IT’S ASTOUNDING - THEY THINK THEY CAN FORCE SOCIETAL CHANGE
My usual mix of quotes, Napoleon and metathesiophobia
I wrote a verse on a topic which seems to dominate my thinking in regards to the right wing's serious march to force us back in time in our society. My verses are written with an idea as a protest speech, and hence are normally negative in substance. I really never necessarily state solutions within my verses, although in this one I state the obvious. But this modus operandi I have established, albeit flighty at times, seems to bring out the best for which I am capable. Have a good Friday everyone.
Following the overall theme of attempted forcing of societal change, I have included some quotes. I was particularly interested in Rousseau, as I have found myself never using any quotes from him. He is indeed an important philosopher advocating for democracy. And his catalog of quotes is quite interesting and vast. I’ve included a friend of Rousseau, the biographer James Boswell. And I came across a very good Seneca quote, so I’ve included several of his quotes on being a human.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes which I found applicable to the subject at hand.
“Equality is deemed by many a mere speculative chimera, which can never be reduced to practice. But if the abuse is inevitable, does it follow that we ought not to try at least to mitigate it? It is precisely because the force of things tends always to destroy equality, that the force of legislature must always tend to maintain it.
— Rousseau.
“Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.”
― Rousseau
“I have never thought, for my part, that man's freedom consists in his being able to do whatever he wills, but that he should not, by any human power, be forced to do what is against his will.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker
“To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract
“In a well governed state, there are few punishments, not because there are many pardons, but because criminals are rare; it is when a state is in decay that the multitude of crimes is a guarantee of impunity.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract
“Everything is in constant flux on this earth. Nothing keeps the same unchanging shape, and our affections, being attached to things outside us, necessarily change and pass away as they do. Always out ahead of us or lagging behind, they recall a past which is gone or anticipate a future which may never come into being; there is nothing solid there for the heart to attach itself to. Thus our earthly joys are almost without exception the creatures of a moment...”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Meditations of a Solitary Walker
“In the human species there seem to be two kinds of inequality; the one established by nature, which consists in the qualities of mind or soul; the other, which depends on a kind of mutual agreement, and is established, by the consent of men; this latter consists in the different privileges which some en joy to the prejudice of others.”
— Rousseau
“I know the feelings of my heart, and I know men. I am not made like any of those I have seen; I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence. If I am not better, at least I am different. Whether Nature has acted rightly or wrongly in destroying the mould in which she cast me, can only be decided after I have been read.”
― Jean Jacques Rousseau, Confessions
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (28 June 1712 – 2 July 1778) was a Genevan philosopher (philosophe), writer, and composer. His political philosophy influenced the progress of the Age of Enlightenment throughout Europe, as well as aspects of the French Revolution and the development of modern political, economic, and educational thought. For more than two years (1762–1765) Rousseau lived at Môtiers, Switzerland, spending his time in reading and writing and meeting visitors such as *James Boswell (December 1764). In the meantime, the local ministers had become aware of the apostasies in some of his writings, and resolved not to let him stay in the vicinity. The Neuchâtel Consistory summoned Rousseau to answer a charge of blasphemy. He wrote back asking to be excused due to his inability to sit for a long time due to his ailment. Subsequently, Rousseau's own pastor, Frédéric-Guillaume de Montmollin, started denouncing him publicly as the Antichrist.
*“If a man who is born to a fortune cannot make himself easier and freer than those who are not, he gains nothing.”
— James Boswell
“The man who stops making new friends eventually will have none.”
— James Boswell
James Boswell, 9th Laird of Auchinleck (29 October 1740 – 19 May 1795), was a Scottish biographer, diarist, and lawyer, born in Edinburgh. He is best known for his biography of his friend and older contemporary, the English writer Samuel Johnson, which is commonly said to be the greatest biography written in the English language. A great mass of Boswell's diaries, letters, and private papers were recovered from the 1920s to the 1950s, and their ongoing publication by Yale University has transformed his reputation.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca quotes which I felt addressed the questions of life, and are applicable to my verse. It is particularly in tune with the downfall of unbridled avarice.
“The high in power are often desirous of impossibilities.”
