FREE ESSAY ON ROUSSEAU AND THE IDEAL SOCIETY

ROUSSEAU AND THE IDEAL SOCIETY

Rousseaue and the Ideal Society
Has the progress of the arts and sciences contributed more to the corruption or
purification of morals? Rousseau criticized social institutions for having corrupted the
essential goodness of nature and the human heart. Rousseaue believed that by becoming
"civilized", society has actually become worse because good people are made unhappy and
are corrupted by their experiences in society.. He viewed society as articficial and
corrupt and that the furthering of society results in the continuing unhappiness of man.

He also argued that the advancement of art and science had not been beneficial to
mankind. He proposed that the progress of knowledge had made governments more powerful,
and crushed individual liberty. He concluded that material progress had actually
undermined the possibility of sincere friendship, replacing it with jealousy, fear and
suspicion. In his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality he elaborated on the process of
how social institutions must have developed into the extreme unequal rights of
aristocratic France where the nobility and the church lived in luxury while the poor
peasants had to pay most of the taxes. And in his Discourse on Political Economy he
suggested remedies for these injustices.


  
    
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Review Of Platoon
I wasn't expecting it, I just looked up and there it was: the disgusting, bloody, mauled
body of a dead soldier. The shot was brief and I do not remember if he was strung up on a
tree, if he was hanging, or what not. I was not in class the day prior due to a sleepless
night led to sickness, so I was not able to watch the first part of the movie. I
remembered that our class was supposed to watch a war movie; Ms. Klein was deciding
between "Born on the Fourth of July" and "Platoon". I vaguely remember her saying
something about one of the movies being a slight bit, well, gruesomely horrifying. Due to
a number of things that were due in my classes that day, when I walked into my English
room, I was not thinking about the warnings that I was given. Then I looked up. Shocked I
guess you could say was my first reaction. I was a little too surprised to be disgusted.
Don't sound so disappointed, I became sick to my stomach all too soon. It was hard for me
to concentrate on a lot of "Platoon" during the first day of class. I looked at the
screen only half of the time; I buried my head in current work so as to hide my eyes from
the disasters on TV. I would occasionally look up and sure enough, each time I proceeded
to lift my head, I squealed, and put it back down. I remember scenes of teenage boys
being tortures with bullets, old women and men being killed, girls being raped, and
children being put in front of a firing squad. That night, I couldn't control the
terrible scenes that flooded my head as I tried to sleep. The next day, I had learned to
deal with the violence a little more than the previous day. I watched almost all of it,
having to turn away only occasionally. The emotions that the violence expressed held me
taut; it no longer turned me away from the screen, but drew me in, showing me further the
horrible nature of war. Even though director Oliver Stone may have exaggerated situations
in the war, he presented Vietnam like no one before. War is not shown as an event worthy
of glory or praise, we are no longer shown as a brave force of victims. Stone uses
constant inhumane brutality, noise, and extreme tension, as a way to contradict that
earlier standard form of war presentation. Although I have always looked at Vietnam with
a feeling of remorse, this movie gave me a sense of personal sadness and national shame;
sadness and shame for the wrong done unto the Vietnamese and the American teenage
soldiers, for the lies told to the American people about the initiative for the war, for
the "murdering" pride of the American government, and for the lack of respect given to
each nation throughout the world. The most disturbing emotion that this film gave me
though, was the depleting faith that humans could get along peacefully if attempted.