Leon Kass on the Wisdom of Rousseau

Does technology liberate us or enslave us? How do our social interactions affect our sense of self and our emotional health? Listen as author and master teacher Leon Kass and EconTalk's Russ Roberts do a close reading of a few paragraphs of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and explore some of the deepest aspects of our relationships with each other and with our technology.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you. Today is May 26, 2025, and my guest today is author and teacher and professor Leon

• 0:42Speaker 00

  Cass, the dean of faculty here at Shalem College in Jerusalem. This is Leon's second appearance on the program. He was last here in March of 2021, talking about human flourishing, living well, and Aristotle. Leon, welcome back to Econ Talk.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Thanks very much. Nice to be back with you, Russ.

• 1:02Speaker 00

  Our topic for today is a thinker I have never respected, but I really never read either, so that's kind of awkward. And I realized with Leon's help that maybe I had judged Jean-Jacques Rousseau a little too quickly. So what we're going to do today, Leon's going to give a brief summary of Rousseau's life and career, and we're going to do a close reading of a few paragraphs from his discourse on the origins and foundations of inequality among men, which is also known as the Second Discourse. We'll link to that work, to the text we'll be studying. You can follow along with us, or you can just listen. We'll be reading out loud some of the passages that we'll be discussing. But

• 1:43Speaker 00

  first, I'd like Leon to give us a little background on Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Leon, it's all yours.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  Thank you. Rousseau was a giant, not only of 18th-century European thought and culture, but really of all of Western philosophy.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Born in the Republic of Geneva, 1712, dies in France, 1778. A prolific political philosopher, known for The Social Contract, a philosopher of education, famous for his émile, author of a romantic novel, composer of seven operas, a theater critic, an author of the first modern autobiography, The Confessions, and even a scientist writing on elements of botany. He lived a colorful and chequered life, with good relations with Voltaire, Dallambert, Burke, Boswell, and Frederick the Great, but he had a horrible public fight with David

• 2:38Speaker 01

  Hume, and he suffered political exile for his views; his books were burned in Paris. He enjoyed many love affairs, and is said to have littered Europe with many illegitimate children. It's impossible to summarize Rousseau's thought. His range is enormous, his writings seem to contradict each other, for they are written from different perspectives on the world. Here he is, a citizen of Geneva, while there he's the individual Jean Jacques. All of his works are suffused with irony. His persistent interests are freedom and happiness, which he finds lacking in modern

• 3:21Speaker 01

  bourgeois society, given to the love of gain, luxury, conformity, insincerity, and the joyless pursuit of getting ahead. But because he approaches the questions of freedom and happiness from different perspectives, he seems to be confused, if not a teacher of error. He's both praised and blamed for the French Revolution, progressive education, and psychoanalysis. He is embraced by civic republicans and Marxist revolutionaries, by admirers of the noble savage, and admirers of the yeoman soldier.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Reading him, looking for agreement, any modern reader can find a Rousseau that he will like, and one that he will hate.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  But few people see the real Rousseau, who was not an ideologue, but a true seeker after wisdom, and whose books offer not doctrine, but invitations to joint inquiry. To learn from Rousseau, we need to rescue him from his blinkered critics and simplistic admirers, who see only answers, wrong or right, and instead, follow up his opening up of deep questions. Rightly read, Rousseau is a teacher, an indispensable companion and guide for anyone seeking wisdom about the enduring human questions of human nature and culture, language and reason, society and religion, love and marriage,

• 4:56Speaker 01

  happiness and politics. All of these are on the table in the text we're going to discuss today, the discourse on inequality.

• 5:10Speaker 00

  Awesome. Let's get started. And what I've asked Leon to do, for those of you listening at home, as I said, you can follow along. I've asked Leon to treat me as his student. I have to say, Leon, your description of Rousseau reminded me of the way I would describe you as a teacher, who has a lot to say about a lot of things. So I'm excited that we're going to explore this text together. It's a text I've only read for the first time earlier today. So I'm sure I didn't get all of it, and you're going to help me find more than I saw.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Okay. Let me introduce the work itself, and then we'll get started. Rousseau wrote this as a response to an essay contest in 1753. The question is, "What is the origin of inequality among men? And whether it is authorized by natural law, the last part Rousseau ignores." He says, "How do we know inequality among men without knowing man? And how do you know man, as he comes from the hand of nature, without separating natural man from the various accretions that history and circumstances have produced in him?" So part one of the discourse is a picture of man in the pure state of nature,

• 6:33Speaker 01

  so-called the noble savage or nature boy, where natural man lives as a solitary, independent, speechless, and roughly mindless orangutan with possibilities. He pursues the elementary needs of life, and he enjoys without complication the sentiment of his present existence. In part two, Rousseau traces the processes whereby man by stages emerges from this pure state of nature, eventually to become the civilized creatures that we are, with our inequality, our unhappiness, and our vices. We're going to pick up the story a little bit down the road towards civilization

• 7:18Speaker 01

  with the first habitations and the first settlements of settled families. And we're going to follow certain psychological and social insights on the subjects of desires and needs, love and jealousy, the birth of vanity and the desire for recognition, and the claim to consideration, and the desire for vengeance when it's violated. That's the agenda, Ross. I think we should get started.

• 7:46Speaker 00

  Okay. Am I going to start by reading, shall I read paragraph 13?

• 7:51Speaker 01

  Please.

• 7:53Speaker 00

  Okay, so this is, I would say, something like the hunter-gatherer, the beginnings of families, living in crude dwellings, that's the lead-in, right?

• 8:06Speaker 01

  Correct, exactly.

• 8:07Speaker 00

  Okay, here we go. "In this new state, with a simple and solitary life, very limited needs, and the implements they had invented to provide for them, since men enjoyed very great leisure, they used it to procure many kinds of commodities unknown to their fathers." And that... Was the first yoke they imposed on themselves without thinking about it, and the first source of the evils they prepared for their descendants. For besides, their continuingness to soften body and mind, as these commodities had lost almost all their pleasantness through habit,

• 8:48Speaker 00

  and as they had at the same time degenerated into true needs, being deprived of them became much more cruel than possessing them was sweet. And people were unhappy to lose them without being happy to possess them.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  Very good.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  What are commodities? What are these people doing with their leisure?