— Seneca.
“If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you’re needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic
“No man was ever wise by chance”
― Seneca
“The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life
“He who spares the wicked injures the good.”
― Seneca
“To be always fortunate, and to pass through life with a soul that has never known sorrow, is to be ignorant of one half of nature.”
― Seneca
“Interference in a *righteous cause is just.”
— Seneca
*right·eous
adjective, 1. (of a person or conduct) morally right or justifiable; virtuous.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger ( c. 4 BC – AD 65), usually known mononymously as Seneca, was a Stoic philosopher of Ancient Rome, a statesman, dramatist, and, in one work, satirist, from the post-Augustan age of Latin literature. Seneca had an immense influence on later generations—during the Renaissance he was "a sage admired and venerated as an oracle of moral, even of Christian edification; a master of literary style and a model [for] dramatic art."
It seems important to me to include an American in this discussion. I found this from Thomas Paine on the difference between government and society. I find it a little anti-government, and almost fodder for the right wing. But I’m assuming the government in this case to Paine was the British government of the time. Regardless, it is from Stanford. Perhaps Paine did not address trying to change society through politics, society being positive in all cases. I don’t know.
In Common Sense Paine opens his account with the contrast between society and government: ‘Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices’ (CW I, 4). [CW refers to The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, P.S. Foner (ed.), 1945.] As with many Paine claims, this seems simple, intuitive, and attractive. Our interests unite us, and it is only when we overstep the legitimate bounds of those interests, or push them to the detriment of others, that we need constraint. But when we do that, we ought to know better, and as such Government can appropriately be regarded as constraining our vices. What is less clear is how far we must assume vice (and thereby government). ‘Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.’
“When a people agree to form themselves into a republic…it is understood that they mutually resolve and pledge themselves to each other, rich and poor alike, to support this rule of equal justice among them… (and) they renounce as detestable, the power of exercising, at any future time any species of despotism over each other, or of doing a thing not right in itself, because a majority of them may have the strength of numbers sufficient to accomplish it. (CW II, 373)” - Thomas Paine, Common Sense
I know not much about Napoleon Bonaparte, yet curious about how he was welcomed, or not welcomed after returning to Paris after exile in Elba by the people of France; I have below some excerpts from his memoirs written primarily by his secretary. One can expect such writing to be slanted in Napoleon’s favor, but I found the memoir to give a sense of the mood of the time. I can only draw comparison with a second Trump presidential bid to this. Forgive my thought, hopefully it never will happen. Although quite different in comparison, perhaps one can read this account with 2023 America kept in mind. That is my reasoning, whether valid or not. I read that today the people of France have conflicting views on Napoleon. The excerpts below bring a sense of something similar back when it occurred.
MEMOIRS OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, Complete
By LOUIS ANTOINE FAUVELET DE BOURRIENNE
His Private Secretary
Edited by R. W. Phipps Colonel, Late Royal Artillery
1891
Overview from an academic source (Brown University)
The period known as “the hundred days” marked the events that occurred between Napoleon’s return to Paris on March 20, 1815, after his exile on Elba, and the second restoration of King Louis XVIII to the throne of France on July 8, 1815. Within five days of Napoleon’s return, the European powers at the Congress of Vienna declared him an outlaw and committed to increasing military troops on the ground in order to end his rule once and for all. This time period included the military engagements of the Waterloo Campaign (June 15 – July 8, 1815), a series of battles fought between the French Army of the North and the Anglo-Allied and Prussian armies, which culminated in the decisive Battle of Waterloo and the final demise of Napoleon’s reign.
From Gutenberg-org, the following excerpts.
