Page 39 - GALIET ILLUSION: Rousseau IV

itself socially and politically, creating a master-slave society riddled by the same Apollonian and Dionysian Wills, a la Nietzsche. In this abyss, bewildered, trampled citizens might surely wander how safe it is and whether it is right for anyone to cede his natural liberty in exchange for legal titles or for the legitimization of the Right of the 1st Occupant,99 when their rights, liberties, possessions and entitlements can easily be stripped from them, as it occurred to the Jews in Nazi Germany, to Job before his restoration, to Joseph K, and to many during Latin American, African, and Asian dictatorships. Surely, the General Will can mislead, and rationally justify an overreaching agenda and perpetrate hideous crimes against its “apparent guilty” citizens and humanity. Thus, it liberates less, and can oppress more by blurring the boundaries between a legitimate Social Contract and a Master-Slave Contract. Indeed, the Social Contract can easily revert and succumb to a master-slave one, reinforcing the opposite of Rousseau’s ideals. Rather than progressing towards a “moral and lawful equality”100 and towards “equality by covenant and by right,”101 it regresses to an immoral and unlawful inequality and to dangerous inequalities by covenant and by right where might legitimately abuses right and the Minority’s Will.
Rousseau, like Thrasymachus, is deeply aware that equality in an abusive and bad government is an illusion: the poor are kept wretched while the rich sustained, and the dispossessed harmed by the laws while possessors benefited by them.102 Why? Although Rousseau’s
99 On rights of First Occupant, please see Book I. Chapter 9.
100 Ibid., Book I. Chapter 10.
101 Ibid., Book I. Chapter 10, and Book II. Chapter 2.
102 Ibid., Book I. Chapter 10. See also Plato’s Republic. Book I. See also Book III.
Chapter I. Rousseau is also aware that if government is more active that then General Will, there are two sovereigns: one de jure and one de facto. In this case, the social and political bond dissolves. He is also aware that the larger the state, the less freedom, and the more abuse of power.
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