• 9:14Speaker 00

  So, what's funny about this, of course, is that I'm an economist, and you're not. So, we're going to have an interesting conversation here. What an economist would say is that, you know, people developed some primitive tools that allowed them to begin to enjoy a slightly higher standard of living, a slightly higher level of material well-being than they had before.

• 9:43Speaker 00

  What those commodities were, well, he says they had great leisure. Now, there's a debate about whether that's true, but let's take him as being correct. They had extra time, and so they used that time to fashion presumably a nicer hut, maybe a better way to catch fish, a better way to bring down game, an iPhone, well, maybe not an iPhone, but a set of what we would call technological change or innovation or progress that he seems to think is not necessarily, in fact, definitely isn't such a great thing.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  Good. So commodities, all of these conveniences and amenities, the product of innovation, which is somehow built into the human beings, always looking to make things a little better, okay? But he says, "This is the first yoke that they imposed on themselves without thinking about it." What's a yoke?

• 10:46Speaker 00

  So it's this word you don't hear very much in everyday English language, because it's a reference to agricultural life. Nothing could be more familiar to most of human history than a civilized human history than a yoke. But it's Y-O-K-E, not Y-O-L-K. Y-O-L-K is the egg yolk. But this is the yolk that restrains an animal, typically an ox or some kind of domesticated animal, and forces them to do their duty, to plow the field, to create a furrow. It's something that keeps you from being free. It is a constraint, a serious constraint.

• 11:31Speaker 00

  And he's arguing, obviously, that when we, as human beings, created things that our ancestor didn't have access to, we lost some of our freedom, as opposed to the ways many people would see it, the opposite. Well, now we're more free. We have technology that liberates us in all kinds of ways. But evidently Rousseau felt otherwise.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  Well, he's going to explain to us in what sense these new devices are, in fact, yolks without our knowing it. He's not talking about the side effects, the harm to the environment or various other things. A yolk is a constraint on a freedom. It's a form of servitude. And here's the sentence. You should parse it for me. "For, in addition to softening, continuing to soften our body and mind, as these commodities had lost almost all of their pleasantness through habit," and this is the part of the sentence I want your help with,

• 12:36Speaker 01

  "and as they had at the same time degenerated into true needs."

• 12:43Speaker 01

  Being deprived of them became much more cruel than having them was sweet. We're unhappy to lose them without being happy to have them. What does it mean to say that these new innovations, which last week we didn't need, degenerate, that's a big word, into true needs?

• 13:02Speaker 00

  Well, it's a remarkably prescient statement. You know, before we recorded this, Leon and I talked a little bit about Adam Smith. And Adam Smith talks about our pursuit of gadgets in 1759 in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. And he points out that a person will acquire a very fancy, expensive watch that does slightly better at keeping on his time, but doesn't make the person any more timely for the meetings that they're late for. And what Smith is interested in is the beauty. He thinks we're seduced by the beauty of things. I don't, I think he's on to something, but what Rousseau is arguing here, I think we

• 13:46Speaker 00

  can all relate to in modern times. A device comes along, a technology comes along, and it's so much better than what we have that we, quote, "have to have it." We want to possess it. But it's shocking, isn't it, how after a relatively short period of time, we can get incredibly annoyed when it doesn't say work the way it's supposed to. You're on the train, you know, if you've ever been on Amtrak between Washington, D.C. and New York or Boston, and you're surfing the Internet, doing some crucial email or something, or shopping, and all of a sudden the Internet goes out. And you can't believe how annoying and frustrating it is. This is something that is an extraordinary miracle that it ever works at all.

• 14:30Speaker 00

  But once you've had it, and once you've become accustomed to it, it becomes a need, as Rousseau would word it, and it, the thrill is gone, which I think he's right, often, not always, but often.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  He's offering us in here, in a way, a definition of a true need. Yesterday, it was a mere want or a desire that we didn't need. I mean, in the state of nature, people have simple needs. Those are real needs for food and water and rest. But now, all kinds of other things, previously desires, degenerate into the category of a true need. What's the definition of a true need that he gives us right in this paragraph? What makes a true need a true need?

• 15:28Speaker 00

  Well, he's suggesting that, well, I'm not sure. So I'm going to bounce that back to you for a second. But one thing he's clearly saying is that the pleasure that we get from having them is dwarfed by the misery we have when we don't have them. So, once we have them, all of a sudden, the loss of them is relatively large relative to the gain we got for them. Again, as an economist, this is hard to accept. He's saying that civilization has immiserated us in some sense, right?

• 16:10Speaker 00

  It has created a set of false needs that, when satisfied, just lead us to look for the next new thing. Is that a fair summary?

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think close. I don't think he says it's, I don't think he's yet talking about that this is false satisfaction. He's saying, "Look, a true need is something that you feel you can't live without."

• 16:37Speaker 00

  Fair enough.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  That's the way, what is necessary is something you must have. And since the pleasures of it vanish or decline greatly with familiarity, it's not that they make you miserable, it's that they don't make you any happier. And there are so many more things you now need that you are now yoked to the desire to have to have more and more and more, lest you feel you're missing the things without which life would be impossible. I don't know how many people, I sometimes make a habit of reminding myself to give thanks for a shower or indoor plumbing.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  You know, all of the things, just the elementary things that make life less solitary, nasty, brutish, and short. We don't give thanks for those things. We take them for granted. If we're missing them, we are in a way slave to those commodities and we're continuing to provide new ones so that our children can't imagine living without their phones or without the internet or what have you. And this question, this is not a side effect of technology or technology assessment. This is the intrinsic effect of our tools on our expectations and what we actually,

• 18:01Speaker 01

  and the malleability of desire that last year's desires, once routinely satisfied, become next year's necessities. And the things that become necessary to live grow and grow and grow, and we are in a way yoked by those things.

• 18:19Speaker 00

  And there's no, you're lucky if you can remember to be grateful for a shower on a random Monday morning, but if you ever lose your shower or your hot water or your heat, all of a sudden, you're in a panic, especially if you don't have a second friend to shower you can borrow or a place you can go that's warm. It's, you're in a state of chaos internally, usually like, when's it gonna get picked? You can't, it's very, very difficult to cope with that kind of hardship.

