The Social Contract -Jean Jacques Rousseau.

To start with, I’ve chosen this picture of me with my male friend, because this is where the whole story lays. In our society, even if we are “free” people, and by “free” I mean “no slaves”, we are still confined in specific boxes that we must fulfill. In this picture, what we see first is our happy faces in the graduation. But by looking further, we notice our dress code: white dress for girls and black suit for boys. That was an unchanged tradition in our college, that even the most aware of gender issues didn’t see the point in discussing it. Traditions are Traditions, a Man is a Man, and a Woman is a Woman… and of course Society is our mother. She dictates how we should behave, speak, think, study, work… she also makes a difference between the “appropriate” and the “indecent” according to imaginary rules that are making pressure on us. Furthermore, I could’ve used any other picture in any other event, but of course “graduation” was what interests me. This event is our first entry in society; it is when we choose what careers and what paths we want to follow. It is when we will get acquainted with all the other students, instructors, workers from different fields and this is when “we” will choose to which category we are willing to be part of. Of course by “we”, I don’t really mean us as teenagers, it is a mix of us and our dreams guided by our parents, teachers, cousins, aunts, uncles, even our neighbors can find a way to interfere.

In Rousseau’s text, we have the concept of “social contract”. Humans is society are considered free men, by having the same rights and duties, the right of property, security and a bunch of other rights that are supposed to make our lives more organized and better. But what we are really discussing here is that those free men actually don’t have the freedom to choose the laws under which they live; they are oppressed by these laws, by the government, and by society of course. He says that “man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” (Rousseau, 114). And this is to emphasize that men, even if they are free, are still in some kind of slavery. Rousseau also says that people can fight for their rights and freedom by using force and my doing revolutions to get “their liberty back by the same “right” –namely force– that took it away in the first place” (114), which means that taking those rights away is the same as taking them back from the government who oppressed their liberties as Rousseau explains. We can leave this political sphere for a few minutes to come back to our example shown in the picture. By following Rousseau’s instructions, we can fight for gender equality, for equal rights and for stopping the differentiation and separation of men and women in the society, and those rights of course, in case they are accorded, will be given back from the source itself that censored them. It is a vicious circle, where the only victims are the free men, who are not so free in their society and state.
Rousseau also talks about the civil state, and its difference from the natural state. It is when humans replace their instincts, inclinations, physical impulses, and appetite by justice, morality, duties, principles and the sense of what is right. It is by being oppressed by those new laws that humans really benefit from the fact that they are now “a thinking being, a man” (Rousseau, 115). The author also elaborates a comparison between the civil and natural states and what people gain or lose in one state or the other.  
Finally we can come back to my picture and say something a bit different about it. According to Rousseau, we have now reached the “civil state” which is, in my point of view, the best state human beings can attain. Of course we have some negative aspects in this civil state, as we mentioned the gender inequality. And this is a bit confusing, because at first we are willing to fight for these rights and reverse society, but now we just realize that those laws are mostly for our own benefit and welfare. Should we then keep on fighting for gender equality and the abolition of codes in society, or instead, should we just keep them the way they are, for the sake of human evolution and stability?

 

Work cited:

The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Shifting Narratives  114,115.