Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 to 1778), the Geneva-born philosopher, held in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755) that the natural differences between people, in strength, health and talent, are small, and that the great inequalities of wealth and power are made by society. They began with property, when someone first fenced off a piece of ground and claimed it as his own, and they were driven on by metallurgy and farming, after a simple early age he thought the happiest humans had known (he never used the phrase ‘noble savage’). His picture of farming and ownership as the turning point is close to Therapeutic Shamanism’s account of domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this, which began with farming, and of the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer that followed with the first city-states; the teaching differs from him on what humans were like before either.
Who was Jean-Jacques Rousseau? #
He was born in Geneva in 1712, largely taught himself, and made his name in Paris in 1750 with a prize essay arguing that the progress of the arts and sciences had corrupted morals rather than improved them. The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, his answer to a question set by the Academy of Dijon, followed in 1755. His later books include The Social Contract and Émile, his treatise on education, both of 1762, and the Confessions, published after his death. He died at Ermenonville, north of Paris, in 1778.1
What did he mean by the state of nature? #
A thought experiment, not a history. He opens by “laying aside facts”: his account is “hypothetical and conditional reasonings”, a way of separating what is natural in us from what society has added.2 Earlier philosophers, above all Thomas Hobbes, had pictured life before government as a war of all against all. Rousseau’s reply was that they had carried the passions of society back into nature, so that in describing ‘savages’ they described citizens.
His natural human is strong, healthy and self-sufficient, living in the present, with few needs and no lasting ties. Such a person is neither good nor bad in the moral sense, because there are no moral relations yet. Two feelings come before reason, a healthy wish to preserve oneself, and pity, a natural reluctance to see another being suffer, which in the state of nature takes the place of laws and manners. What sets humans apart from other animals is not reason but freedom and ‘perfectibility’, the capacity to keep changing, which he calls the source of all our misfortunes.2
How did inequality begin, on his account? #
With property. The Second Part opens with his most famous lines: “The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, ‘This is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.” How many crimes, wars and horrors, he goes on, would have been spared if someone had pulled up the stakes and cried that “the fruits of the earth belong equally to us all, and the earth itself to nobody!”3
Between the solitary state of nature and settled society he placed a middle stage, people living in huts, clothed in skins, painting their bodies, making bows and arrows and fishing boats, and doing only what one person could do alone. This, he thought, “must have been the happiest and most durable epoch”, the “real youth of the world”. Then, “from the moment it appeared an advantage for one man to possess the quantity of provisions requisite for two, all equality vanished; property started up; labour became necessary.” The two arts that brought this revolution were metallurgy and agriculture: “it is iron and corn, which have civilized men, and ruined mankind.”3
What followed was competition, dependence and the pride of comparison. Laws and government, on his account, were finally proposed by the rich, presented as protection for everyone, and accepted by the poor, so that they fixed the new inequality for good.34
Did Rousseau believe in the ‘noble savage’? #
Not in those words. The phrase comes from John Dryden’s play The Conquest of Granada (1672), and Rousseau never used it, though it has been tied to him ever since.5 His natural human is not noble but innocent, neither good nor bad, and his happiest age is not a paradise but a balance between the idleness of the first state and the restless self-love of society. The myth of the noble savage, and the opposite myth of a life “nasty, brutish and short”, are both set aside in Therapeutic Shamanism, as the answer Isn’t the Fall just “noble savage” romanticism? explains.
How does Rousseau’s account connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Most closely in naming farming and ownership as the turning point. In Therapeutic Shamanism the move from hunter-gathering to totalitarian agriculture took us from being part of the land to seeing ourselves as owning it: ‘We now own this land. We now decide what lives on it and what dies.’6 Hunter-gatherers did not own anything much at all; it is only with agriculture that the idea of ownership appears, and it sits at the heart of Taker thinking.7 Rousseau’s man with his stakes and ditch is the same moment seen from the eighteenth century.
The teaching also follows what came after. Larger settlements needed laws and contracts, and disputes over the ownership and inheritance of land had to be settled.8 With the first city-states, from around 4000 BC, one group seized power over another for the first time, patriarchy was born, and there was huge inequality of wealth, kings living in riches whilst others starved, and decisions made by a ruling elite.9 That is Rousseau’s ‘civil society’, and the stage the teaching calls the Fall proper. See What is the Fall? and Was farming a mistake?
And it shares his scepticism about the claim that government rescued us from chaos. Hunter-gatherer tribes governed themselves without leaders who imposed decisions, by respectful discussion and consensus among people who were truly equal; the assumption that tribes must have had chiefs is Taker thinking.10 See How did hunter-gatherers keep their societies equal?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
On solitudeSolitude. Chosen aloneness from other humans: a healthy, essential Adult capacity, the opposite of loneliness (which is about the quality of relationship, not the quantity). Relational solitude is time away from the humans in the company of everything else. More about this. Rousseau’s natural human lives alone, meeting others by chance. Humans, in Therapeutic Shamanism, are a social species that depends on cooperation. Hunter-gatherer bands of fewer than about twenty were rarely viable for long, and once a tribe grew past the size at which people can know each other, it divided.11 Belonging to a tribe, and to a web of kin that includes the other Peoples, is part of human nature, not a later corruption of it.
On method. Rousseau laid the facts aside and reasoned from what he imagined. Therapeutic Shamanism holds its picture of hunter-gatherer life both as logosLogos. Literal, factual, analytical truth: the truth of facts you can check. One of the two modes of truth, alongside mythos. More about this, a claim about the record, drawn from anthropology, and as mythosMythos. Metaphorical, symbolic, felt truth: the truth of art, poetry and shamanic journeys. Shamanic reality is mythologically true, not literally true, which is why journeys are interpreted, never taken at face value. More about this, a guiding story; and the record it draws on is of hunter-gatherers, kept carefully apart from farming and herding peoples. See What is the difference between a hunter-gatherer and an agricultural society?
And on what was good. For Rousseau the earliest humans were innocent, without morality. In the teaching, hunter-gatherers were far more than innocent. They treated the other species with great respect and reverence, as brothers and sisters, the Animal, Plant and Stone People, all kin to the human people, and deliberately waging war on another species would have been unthinkable to them.12 Central to animism is a deep, empathic, reciprocal and respectful relationship with the world around us, which is ethics lived, not merely the absence of vice.
What have critics said about the Discourse? #
From the start, that it idealises a past nobody would want. Voltaire, thanking Rousseau for his copy in 1755, joked that reading it made one long to walk on all fours.13
On the other side, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, in a lecture of 1962, called Rousseau the founder of the sciences of humanity, for asking how we came to be what we are, and for seeking to understand humanity by looking at people far from oneself. The anthropologist David Graeber and the archaeologist David Wengrow, in The Dawn of Everything (2021), reject Rousseau’s single story of a fall from equality, whilst granting that something was lost.14