• 19:03Speaker 00

  Reminds me of the episode we had with Michael Easter on the comfort zone. We've become accustomed to comfort in the modern world and we don't appreciate it. And when it's taken away, we are very unhappy to lose those comforts.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Yep. This is, as you said early, and the first thing you said, how prescient he is. This is with respect to the simplest of technologies. We shape our tools and then our tools reshape us. And that part of it is rarely reckoned because the advantages of these tools are perfectly well-known. But the costs of them are often hidden. And the costs in the way in which they transform the whole economy of what is necessary and what is not necessary continues to be altered. Just as an aside, in the 1939 World's Fair,

• 20:00Speaker 01

  the American housewife was introduced to washing machines, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, dryers, all of those sorts of things. My mother washed clothes on an iron scrubboard in the basement every Monday, and the clothes were hung out to dry with a clothespin. There was a wringer to get the water out of it. That World's Fair in 39 showed people things that they really wanted because the toil was arduous. I don't think you could produce a World's Fair today of anything that people know that they need

• 20:41Speaker 01

  in the way in which those needs could be anticipated and satisfied. And all of the satisfaction of those needs has not produced the kind of contentment because one has forgotten what they replaced.

• 20:59Speaker 00

  Fair enough. And I've written a lot on the transformation of our standard of living over the 20th century. And I've tried to debunk what I think are incorrect stories about stagnation in the last Forty, fifty years, people claim that people's standard of living hasn't changed, the average person's hasn't changed. I think that's totally wrong. And whenever I write about that, I always concede that while our material well-being is extraordinarily higher, say than it was in 1900, say, in America or in the West, I was usually writing those pieces as an American. When I was writing that, I would concede that, you know, I'm not sure we're any happier. In fact, we might be less happy, which is what Rousseau's alluding

• 21:42Speaker 00

  to. Having said that, we don't want to go back. The image of your mother's washing in the basement, no one says, "Yeah, those were the good old days." There might be things about that time that were the good old days, but that's not one of them, the scrubboard.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 21:59Speaker 00

  And there are other things I think economists would add about longer life and the longer quality of life at a high level for a longer period of time, higher quality of life for a longer period of time. But this is a fascinating thing, that 1939, by the way, David Galanter wrote a wonderful novel on the 1939 World's Fair, which I really enjoyed, which I recommend. But that 1939 World's Fair, it's true that we as human beings craved those things, especially women who had incredible drudgery, working, oh, in the, you know, in the 1900s, early 1900s, anywhere, usually 12 hours a day,

• 22:42Speaker 00

  just to boil water, make food, clean clothes, just a terrible life of drudgery. There is less drudgery in the world, but there's not a lot more happiness, maybe. And that, I think, is a fascinating statement about the human being.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  Yep. That, I think, is the main point of this paragraph. And it's, the question is whether or not, at least there are new possible sources of unhappiness because of the deprivation of so many other things without which life now seems to be impossible. Why don't we go on and look at the next vignette, this one, paragraph 15, and this now leads to the development of new human sentiments unknown before.

• 23:34Speaker 00

  Okay, here we go. Everything begins to change its appearance. Men who, until this time, wandered in the woods, having adopted a more fixed settlement, slowly come together, unite into different bands, and finally forming each country a particular nation, unified by morals and character, not by regulations and laws, but by the same kind of life, and foods, and by the common influence of climate. A permanent proximity cannot fail to engender at length some contact between different families. Young people of different sexes live in neighboring huts. The passing intercourse demanded by nature soon leads to another kind, no less sweet and more permanent, through mutual frequentation.

• 24:17Speaker 00

  People grow accustomed to consider different objects and to make comparisons. Imperceptibly, they require ideas of merit and beauty, which produce sentiments of preference. By dint of seeing one another, they can no longer do without seeing one another again. A tender and gentle sentiment is gradually introduced into the soul, and at the least obstacle, becomes an impetuous fury. Jealousy awakens with love. Discord triumphs. And the gentlest of the passions receive sacrifices of human blood.

• 25:00Speaker 00

  Oh, that was going fine, until it turned kind of dark there at the end, didn't it?

• 25:04Speaker 01

  Right. Let's trace it.

• 25:07Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  Population grows. People have fixed settlements. They come together. The different families in the neighboring huts, they gather. The young people of different sexes meet. The passing intercourse of nature, demanded by, sorry, the passing intercourse demanded by nature, sexual desire, casual sexuality, soon leads to another kind of intercourse, no less sweet and more permanent, through mutual frequentation.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  People grow accustomed to consider different objects and to make comparisons. Imperceptibly, they acquire ideas of merit and beauty which produce sentiments of preference. By dint of seeing one another, they can no longer do without seeing one another again. What's he talking about, just to that point?

• 26:15Speaker 00

  Mostly, I take love, some concept of romantic love as opposed to pure sexual attraction. But the way he describes it is quite extraordinary, right? He's talking about the power of judgment of what we would call discrimination, not the way the world is usually used with the pejorative way, but simply the idea that some things we might find more appealing or attractive than others, some sense of merit, some sense of beauty. When you're living by yourself, you've got nothing to compare yourself to. When you're hanging out with your family, you're all kind of close-knit and everything's hunky-dory.

• 26:58Speaker 00

  If you've got another family nearby who's more athletic, beautiful, has bigger fish than you catch, and whose hut has more bedrooms and bathrooms and a larger lawn, all of a sudden, things change.

• 27:12Speaker 01

  That, I think, that comparison is, in his account, a little later stage.

• 27:23Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 27:24Speaker 01

  Here, he's still talking in the realm of sexuality and love. And the ideas of merit and beauty, he's talking about, there's more than one woman out there.

• 27:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  More than one man.

• 27:39Speaker 00

  More than one. Yeah.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  So...

