Most philosophers before Rousseau looked at human conflict and said: “People are just born selfish. That’s how it is.” Hobbes said life without government is “nasty, brutish, and short.” Everyone nodded. Rousseau said: “Wait. What if we weren’t born this way? What if society made us like this?”
I just finished reading No B.S. Guide to Powerful Presentations by Dan Kennedy and I have thoughts.
By this point in the book, you start to dread the pattern. A village name you have never heard of. A date. A body count. And the same men doing the killing, over and over again.
Before we get into Rousseau’s ideas, we need to understand the man. His life reads like a novel with bad decisions, genius moments, paranoia, and burned bridges across Europe.
You ever wonder why your government gets to tell you what to do? Like, who decided that? And why do you go along with it?
The men of Battalion 101 discovered something about themselves in August 1942: it was a lot easier to load people onto trains than to shoot them in the face. And that discovery changed the entire nature of their participation in the Holocaust.
One guy walked into the Department of Justice with proof that UBS was helping 19,000 Americans hide over $20 billion from the IRS. The government used his evidence to collect billions in fines and back taxes. Then they put him in prison for 40 months.
Nineteen posts. One book. A whole lot of thinking about how words shape who we are.
We’re done. The retelling of Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany is complete. And now I want to step back from the chapter-by-chapter breakdown and talk about the book as a whole. What it’s about. What it made me think. And whether you should read it yourself.
Twenty-three posts. Four novels. A timeline that starts with Cold War paranoia in Washington and ends with the literal birth of new universes. We’re done.
So we made it. Twenty-two chapters. One of the strangest and most important sci-fi books ever written. And I still think about it weeks after putting it down.