The municipality of Grasse was strongly in favour of the Royalist cause, but the sudden appearance of the Emperor afforded but little time for hesitation, and they came to tender their submission to him. Having passed through the town he halted on a little height some way beyond it, where he breakfasted. He was soon surrounded by the whole population of the place; and he heard the same sentiments and the same prayers as before he quitted France. A multitude of petitions had already been drawn up, and were presented to him, just as though he had come from Paris and was making a tour through the departments. One complained that his pension had not been paid, another that his cross of the Legion of Honour had been taken from him. Some of the more discontented secretly informed Napoleon that the authorities of the town were very hostile to him, but that the mass of the people were devoted to him, and only waited till his back was turned to rid themselves of the miscreants. He replied, "Be not too hasty. Let them have the mortification of seeing our triumph without having anything to reproach us with." The Emperor advanced with all the rapidity in his power. "Victory," he said, "depended on my speed. To me France was in Grenoble. That place was a hundred miles distant, but I and my companions reached it in five days; and with what weather and what roads! I entered the city just as the Comte d'Artois, warned by the telegraph, was quitting the Tuileries."
I had no opportunity of observing the aspect of Paris during that memorable period recorded in history by the name of the Hundred Days, but the letters which I received at the time, together with all that, I afterwards heard, concurred in assuring me that the capital never presented so melancholy a picture as: during those three months. No one felt any confidence in Napoleon's second reign, and it was said, without any sort of reserve, that Fouché, while serving the cause of usurpation, would secretly betray it. The future was viewed with alarm, and the present with dissatisfaction. The sight of the federates who paraded the faubourgs and the boulevards, vociferating, "The Republic for ever!" and "Death to the Royalists!" their sanguinary songs, the revolutionary airs played in our theatres, all tended to produce a fearful torpor in the public mind, and the issue of the impending events was anxiously awaited.
Napoleon was scarcely reseated on his throne when he found he could not resume that absolute power he had possessed before his abdication at Fontainebleau. He was obliged to submit to the curb of a representative government, but we may well believe that he only yielded, with a mental reservation that as soon as victory should return to his standards and his army be reorganised he would send the representatives of the people back to their departments, and make himself as absolute as he had ever been. His temporary submission was indeed obligatory.
The Republicans and Constitutionalists who had assisted, or not opposed his return, with Carnot, Fouché, Benjamin Constant, and his own brother Lucien (a lover of constitutional liberty) at their head, would support him only on condition of his reigning as a constitutional sovereign; he therefore proclaimed a constitution under the title of "Acte additionnel aux Constitutions de l'Empire," which greatly resembled the charter granted by Louis XVIII. the year before. An hereditary Chamber of Peers was to be appointed by the Emperor, a Chamber of Representatives chosen by the Electoral Colleges, to be renewed every five years, by which all taxes were to be voted, ministers were to be responsible, judges irremovable, the right of petition was acknowledged, and property was declared inviolable. Lastly, the French nation was made to declare that they would never recall the Bourbons.
Napoleon at the same time endeavoured to make himself popular with the common people—the mob of the Faubourg St. Antoine and other obscure quarters of Paris. On the first evening of his return, as he walked round the glittering circle met to welcome him, in the State apartments of the Tuileries, he kept repeating, "Gentlemen, it is to the poor and disinterested mass of the people that I owe everything; it is they who have brought me back to the capital. It is the poor subaltern officers and common soldiers that have done all this. I owe everything to the common people and the ranks of the army. Remember that! I owe everything to the army and the people!" Some time after he took occasional rides through the Faubourg St. Antoine, but the demonstrations of the mob gave him little pleasure, and, it was easy to detect a sneer in his addresses to them. He had some slight intercourse with the men of the Revolution—the fierce, blood-thirsty Jacobins—but even now he could not conceal his abhorrence of them, and, be it said to his honour, he had as little to do with them as possible.
The interview took place at the Tuileries. The Emperor, as was his wont, began the conversation, and kept it nearly all to himself during the rest of the audience. He did not affect to disguise either his past actions or present dispositions.
