave than they.” Though he says he could only come up with a prognosis for it, he doesn’t elaborate further. …show more content…
It might sound like white privilege hogwash, but I actually agree completely with Rousseau on this point of his argument.
I had pointed this out in the conservatism v. liberalism debate a few days ago, but as a country, the Philippines never had the mindset that things should get worse before they get better, or at least that’s what I’d learned from mostly Luzon-centric texts. As people, we’ve become so privileged to think that the occasional slap on the wrist for bad behavior is so uncalled for, always taking our colonized history out of context.
We were colonized, yes, and we waited for the most part before we struck against our colonizers, yes. In consequence, it made us so complacent with being colonized that we didn’t even notice the new ones taking over. We are right to be enraged by that leniency from our own government at that time but blanketing that over our modern issues, saying that every unpleasant experience we are subjected to by our own government is uncalled for, is the incorrect use of the phrase “history repeats