Rousseau's nightmare has come true: farewell to goodness and justice. The philosopher who wrote a political work aimed at eliminating inequalities between people and making possible an individual freedom that respects others would fall into a complete depression in today's Trumpist world. In just a few decades, we have gone from "let's make love, not war" to proudly displaying hatred of difference. Identity (identities: individual, national, religious) has ceased to be an invitation to get to know the other and has become a hard protective shell. The mature Rousseau already suffered from the intolerance that has become omnipresent today.
Well into his sixties, Rousseau (1712-1778) withdrew from everything to dedicate himself to his botanical hobby and to following the maxim of the Temple of Delphi: "Know thyself." He then wrote The reveries of the lonely walker (Adesiara, translated by Gloria Farrés Famadas, who also wrote the introduction), a work in which he tries to be like Montaigne: he wanders, meditates, dreams. Half Stoic, half Epicurean, unlike the wise man from Périgord, he feels mistreated and persecuted, and resents the world. He searches, without fully finding it, for inner peace and the natural primal innocence—that of the noble savage—that he had advocated years before. He dies alone, with his work unfinished.
"Daydreaming relaxes and distracts me, but reflection tires and saddens me; thinking has always been a painful and charmless occupation for me. Sometimes my daydreams end in meditation, but more often my meditations end in daydreaming." It is thus, wandering, lost in his thoughts, that he inaugurates a romantic sensibility, that of an individual misunderstood and removed from the world, that of a tortured and melancholic self who admires nature and yet does not renounce the joy of life nor can ignore the abuse of unreason. "Only my innocence sustains me in misfortunes," he writes. "I prefer to flee [from men] than to hate them" because "the spectacle of injustice and evil still makes my blood boil with anger." "It is my ardent nature that unhinges me; it is my indolent nature that soothes me."
Should we become romantics in the face of the Trumpist axe and European neo-fascism? Should we flee society and take refuge in the imposing and delicate beauty of nature and in the right, nevertheless, to love without measure? Should we resign ourselves to being clumsy apprentices of misanthropes in search of inner peace while everything collapses around us? Should we remain indifferent to the destiny and fate of humankind? Who can afford it?
The world has become inhospitable, ugly, uncertain. Fear has taught itself to our lives. The law of the strongest, of the most clumsy amoralist, has returned. The Rousseauian utopia, if it was ever plausible, is today drowning under a heavy layer of anti-political ideological filth that penetrates and takes root in hearts tortured by bitter revenge. In the face of mistreated lives, angry responses arise. Once again, it beats Hobbes: a strong, authoritarian state. Like Putin's, like Xi's, and like the one Trump wants. For those who don't think like you, not even water. Thinking becomes dangerous again. Involution accelerates hand in hand with impractical returns to the past, with deceptive mirages of order.
In the ninth and penultimate walk, a melancholic Rousseau does this: "On Earth, everything is in a continuous flux that does not allow anything to take a constant form. Everything changes around us. We ourselves change, and no one can be sure that tomorrow they will love what they love today [Thus, all our projects of faith]. Happy, perhaps I have not seen any; but I have often seen contented hearts, and of all the things that have struck me, this is the one that has satisfied me the most." Let us, then, retain the individual possibility of a fleeting and placid reverie to ward off the very real and dystopian nightmare that haunts us.
