Discourse on Inequality

"Rousseau is one of the first people to offer an entirely non-religious account of the origins of deception. Before Rousseau people tied lying and deception to the Garden of Eden, the Devil and original sin. Remember that the gospels tell us that the Devil is the father of lies. Rousseau rejects the notion of original sin, he doesn’t think it explains anything, and argues that the reason we lie is because we are social creatures. In the Discourse he offers a rather inventive account of primitive human life. In those earliest days human beings lived alone and were content. Things happen as they do and eventually we came to live with others and this became the source of many problems. Once we live in groups we cannot help but compare ourselves to others. We notice that some people are more talented than we are, are smarter or more handsome than we are, more charismatic, caring, popular or mysterious. And so people begin to pretend to be what they aren’t, mimicking others who have things we want. We lie because we are social. Rousseau is the first to argue that lying is not a religious problem: it is a natural phenomenon. We lie to get ahead and this leads to a new sort of diagnosis of the human condition. We no longer suffer from original sin, we suffer from insincerity and inauthenticity. We are no longer true to ourselves. We put on façades to impress people and impressing them, we lose ourselves. No, he thinks it’s impossible to go back because society exists. His ideal is not to be honest or to tell the truth, it’s to be authentic. To overcome the problem of society is to ‘be true to yourself’: this is where we get this language. In the Reveries of a Solitary Walker he offers a long meditation on lying only to conclude by writing something like, ‘I might hold that I should never lie because truth is a virtue, but I’m not really up to that, so sometimes I’m going to lie, and as long as that’s who I am that’s ok’. It’s an entirely new ideal."