• 27:42Speaker 00

  It's the birth of aesthetics. It's the birth of the idea that, I mean, it's a strange idea. We take it for granted that we can, you know, shown two pictures, most people can say that one's prettier than that one, that one's more handsome than that one. But why is that, actually, when you think about it? Why would you just say, well, there's that one, and there's that one? And there's two of them now? But evidently, that's not the way we're made.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, that something emerges as a result of the experience. This one seems more beautiful to me than that one. And this one is... There's something about her qualities that I seem to like. And instead of it's being just about sex, it's... They want to keep seeing one another. As a result of having seen them, they want to see them again, over and over and over again. This is the transformation of lust to something like admiration and being admired. Um, so, and then he says,

• 28:47Speaker 01

  "A tender and gentle sentiment is gradually introduced into the soul." Very nice.

• 28:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, beautiful.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  Very nice. "And at the least obstacle becomes an impetuous fury." Why?

• 29:07Speaker 00

  Well, I think once on this show, I, I mentioned that there is a kind of love that most of us are blessed to have where, when your beloved is absent, you don't just say, "Oh, it'd be nice to be with, or be with him," but you have, you have a physical longing, a stomach ache. You know, you, you, the thought of seeing the beloved, the beloved is so overwhelming. And that's what, one way of, of describing love. But also, if you're not allowed to see that person, or if that person aren't interested in seeing you, it's of course devastating. And, um, it's not obvious

• 29:48Speaker 00

  that the least obstacle becomes an impetuous fury, as Rousseau says. But, um, that's his description. And worse, and worse. Not just a fury that you can't get to that person, there's jealousy, which is that someone else can.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  Well, if you can't get to them, she might be with somebody else.

• 30:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  Um, uh... Jealousy awakens with love. Is that true?

• 30:23Speaker 00

  I think so. I'd have trouble explaining why. I think we are, there's a possessiveness about love that certainly Shakespeare and many, many other observers of the human condition have noted. We don't have to go into my or your personal lives. But yeah. Jealousy is, we are possessive, not just about our tools and toys, but about our, the people we care about.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the jealousy, I think, the jealousy is, in a way, connected to the sense that this kind of love is exclusive.

• 31:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:13Speaker 01

  In other words, that I am my beloved and she is mine. And it doesn't have to come simply to possession in a pejorative sense, but there is something about this that this kind of love, if it's genuinely love, sort of excludes others, or so one would hope. And therefore, if there is a sense that the love wanders, or it is not exclusive, or if she's absent, I want to see her again, lest she be lost, or lost to someone else, and so on.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  And I don't think we're prone, I think, we're prone, because we're such nice people, to think that true love would not know jealousy. But that's probably an acquired education, which is not primordial. I mean, to, this kind of experience of love is sort of exclusive, and it seems to me the jealousy is right behind.

• 32:18Speaker 00

  I'm sure even a mediocre evolutionary psychologist like myself could, could cook up a evolutionary reason for this. But what I find interesting about Rousseau...

• 32:36Speaker 00

  He ends with a very dark, dark note. First, he says, "There's a tender and gentle sentiment that can be, can be, lead to fury. The jealousy is next. Discord triumphs." That's a very negative statement. "And the gentlest of the passions receive sacrifice to human blood," meaning if violence is the natural follower of, of the birth of love. It's a pretty dark image of the human condition.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  As you yourself said, there are lots such stories. The Trojan War, pretty bloody enterprise for the sake of a woman. A fellow, you know, you can go any, any way you want. I think the, the important thing here is not that he's got so much a dark picture, but he's showing how of the things that make us miserable, they have to do, not with things that were present to nature, boy, but that they follow through the gradual stages of the emergence of our complicated humanity. And there are no free lunches.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  I mean, the, the various things that are sort of improvement either soften us or, or confine us, or enslave us, or make us vulnerable, because you give your life to someone else, you could lose that if your happiness now depends on her presence and returning and on her staying alive, right? Love is exposed also to grief. And it's not for nothing that the ancient Epicureans sort of told you to,

• 34:36Speaker 01

  the ancient Stoics told you to limit your desires to the things in your power, so that you would be least likely to be disappointed, frustrated by things that are not under your control. To fall in love is to be vulnerable. To fall in love is to be vulnerable also to its being lost to you, and especially being taken from you by a more worthy so she thinks suitor.

• 35:05Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  So I don't think, I mean, it's, I think he's just telling it like it is.

• 35:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think I'm definitely sympathetic to that view of our nature. I think, you know, I don't think religion is designed to make us happy, but you could argue that some of the strictures of religion, say, thinking about the Ten Commandments, not to covet, which would be another example here, are ways to remove some of your options that might seem appealing, but actually are difficult for you to process. I couldn't help thinking, we're talking about the desire to see the person again. You know, it's why people go to the movies more than once sometimes.

• 35:56Speaker 00

  You know, they, they have a crush on a male or female film star. And part of that thrill is, you can watch them all you want. Now you can take them home with you and watch them on their phone. And, and you can use your imagination. And those are unfulfilling thrills that weren't available to Rousseau's person in the hut next door. So things have just, in many ways, just gotten more challenging.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Shall we go on? Sure. Or do you want to do something more with this?

• 36:32Speaker 00

  No.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  Let's do the next paragraph.

• 36:34Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  This has also got to do, in the one we've just done, he talks about seeing and wanting to see again. Here we've got another aspect of the eyes, slightly different, and much more potent in its effect. Let's do it. Paragraph 16.

• 36:56Speaker 00

  In proportion, as ideas and sentiments follow upon one another, and his mind and heart are trained, the human race continues to be tamed. Contact spread and bonds are tightened. People grew accustomed to assembling in front of the huts or around a large tree. Song and dance, true children of love and leisure, became the amusement, or rather, the occupation of idle and assembled men and women. Each one began to look at the others and to want to be looked at himself. And public esteem had a value. The one who sang or danced the best, the handsomest, the strongest, the most adroit, or the most eloquent, became the most highly considered. And that was the first step toward inequality, and at the same time, toward vice.

