Rousseau in action: the real reason behind gun control legislation

It's been really busy, and I missed posting about Rousseau's birthday on Monday. Rousseau was basically the father of the philosophical strain that led to Fascism, Socialism, and Communism. It's not far from the truth to say that more lives have been sacrificed on the altar of Rousseaupian Romanticism than for any other cause. Perhaps he wasn't an evil man - although he seems to have been entirely unpleasant - but his philosophy has been lethal since the Terror of the French Revolution. It's only picked up steam in the 19th and 20th centuries.

It is - perhaps unsurprisingly - wildly popular at Universities across the globe.

We are born weak, we need strength; helpless, we need aid; foolish, we need reason. All that we lack at birth, all that we need when we come to man's estate, is the gift of education.

- Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Man, said Rousseau, is corrupted by society, turned into a fallen creature - but is perfectible by education. In a sense, Rousseau took Plato's dictum that only Philosophers should rule and amplified it. If the right education were provided, he claimed, man and society would be perfected. Thus the popularity of Rousseaupian theory and it's bastard children in the Academy, who see in themselves the soul of the Philosopher-King.

Bob S updates us on his lovely bride's status, and tosses out this lightning bolt:

That is the point so many antis forget — it is the fundamental nature or character of the person that matters – not the tool.
Who I am didn’t change.
It didn’t change when I was in the hospital visiting my Beloved Bride. It didn’t change when I stopped and got gas. It didn’t change when I was walking into the 10 story parking garage at nearly 10 o’clock at night.
I obeyed the law because it was the right thing to do.
Do you think the criminals do the same thing?

And this, it seems to me, strikes to the very heart of why we keep seeing increasingly idiotic gun control proposals being proposed (e.g. Chicago's proposal that you should only be allowed to own one gun. Srlsy.).

Disciples of Rousseau (or its derivatives, meaning all progressives) are overly invested in human perfectibility. But humans keep acting imperfectly - for example, shooting each other on the streets of Chicago. It's a logical contradiction.

Rather than jettison the philosophy that's causing their mental circuits to overload, they shift the focus: if man is perfectible, and acts imperfectly, something must have made him act that way. Sumdood shot Someotherdood? The gun made him do it.

Canalized by a philosophy that so flatters their ego ("You're a Philosopher-King!"), they have to reject Bob's entirely sensible analysis:

... it is the fundamental nature or character of the person that matters – not the tool.

To accept that is to accept that the right education can't build the New Jerusalem, and (worse) their services as Philosopher-Kings won't be needed. Can't have that.

And so we see a never-ending set of increasingly idiotic gun control proposals (no bayonet lugs, because of the plague of drive-by bayonettings in Chicago). We're fighting against their self-image.

But don't forget that these people are Ever So Smart, and much smarter than you or me. Even if they don't know their Rousseau:

Every man has a right to risk his own life for the preservation of it.

- Jean-Jacques Rousseau