And Here We Go...: The Plot Against Civilization pp. 15-17

 Readers new to my format: we are using the PDF page numbers found at the internet archive.

Chapter I: Illuminism—The Philosophers—Rousseau—Secret Societies—Freemasonry—Adam Weishaupt—The Illuminati—Congress of Wilhelmsbad—Illuminati Suppressed

Right off the bat this book is going to be much different. Unlike any other of our subjects, this book is the product of an educated person who is familiar, at the very least, with how a history book should be written. She’s writing this book in the very early 20th century, so it’s still got this interesting chapter heading format where the chapter titles are going to be succeeded by the list of subjects it’s going to cover. I primarily read philosophy (and fiction) we don’t do this. The few history books that I do have, don’t have this in such detail. It’s very helpful though—like a pre-index.

It is a commonly accepted opinion that the great revolutionary movement which began at the end of the eighteenth century originated with the philosophers of France, particularly with Rousseau…if we were to seek the cause of revolution in mere philosophy it would be necessary to go a great deal further back than Rousseau—to Mably, to the Utopia of Thomas More, and even to Pythagoras and Plato.

In all of these books I strive to be fair, if the author makes a good point or has a good turn of phrase, I’ll mention it. Here, Webster is making a good point. The philosophy of Jean Jacques Rousseau was important to the revolutionary movements of the 18th century. Rousseau argued two very important ideas in the history of human civilization. The first was the inequality is artificial. People are generally all equal to each other, and inequality is created when one person claims that someone else cannot have what they have. This is usually determined to be property rights and is how Rousseau framed the position. The reason that kings and peasants have equality disparities is because kings not only have more property, but they also have rights.

I should remind the reader, that the concept of “rights” is new during Rousseau’s time.

The second thing that Rousseau communicated during the enlightenment was that government should serve the will of the people. A king, for example, did not exist for the sake of itself but to enact the will of the people—who are, themselves, sovereign. In other words, their sovereignty exists whether or not a monarch grants it.

Webster is making an interesting omission here, and I’ll bet it has to do with her fascist outlook. She claims that the ideas of Rousseau go back and she’s right, but she ignores Rousseau’s immediate predecessor Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes also believed that government is artificial, but he believed in the absolute power of the Leviathan to make order and enforce peace. We can have discussions about who or what the leviathan actually is, whether Hobbes was a monarchist or a parliamentarian; but Rousseau borrows from Hobbes, and it’s curious that Webster doesn’t mention this.

While Webster is correct in her estimation of Rousseau, she picks curious examples to say who informed Rousseau’s theories. I am not familiar with this Mably person, so I am going to skip him.

More’s Utopia, I’m familiar with. As well as the Philosophies of Plato and Pythagoras. With More and Plato there is a consistent idea that the people work toward the good of both the society and their fellow citizens. In Utopia, labor is undertaken not as a job for money but as a contribution to the general good. In Plato’s Republic, this idea was taken even more extreme. The state was assumed to be more like a parent so that there were familial bonds to guarantee loyalty to the state. I’ll be clear: Plato hated democracy. He believed it to be the lowest form of government, and he blamed it for killing his mentor, Socrates. More’s book has a king, an elected king, but a king nonetheless. Rousseau is the only one arguing for a rule of law. What Webster wants is to tie Rousseau to a lineage of philosophy that she can demonize, and I’m very curious how she is going to justify it.

Webster wants to claim that the lineage of Socialism is this. While Rousseau did claim that civilization was all wrong, he wasn’t advocating a return to the state of nature, only that inequality came from those amassing property at the expense of other people. Webster says that the germs of socialism are here; but she’s missing the really important work that was made a profound impact on Karl Marx—Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. I’m always amazed when people attack socialism they miss this book.

Her summary of Rousseau is a little biting but otherwise correct. This, again, is a step up from other books who have either cherry picked their quotes (like Gary Allen) or are just repeating things that they’ve heard about a book (like Alex Jones). She spends the next few pages summarizing more of Rousseau’s philosophy.

She makes an analogy that I’m certain that she thought was clever: “the first creature to establish the law of property was not man staking out his claim, but the first bird appropriating the branch of a tree whereon to built its nest, the first rabbit selecting a spot wherein to burrow out his hole—a right that no other bird or rabbit has ever dreamt of disputing.”

She then moves toward an example of how two thrushes on a lawn will fight over a worm, commenting, “to see how the question of food supply is settled in primitive society.”

This analogy fails for a few reasons. The first is that animals are not people. That’s the pettiest response I can give, but it’s appropriate because a bird is just going to find a different branch. Rousseau’s criticism, and what Webster is purposefully ignoring, is that Rousseau’s position is a little more involved. See, it’s not a bird claiming a branch or a rabbit claiming a warren. It’s if the bird claimed a branch but then told the other bird that they weren’t allowed to claim any other branches anywhere. The rabbit claims a spot in the field, then tells the other rabbit that they have to move to a different field and then have to pay part of its food to the first rabbit for the privilege of being allowed to find their own field. If resource allocation was not a zero sum game Rousseau would be more incorrect, but Webster doesn’t address this issue. She thinks that people who are starving are only starving because they didn’t find another branch for their nest.