• 37:40Speaker 00

  From these first preferences were born, on one hand, vanity and contempt; on the other, shame and envy. And the fermentation caused by these new lemons eventually produced compounds fatal to happiness and innocence. Whew, that's a heck of a paragraph.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  It's a terrific paragraph.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  It again begins now with leisure. There are more people. They gather in front of the huts or around a large tree. Instead of just digging for roots, they now sing and they dance.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  The children of love and leisure. We've got the love from before. Now they're out there singing to each other, they're dancing. And each one begins to look at the others and to want to be looked at himself because having public esteem, being thought well of in the eyes of the others is now valuable. Okay?

• 38:51Speaker 01

  Now, the one who sang or danced the best, the handsomest, the strongest, the most adroit, the most eloquent, they became the ones who were most highly considered. And that was the first step toward inequality. That's obvious, right? You're making distinctions amongst abilities and talents, but also at the same time toward vice. And it's the part about vice that I think we want to work on, because that's what he does in the end of the paragraph. Are we okay to this point?

• 39:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, but I have to comment on two things. First, that's the first mention we've had of inequality in this section. As an essay contest entrant, I hope he referred to it earlier. I hope he didn't have to get through all of part one and this far into part two before he starts talking about inequality. Or is that the case?

• 39:47Speaker 01

  He will talk about, in other places, some people might be stronger or faster than others, but it made no difference. Because if someone was strong enough to take away your food, you'd go find something else. The distinctions were not of the sort that mattered to you, because you didn't feel humiliated, you just were sad that you lost your dinner and you went and found it elsewhere. Here, it's inequality that now becomes registered and significant in the way people think about things.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  So the physical inequalities didn't matter, but the moral inequalities, the inequalities that emerge in society, they become toxic.

• 40:37Speaker 00

  So of course, listeners know what I'm thinking about, right? You guys out there know what I'm thinking about? Man naturally desires not only to be loved, but to be lovely. Perhaps my favorite quote from the Theory of Moral Sentiments. This idea that we want to be looked at, and we want to be admired, and we want to be respected, and we want to matter. And Rousseau is giving us the dark side of that, which is that that impulse has some challenges to it. You know, I'm interested in, when I write about Smith, in how that hardwired, when he says "naturally desires," he's saying we're hardwired, to care about what other people think of us, and that can induce good behavior. Here, it's the opposite.

• 41:21Speaker 00

  So, take me through the next part, Leon. What do I need to, what do you want to look at?

• 41:26Speaker 01

  Okay. He, by the way, will say in a passage we don't have, that this concern for recognition is, I think he has a passage, it's responsible for some of our virtues and all of our vices. So, he does credit in other places that it's the source of the desire to be recognized for good. But at this particular place, from these preferences, from these preferences, two things are born in the soul. Rousseau, this section is not being talked of in terms of social roles. He's talking about the developments that happen in the human psyche.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  And that's what we want to concentrate on. From these first preferences, the last sentence, were born, on the one hand, vanity and contempt, and on the other, shame and envy. We should do something with these terms. And we'll do something more detailed on vanity, because he's got an important footnote that we'll look at in a minute, but...

• 42:40Speaker 01

  Just for openers, what would you say are, on the one hand, vanity and contempt, and on the other hand, shame and envy, and how do you relate them to each other?

• 42:53Speaker 00

  So, you know, once we're dancing around the tree,

• 43:01Speaker 00

  some people are better dancers than others, some are better singers than others, some are better looking than others, and it's a pleasant feeling to be one of those, that's the vanity. And then there's this horrible part that can come with that, which is,

• 43:19Speaker 00

  it's cousin, sibling, which is, not only do you feel that you're important and special, but that implies that other people are less so, and that's the contempt, and that's human. And then for those on the other side of the equation, the people who feel the contempt, or who are not at the same level as the others in terms of dancing, handsomeness, etc., they've got shame. Like, I'm inadequate, and envy, I wish I were like that person over there who's getting all the rewards and honor and glory, and

• 44:01Speaker 00

  I'm inferior, and that's an incredible level of inequality. It's, again, as you say, it's a psychic inequality. It's not, there's nothing here about that guy drives a better car than I have, or his watch is nicer, or his spouse is more attractive, or fill in the blank, or his house.

• 44:23Speaker 00

  It's simply that I'm not as good.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  How does it strike you? Reasonable?

• 44:34Speaker 00

  Well, not for me, Leon. I've never had contempt for anyone. No, it's... I think it's...

• 44:40Speaker 01

  As a social scientist...

• 44:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, does it strike you as anthropologically sound?

• 44:52Speaker 01

  Do you recognize this as somehow... After all, this is... We don't yet have

• 45:00Speaker 01

  books that teach you that pride is a sin.

• 45:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  Right?

• 45:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:07Speaker 01

  The original sin, in fact.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  But anthropologically speaking, before there's instruction, the recognition of one's superiority and the recognition and consideration you get from it,

• 45:29Speaker 01

  doesn't it produce a sense of one's superiority and some sense that the others are not as good? You look down upon them, you disdain them?

• 45:38Speaker 00

  Well, once...

• 45:42Speaker 00

  One of the things you learn when you start meditating is how often you judge. And one of the powers of meditation, when it's effective, is to

• 45:56Speaker 00

  help you be aware of that. It's kind of shocking when it first happens because you realize that you judge every single person. Not necessarily in the way we're talking about here. That's an inferior person, that person's not as good as I am. Not that. Simply that the human brain, this is the part that I'm gonna agree with you anthropologically, the brain is constantly making distinctions. Sometimes, with respect to myself, yes. That person's tall. I'll pick some relatively...

• 46:28Speaker 00

  Uncontroversial things. Oh, that person's taller than I am. Or that person is faster than I am, or that person is thinner than I am, or that person is younger than I am, or that person's hair is darker than mine. It's totally unconscious. When you first start to notice it, which again is a gift from a good meditation practice, it's quite alarming. It's like, wow, this has been going on the whole time and I'm just kind of noticing it. And that's what we do. And I'm sure, again, there's evolutionary reasons for it. There's some, maybe some good benefits from it. But it's jarring. And certainly, as you point out, I think a lot of civilization, religion,

• 47:11Speaker 00

  moral writing is designed to temper that, but with modest success, probably.

• 47:20Speaker 01

  Let's add to this Rousseau's own treatment in the footnote on what is in English translated as vanity. It's footnote 15.

