Was Rousseau right by saying this?

Was Rousseau right by saying this?

No, and I cannot believe he would be foolish enough to state that.

No. Man is bad, society redeems.

>society redeems.
[Citation needed]

Absolutely retarded

He's wrong.
Human beings are inheritly selfish and always place their own interests above the common good.

Take a hostage situation for example. If humans were inheritly good then the hostages would all ambush the gunman together regardless of the risks. No one does this however, because people care about themselves too much.

Let's also not forget the bystander effect and the diffusion of responsibility whenever something bad happens.

Machiavelli was right: People are selfish and need to be collectively kept in check because of this.

People are Good
Society is a group of People
Therefore Society is Bad

I dont follow the logic here. So humans are good, unless they are in large numbers in which case they then become bad?

Unless there is some spooky mechanism that makes society inherently bad, completely independent of the influence of people (which makes no sense since society is simply and only a group of people), then whatever makes society bad is also inside the people who comprise that society.

If the person is only good individually and alone, but corrupt when in the presence or influence of others, the individual was never good to begin with. Society is a collection of individuals. Does being in the presence of another individual or group significantly alter the fundamental nature of that individual. Of course not. The propensity to do bad acts in groups was still part of that persons nature. If an individual does an action, alone or in a group, that person is responsible for their actions, not the society as a whole.

Displacing individual responsibility for actions onto the evil society is absurd. Society is made up of people. If society is bad, so are the people who make up a society.

>Was Rousseau right by saying this?
Is the answer to this question ever yes?

This is Veeky Forums, George Washington's white horse was a black Ethiopian kangz horse.

>I dont follow the logic here.
You're talking about a man who lived in the age of line infantry and yet believed an amateur citizen soldier army to be superior to a professional military.
You need to use feels to understand him, not logic.

>If humans were inheritly good then the hostages would all ambush the gunman together regardless of the risks.
or maybe because there is a chance they will all make it out alive

The Levee en Masse proved him right about the amateur army thing.

Not to mention that he's a guy that put all the kids he spawned to orphanages his entire life, meanwhile decrying society's institutions for creating evil.

He's literally just another hypocrite.

Hardly. The average french soldier might have been a conscript, but the whole structure behind the grand armee was so thoroughly professional it put other countries to shame.
Besides a conscript hardly counts as an amateur, he's just a professional who wasn't allowed to choose his career.

This is a good example of how liberalism is basically secularised Christianity actually.

It never occurred to rousseau that human nature is a duality of both good and bad. Take war for example, homer understood that war brings out both best and worst in people. Humans are endlessly cowardly but they're also occasionally extremely heroic.

But because of Christian moral dichotomy this basically retarded rousseau and other libtards ability to conceptualise human nature as both good and bad. And moreover to understand that some people are just intrinsically more virtuous than others owing to heritability.

Tfw a bunch or bards who lived in a non iron age civilization over three thousand years ago were closer to the truth than navel gazing libfags. It's not a meme: enlightenment philosophy really is that bad.

The problem isn't that he is wrong. The problem is that he is just right in very select isolated circumstances.

People do get corrupted by institutions, and turn evil.

But that's not the entire story. I mean, when the US removed Saddam Hussein from power, the resulting insurgency looked a lot more like what Hobbes thought would happen if you removed the Leviathan.

Yes. Indigenous people for example, even if they have only have 2 chickens they will always give you one.

But to find this kind of behavior you have to get away from our hyper-individualistic socially engineered society.

How does he define good?

>Indigenous people for example, even if they have only have 2 chickens they will always give you one.

This is what Commies truly believe.

I'm a libertarian you opinionated fag and yes, they do this. I know for a fact that people who live in the jungle are like that generous. The ones that already had prolonged contact with the white men on the other hand are greedy and will even try to rob them because they have learned that the white man will only take from them and never give anything.

>hurr i just read nietzsche