Flourish. The Houn stands atop a soapbox labeled "Liberty" at the intersection of War and Peace. With hands raised his voice shaketh the ground.
"Ladies and Gentlemen, I will not bore you with petty quips at Chilton the Lesser. I will not tease you with hints at things to come. I will not insult you with history lessons from the schoolhouse. I will not tickle you with the feather-duster of post-modernism. No, instead I will free you from the chains of indecision. I will rescue you from the peril of contemplative thought. I will snatch you with the talons of Liberty.
I speak today in response to a certain blind Frenchman, one Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Though long dead some two hundred and fifty years, he haunts classrooms and libraries alike. It is this man who enslaves future generations to ideas both silly and dangerous. Namely, that man is more than the sum total of his desires. Bah!
He claims further, that a child only need be taught to live a better life, that with knowledge they can return to the Garden of Eden. He says we were once peaceable, once pristine as a species, and uncorrupted by our present reality. He says that we are all at heart compassionate, altruistic, and it is only our possessions that corrupt us.
Has he no sense? Has he never observed the world in all its terrifying splendor? Has he not seen the unending cyclic carnage of the earth? Education is not a tool of personal reformation, it is a weapon. A man's personal might only grows stronger with knowledge. With knowledge he is better able to harm his fellow man, not help him.
Should Rousseau have ever traveled anywhere outside the West, he would have discovered this readily enough. And, indeed he had no need to, since examples were present. His own civilization was built on educated people enslaving uneducated people. The wheel is the same over the whole earth. So it goes.
Should any man ever march up to you and cry "Rousseau knows best," you need only obtain your copy of Hobbes' Leviathan and throw it forcefully, aiming right between the eyes...for only severe cranial trauma is sufficient to break the Frenchman's spell. So, I will give you the truth, the absolute truth [see Dictums]:
The mind is simple, the heart is fiction, we love ourselves like no other. There is no other end, nor other beginning. You cannot fix the brokenness of all mankind: their interests. You cannot change a man; you can only take care to stay out of his way, or to fight him. And as for me, I will opt for a fight...as should all of you.
So, I pray you burn the pages of his discourse and discard them at your leisure, for they will lead you only to ruin. Think of his work as a storybook of human history. For, a storybook, it can only be. As for the rest of us, TO WAR."
Thunderous applause.
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