• 47:34Speaker 00

  So there's going to be two French phrases here. Do you want to introduce those firstly? Amour propre and amour de soi-même, which are two kinds of self-love.

• 47:46Speaker 01

  Right. In English, if you say self-love and vanity, it sounds like they're belong to two different species. But in French and in the original, they're both species of amour. Amour propre and amour de soi-même. And this is, why don't I read the note?

• 48:09Speaker 01

  Amour propre, which we would translate as love of own, and love of oneself, amour de soi-même, two passions very different in their nature and their effects must not be confused. Love of oneself is a natural sentiment which inclines every animal to watch over its own preservation, and which directed in man by reason and modified by pity produces humanity and virtue.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  Amor pop, translated vanity, is only a relative sentiment, artificial, born in society, which inclines each individual to have a greater esteem for himself than for anyone else, inspires in men all the harm they do to one another, and is the true source of honor.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  There's the care for yourself, the love of yourself in terms of your biological neediness, and then there is the love of what is your own or appropriated to you, and it's primarily your self-image and your regard for yourself. It's in a way the first property that you have is what you think of yourself as it's been reflected to you in relation to others, and the preoccupation with this, the preoccupation with this is, in a way, the source of the harm people do to each other, the source of much of our unhappiness.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  And it's very nice to say these are two different kinds of self-love. One of this is the self-love of the naturally given self, and the other is the love of the self which is as close to you now to us as grown and civilized people as the other. But in origin and its relation to our happiness and goodness, they are very different valence. What do you think?

• 50:20Speaker 00

  Well, it's fantastically interesting. I don't... In economics, we talk about self-interest, and sometimes we talk about selfishness. And, you know, I like to say that Smith's view of human beings is that they're self-interested, and that no one could disagree with that. No one could disagree that we care about whether we survive, that we want food, that we put ourselves first.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:46Speaker 00

  That's natural and human. And what he's saying here, which is utterly fantastically interesting, is that there's this other kind of self-interest, which could be called vanity. It's not a very good word for it.

• 51:02Speaker 00

  Because vanity gets tangled up with just, to me, with just appearance often. But he's saying there's this other kind of self-love that comes from being amongst other people, right? Man, nature boy, still needs a roof over his head and he needs food to survive. And he's got a natural urge and desire to feed himself and procreate and so on. So is nature girl, by the way, just to keep things more egalitarian here for a moment. But once we're mingling, once we have a social life, and by that I don't mean parties to go to, but once we are interacting regularly with other people, these distinctions he's

• 51:42Speaker 00

  been talking about raise their relatively unattractive head and we start feeling a certain sense of where we fit in. And of course, he suggests that we all think we're better than average drivers, which is not possible. But, you know, he's saying we have a greater esteem for ourselves than for anyone else. So that, I think that's true. But the part I'm fascinated by is the next part. Inspires them in all the harm they do to one another and is the true source of honor. Why don't you tell me what that means to you?

• 52:24Speaker 01

  Look, I think the harm that they do to one another is born out of rivalry and a sense of not wanting to be found inferior. I mean, the classic biblical story of this, and we'll tie also to the next paragraph, which I hope we can do very briefly, is the story of Cain and Abel, in which Cain had a very exalted self-image of himself, but his sacrifice wasn't accepted. And it gives rise to, well, that's really closer to the next paragraph. I'm a little ahead of myself. But also, the true source of honor, which is a... In a way, at least half positive.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  It's the desire to somehow conduct yourself to deserve to be well thought of and to be able to think well of yourself. The honor, of course, is received in the eyes of the community. Only a sufficiently self-confident person will honor himself and be content with that and not look for any other recognition. But this love of your reputation or this love of your self-image, of your self-esteem, that causes all kinds of terrible things to those who are your rivals.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  But it also might inspire you to do something to be worthy.

• 54:00Speaker 00

  Stepping outside, not as the anthropologist, but as the, I'll say, as the mensch. What do you do with this, Leon? What do you do with this fact that we care? And this is, again, going back to Adam Smith. I don't talk very much about this in my book on Adam Smith, but it's in the background, which is, at its extreme, you might end up devoting much of your activity based on what other people think rather than on your own values or what you think is important. In fact, you start to think that what's important is whatever other people think is important.

• 54:43Speaker 00

  You couldn't even imagine there's something else other than in your social circle. It's a very, I think, a dark part of ambition and achievement, right? This pursuit of self-esteem, this pursuit of honor, this pursuit of a self-image or to make sure that your self-image is actually somewhat aligned, that you are lovely, not just loved, as Smith said. So this fascinates me that it has this violent side, which I think is true. The harm that we do to each other, the sense of injustice that we feel

• 55:28Speaker 00

  if we're not sufficiently honored and treated with respect.

• 55:34Speaker 00

  It's an extraordinarily powerful part of the human experience that Rousseau is talking about here.

• 55:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, look, he concentrates on this in his educational writing in a meal on how to cure people from an improper sense of amepo. And it is, his treatment of this subject is perhaps one of his greatest contributions to psychology and to social psychology. And what interests me a lot about it, there are most people who think that the harm human beings do to one another has to do with oppression, or social conditions, or poverty, or things of that sort.

• 56:24Speaker 00

  Testosterone, just for violent, you know.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  Right, but this sense that what matters so much to us is how we seem in our own eyes, and that we can only somehow know through the eyes of those who look upon us. This accounts for all kinds of sorting by opinion groups, people afraid to stand out in a different way. All kinds of herds are formed by people who need to have that kind of validation from others, and if they don't get it in the proper way, there can be hell to pay. Look, I think we should fill this out with the next paragraph, where the whole question

• 57:08Speaker 01

  of injustice comes in, and it's still the same theme, but now brought not only, he's going to show you how this becomes sort of fatal to happiness and innocence. Let's do just the first few paragraphs of seventeen.

• 57:29Speaker 00

  Okay, you don't want to finish the footnote?

• 57:32Speaker 01

  I think, basically, the rest of the footnote says, "Man in the state of nature does not have a soul sufficient to have amok, because he does not yet have the mind capable of making the comparisons." And they only, those passions, he doesn't have hate or the desire for revenge, because he doesn't have those kinds of relations, and doesn't have a self-image to have been wounded. But that's the subject of the text we're now gonna do. So why don't you do the beginning of 17?

