I gotta have my orange juice.

In Rousseau, we especially find ourselves awash with so much that is modern. There is bathos, sentimentality, and the relish of pity that has its origin in self-pity. He nearly succeeds in making the self absolute as the feeling self, and then very quickly loses that same self as it drowns in its own self-felt concern. He is lost in self-pity and in self-importance in petty tragedy. Anything can be a tragedy—a toothache, the smallest unrequited love.

Rousseau didn’t invent anything absolutely new. He simply placed an emphasis on certain aspects of life that had never before been given such importance. Everybody has always known about feelings. Bathos and sentimentality have been around for a long time, but mostly as comedy. Rousseau made self-concern, in a deepened way, the end of life; for literary Europe, however, he managed to make it respectable. The importance of romance is not the glory of the beloved. The importance of romance is the glory of my own feeling of being in love. He was in love with being in love, and the beloved is a really quite secondary self-extension. He glorified the self’s importance by making the smallest self-pity seem as immense as the tragedy of King Lear.

What Rousseau accomplished was a lineage that is very old, and is deeply tied, ironically, to the love of death. The final glory, one begins to suspect, would be suicide over the tragedy of a toothache. Hopefully others will notice. My tragedy makes me overwhelmingly notable and important. . . .

Who was this lover and this beloved inside of Rousseau? Is this one who feels love for the self, sensing a prior self, or does he create this self? Did Rousseau exist before he felt himself in love, or did this love create this person?

There is a manifest contradiction here. Rousseau makes a good deal of “virtue.” The self is a “virtuous” self. But Rousseau is very interested in maintaining the utter independence of his existence. This good or virtuous self is only good because Rousseau loves this self. He creates himself by loving himself, and makes himself “virtuous” because he loves himself, and then “feels” this self-creation. He, in other words, creates himself out of nothing. Did he authentically exist before he loved himself? Where was he before he discovered this love? Apparently nowhere. He did not exist. Then he who did not exist began to exist and brought himself into existence by love. But how? By loving himself. Unfortunately, there was no one there to carry out the act of loving. Which is prior: self-love, or existence of the self? One cannot be without the other. This is creation out of nothing, creation ex nihilo. . . .

The United States—my own country—is, at this moment, in grave danger of falling into a final and irreversible sinkhole of Rousseauian sludge. Some years ago, the American education system adopted the “middle school” philosophy, which replaced the old-fashioned junior high school. The purpose of junior high was quite simply to prepare students for high school; the purpose of high school was to complete a basic and foundational educational curriculum that would enable one to enter the work and domestic force of the country, and also prepare some of those students for higher education at the nation’s colleges and universities. One, in other words, had to submit oneself to a particular body of learning. However, by the 1970s and 80s, America had been extensively psychologized. The purpose of education for adolescents ceased to be submission to a curriculum for life preparation, and was replaced with collective therapy to enable students to develop a “healthy self-esteem.” School, in other words, became “student-centered,” making the development of the students ego the central reality. The student, then, no longer submits him or herself to something larger than and outside of themselves, but the entire educational establishment submits itself to them. School became “ego-centric” in the most literal way. This was the essential purpose of middle school as opposed to junior high.

The middle school is an entirely Rousseauian institution, and has built into it all of the contradictions and conflicts that are outlined above. Not surprisingly, it has, over time, issued in all of the above contradictions. . . . If God cannot be one’s final and ultimate audience (as with Augustine in his Confessions, who gave himself to, but did not pander to, a public), then one can only “play to the crowd” as with Rousseau. The result is a world of constant offense, extensive hypocrisy, and a societal “anti-covenant” in which harmonious relationship is nearly impossible. In short, the Rousseauian “middle school” philosophy is a recipe for a completely neurotic society, one dominated by psychiatry and a legal profession with an inordinate number of people involved in lawsuits over absurd and petty offenses. What should have been a passing moment in the development of the adolescent’s personality in junior high school (with the constant sense of seeking to be “in” and “popular”) is now elevated to the final meaning of life and as grist for an everlasting therapy mill. It is a recipe for an adolescent society in which everything coalesces around nothing. (Rich Bledsoe, Can Saul Alinsky Be Saved?, 14-17)