Observing Attorney General Merrick Garland’s willingness to classify as “domestic terrorists” parents who oppose public school teachers inculcating their children with Critical Race Theory, and Joe Biden’s drumbeat campaign to coerce employers to coerce their employees to get the Covid vaccination under pain of termination reminded me of one of the most pernicious thinkers in the Western tradition, perhaps the most pernicious, the French Romantic radical Jean-Jaques Rousseau.
Rousseau’s depraved genius was to posit a distinction between “false consciousness” and the “authentic” individual. Social relations and institutions like the family and church and business cultivate in citizens a way of thinking that obscures one’s self-interest and creates a self-injuring mentality. They must be enlightened in order to throw off the chains of their self-enslavement.