• 58:06Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 58:09Speaker 00

  "As soon as men had begun to appreciate one another, and the idea of consideration was formed in their minds, each one claimed a right to it, and it was no longer possible..."

• 58:17Speaker 01

  Each one claimed a right to it. Sorry to interrupt. We're now moving into a moral territory, and not just a psychological one. So, just do it again.

• 58:31Speaker 00

  "As soon as men had begun to appreciate one another, and the idea of consideration was formed in their minds, each one claimed a right to it, and it was no longer possible to be disrespectful toward anyone with impunity. For this came the first duties of civility, even among savages, and from this, any voluntary wrong became an outrage, because along with the harm that resulted from the injury, the offended man saw in it contempt for his person, which is often more unbearable than the harm itself. Does everyone punishing the contempt shown him by another in a manner proportionate to the importance he accorded himself? Vengeance became terrible, and men bloodthirsty and cruel."

• 59:13Speaker 00

  This is precisely the point reached by most of the savage peoples known to us. And it is for want of having sufficiently distinguished between ideas, and noticed how far these people already were from the first state of nature, that many have hastened to conclude that man is naturally cruel, and that he needs civilization in order to make him gentler. On the contrary, nothing is so gentle as man in his primitive state. When placed by nature at equal distances from the stupidity of brutes and the fatal enlightenment of civil man, and limited equally by instinct and reason to protecting himself from the harm that threatens him, he is restrained by natural pity from harming anyone himself, and nothing leads him to do so even after he has received harm.

• 59:58Speaker 00

  For according to the axiom of the wise Locke, where there is no property, there is no injury. So that was a long paragraph, but the key part is this idea that the physical harm we get is not comparable to the injustice that it has befallen us, this harm, and unmerited, obviously, because look at me, I don't deserve that.

• 1:00:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. This is really, this is the beginning of, he says, "The beginnings of duties of civility." "You better be nice to other people and show respect, because if you don't and you diss them, there will be hell to pay." And the beginning of justice, the beginning of a concern with justice is not some lofty sense of the other fellow's good. The beginning of a sense of injury, of injustice, inuria, injustice. "In addition to the harm that you've caused me, you have not treated me the way I know I need to be deserved, and there is an injustice,

• 1:01:12Speaker 01

  and the only thing to settle this is I take revenge on you for having shown me disrespect." And the size of the, the measure, the measure of what's coming to you is the fatness of your sense of self-worth. You know, each person has his own measure of what he thinks is coming to him. He'll punish you according to the contempt in a manner proportionate to the importance he accords himself, and then people take vengeance and life becomes bloodthirsty and cruel.

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  What do you think?

• 1:02:00Speaker 00

  Well, I think about codes of honor, which are ways to constrain this from its most dangerous forms.

• 1:02:13Speaker 00

  But doodling is the way that when you're perceived to have been treated unjustly, there's this stylized way, which eventually I think became mostly just a show, I hope. I think maybe kind of. But this emotion, this emotion of injustice that you, one has been treated unfairly, is unbelievably prevalent in our human interactions. It is everywhere. And I'm fascinated by this idea of civility, right?

• 1:02:55Speaker 00

  This idea of trying to temper this very potent urge.

• 1:03:05Speaker 00

  What are your thoughts?

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  I mean, I mentioned the Cain and Abel story before, but Cain is the first human being born of woman, okay? So Adam and Eve have a different origins. Cain is the first person born into the world. Cain is the inventor of sacrifices. He's the older brother. He's the proud farmer. And it turns out God disses his sacrifice and he gets enraged. And he treats Abel as if Abel was trying to outdo him and he eliminates the rival. That's the first human being has anger at a sense of having been wronged to the point of fratricide.

• 1:03:52Speaker 01

  That's the primary human story.

• 1:03:56Speaker 00

  He takes it out on the wrong actor.

• 1:04:00Speaker 00

  He's really mad at God and yet he kills Abel.

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  He kills Abel, but it's partly the displaced anger because he treats Abel, who is a mere imitator, you know? He's a mere imitator, this no-good brother who wanders out with his sheep. What I'm planting crops and producing things from the ground. He treats Abel's success as if he were trying to outdo him. That's a perfectly normal kind of human reaction. Somebody perfectly going about their business, doing well, and you lose, and you basically attribute bad intent to the fact that they've gotten ahead of you. And especially, God is invisible, and it would be pretty dangerous to get angry with him anyhow.

• 1:04:48Speaker 00

  But I do think it's a fascinating thing that whether you believe in God or not, I think bad, ill fortune, which implies a certain randomness, but it sometimes just means a bad thing happening to you, can make you angry. That's not rational. It is clearly a manifestation of what Rousseau was talking about.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, but there's a big difference. If you're a normal person walking down the street, and if a flower pot falls off the ledge and hits you, and you've got a slight bruise on the forehead, you're hurt, you're annoyed, but only if you think the universe is arranged so that no bad thing will happen to you are you going to get angry.

• 1:05:43Speaker 00

  I don't know.

• 1:05:44Speaker 01

  If you think somebody, if you think your neighbor up there was waiting for you to come by and pushed it off on purpose, much more a source of fury is his intention than the harm.

• 1:06:00Speaker 00

  That's true. But I do think there is, you know, the why me aspect of misfortune.

• 1:06:08Speaker 00

  And the sense of injustice, I think, is born out of this amor propram, this love of one's own that Rousseau's on to. And it's giving me a different way to think about some of my own shortcomings, which we will not go into. But I do want to tell the Soviet joke that I know you know, you know, of the two Russian peasants under communism. And one's got a goat and the other one doesn't. And the guy with the goat's, you know, he's got some extra benefits because he's got a goat. And one day, the guy without the goat finds a little lamp and he rubs it.

• 1:06:50Speaker 00

  And the next thing he knows, there's a genie and the genie offers to grant him a wish. And what does he wish for? He says, I wish that my neighbor's goat would die. And that is an extreme version of what we're talking about here, right? It's a desire for schadenfreude, a desire for misfortune to befall your inferior neighbor rather than what has become your lot. And Rousseau's on to something here, clearly.

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  And with respect to the people who basically get angry at every misfortune, I think Rousseau would say that their anger is somehow proportionate to the importance they attach to themselves. And if they have a very inflated view of what is coming to them from the universe, only good things, then yeah, sure. Every least misfortune is a source of a temper tantrum in one form or another. But ordinarily, we can distinguish from intentional harm done to us

• 1:08:06Speaker 01

  to simple accidents and so on, or at least most reasonable people, I think, can.

• 1:08:12Speaker 00

  I'm not sure. You know, I remember.

• 1:08:18Speaker 00

  More than once, when someone has been cruel, I have tried to give them the benefit of the doubt and said, you know, maybe something unfortunate has happened to their loved one, and sometimes that's true, and people lash out in those circumstances. I actually want to ask you about two things before you, I know you have, I assume you have something else you want to do, but I want to ask you about two things. We didn't talk about the last line of paragraph 16, the last phrase, he says, after he says, vanity and contempt are born, and shame and envy, this idea that when you start to see other people being more successful in social settings, you start to get jealous and look down on people and you feel good about yourself.

• 1:09:00Speaker 00

  He says, "The fermentation caused by these new lemons eventually produce compounds fatal to happiness and innocence." And lemons, meaning yeast, meaning things that work on other things and grow, in this case, compounds that are fatal to happiness and innocence. How do you read that?

• 1:09:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know what the compounds are, so I have, it's wonderful of you to raise that, I've never, I've never slowed down over that. What, what I would say is, these, these are new passions in the soul. Vanity and contempt, shame and envy, don't exist in the pure state of nature, they don't exist until man becomes social and then becomes concerned with his, with his, how he stands with respect to others.

• 1:09:59Speaker 01

  But I think he wants to say that these comparative considerations of superiority and inferiority relative to others, envy and disdain and so on, they infect so many things, so many aspects of our lives, that they tend to destroy our happiness, we're always envying somebody or feeling ashamed because we're not measuring up, or they give rise to...

• 1:10:32Speaker 01

  The coveting and taking what is not ours, or of lording it over other people because we think they don't deserve the superior positions we have. In other words, it's those particular passions relative to others that wind up destroying our happiness because they infect absolutely everything else. Every way in which we look at the world are in danger of doing that. And they destroy our happiness and they contribute to our being bad people toward others. I think, I can't specify the compound, but it's basically this yeast goes everywhere.

• 1:11:12Speaker 00

  And we all can understand some of that. We can relate to it. We can say that seems plausible. But of course, it doesn't have to be that way. Why wouldn't it be the case when I'm out in the public sphere and I see people who are more attractive or more successful than I am? Okay, so that's that. I make a note of it, perhaps. I observe it and I go back to my own hut and I have my own family and my own successes. And so I'm not as great as so and so. And but it eats at you. That's why I like the the compounds and the lemons. It it it. It's hard to put it down. And then even stranger, shouldn't at least the successful people

• 1:11:55Speaker 00

  who have the vanity and the contempt, shouldn't they be happy? But of course, there's only one, perhaps, who can see themselves at the top, the alpha of the of the tribe. Everybody, even the most successful people are often thinking, yeah, I'm a successful, but I wish I could have had that. And you don't. And so even they suffer.

• 1:12:21Speaker 01

  Yep, yep.

• 1:12:24Speaker 00

  One more thing.

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  Let me try to pull a couple.

• 1:12:26Speaker 00

  One more thing I want to ask. One more thing I want to ask, and then you can bring us home.

• 1:12:32Speaker 00

  In my experience, some of the most vain people, the most arrogant people, the most pretentious people are insecure.

• 1:12:44Speaker 00

  They use their public image of vanity and contempt for the people they see as lesser, less than themselves, as a form of armor, a fear that they're not measuring up, a fear of, maybe it's envy toward the people who are maybe content even though they don't have the gifts, or the wealth, or the accomplishments of those people. Does Rousseau have anything to say on that? Do you want to reflect on that? Because I think that's true.

• 1:13:18Speaker 01

  I think it's true. I don't think he's, I don't think he speaks about that in here. But, no, these are often covers, and roles and postures that people invent for themselves, and in the dark of the night. In fact, there's a wonderful, there's a wonderful saying attributed to the pianist Arthur Rubinstein. "When I compare myself, I feel proud. When I regard myself, I feel humble."

• 1:14:02Speaker 01

  When there aren't the others, when he really looks at himself, in any case. Look, I love these paragraphs because they go to the root of certain very primordial things in the human psyche before morality and culture come along to try to instruct them. They give you the unvarnished view of the human being, not in the primitive condition when he's little distinguished from an ape, but with possibilities.

• 1:14:39Speaker 01

  But when certain anthropological things, deeply rooted, come into view, and then one begins to see what culture has to address in a deep way, and not think you jiggle around these institutions, or provide these new incentives. If you don't somehow understand what the potential demons are in the soul for yourself and for the people you live with, you'll get it all wrong.

• 1:15:11Speaker 01

  Rousseau is, in a way, bothered by bourgeois society in particular because it feeds those kinds of vanities and those senses of inequalities and those pursuits of advantage over others. The very thing which makes capitalist prosperity and the ease of our life go turns out to be, in some ways, from a Rousseauan point of view, corrupting of the soul. Also, in the sense that our needs now are vastly greater than one would really need to live cheerfully and well at a much lower plane. The solutions, he doesn't offer you solutions. He's offering you a kind of insight to look into the mirror

• 1:15:56Speaker 01

  and have a really good look at what it means to be a human being, top to bottom, and then begin to think about what kind of social arrangements might leave people freer than they were and less culpable of cruelty and vice towards their neighbors. There's no simple Rousseauan answer, but to set you the table and to help you think about it, there are fewer, better people.

• 1:16:26Speaker 00

  My guest today has been Leon Casse. Leon, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.

• 1:16:32Speaker 01

  Thanks for being with you, Russ.

• 1:16:40Speaker 00

  This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to EconTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.