"The nation," he said, "has had a respite of twelve years from every kind of political agitation, and for one year has enjoyed a respite from war. This double repose has created a craving after activity. It requires, or fancies it requires, a Tribune and popular assemblies. It did not always require them. The people threw themselves at my feet when I took the reins of government. You ought to recollect this, who made a trial of opposition. Where was your support—your strength? Nowhere. I assumed less authority than I was invited to assume. Now all is changed. A feeble government, opposed to the national interests, has given to these interests the habit of standing on the defensive and evading authority. The taste for constitutions, for debates, for harangues, appears to have revived. Nevertheless it is but the minority that wishes all this, be assured. The people, or if you like the phrase better; the multitude, wish only for me. You would say so if you had only seen this multitude pressing eagerly on my steps, rushing down from the tops of the mountains, calling on me, seeking me out, saluting me. On my way from Cannes hither I have not conquered—I have administered. I am not only (as has been pretended) the Emperor of the soldiers; I am that of the peasants of the plebeians of France. Accordingly, in spite of all that has happened, you see the people come back to me. There is sympathy between us. It is not as with the privileged classes. The noblesse have been in my service; they thronged in crowds into my antechambers. There is no place that they have not accepted or solicited. I have had the Montmorencys, the Noailles, the Rohans, the Beauveaus, the Montemarts, in my train. But there never was any cordiality between us. The steed made his curvets—he was well broken in, but I felt him quiver under me. With the people it is another thing. The popular fibre responds to mine. I have risen from the ranks of the people: my voice sets mechanically upon them. Look at those conscripts, the sons of peasants: I never flattered them; I treated them roughly. They did not crowd round me the less; they did not on that account cease to cry, 'Vive l'Empereur!' It is that between them and me there is one and the same nature. They look to me as their support, their safeguard against the nobles. I have but to make a sign, or even to look another way, and the nobles would be massacred in every province. So well have they managed matters in the last ten months! but I do not desire to be the King of a mob. If there are the means to govern by a constitution well and good. I wished for the empire of the world, and to ensure it complete liberty of action was necessary to me. To govern France merely it is possible that a constitution may be better. I wished for the empire of the world, as who would not have done in my place? The world invited me to rule over it. Sovereigns and subjects alike emulously bowed the neck under my sceptre. I have seldom met with opposition in France, but still I have encountered more of it from some obscure and unarmed Frenchmen than from all these Kings so resolute, just now, no longer to have a man of the people for their equal! See then what appears to you possible; let me know your ideas. Public discussion, free elections, responsible ministers, the liberty of the press, I have no objection to all that, the liberty of the press especially; to stifle it is absurd. I am convinced on this point. I am the man of the people: if the people really wish for liberty let them have it. I have acknowledged their sovereignty. It is just that I should lend an ear to their will, nay, even to their caprices. I have never been disposed to oppress them for my pleasure. I conceived great designs; but fate has been against me; I am no longer a conqueror, nor can I be one. I know what is possible and what is not.—I have no further object than to raise up France and bestow on her a government suitable to her. I have no hatred to liberty, I have set it aside when it obstructed my path, but I understand what it means; I was brought up in its school: besides, the work of fifteen years is overturned, and it is not possible to recommence it. It would take twenty years, and the lives of 2,000,000 of men to be sacrificed to it. As for the rest, I desire peace, but I can only obtain it by means of victory. I would not inspire you with false expectations. I permit it to be said that negotiations are going on; there are none. I foresee a hard struggle, a long war. To support it I must be seconded by the nation, but in return I believe they will expect liberty. They shall have it: the circumstances are new. All I desire is to be informed of the truth. I am getting old. A man is no longer at forty-five what he was at thirty. The repose enjoyed by a constitutional king may suit me: it will still more certainly be the best thing, for my son."
I will end with some excerpts from Choosing Therapy-Com and discussions about metathesiophobia, fear of change. I’m certainly not asserting that this is the primary driving force being this seeming obsession on the right to force change as it is beyond my expertise to do so. But it intuitively makes sense that this may be a factor in the mass behavior we witness. As to the length of this posting I will not go into depth on this possible factor at this time but perhaps will in a later time with some more thought. It is not my intention to attempt to stigmatize others who struggle within their minds, solidifying their reluctance to realize their difficulties and seek help in such matters. I only want to bring awareness of possible problems, and to stress that there may be solutions if willingness will exists to confront them.
Although most of us realize that change is the only constant in our lives, we can still struggle to cope. Many people actually develop intense fears related to change (also known as metathesiophobia), but the prospect of something new does not have to feel frightening. There are several ways to cope with and overcome a fear of change, including therapy, shifting your thinking, planning ahead, and seeking support.
Why Are People Afraid of Change?
We are naturally prone to feel scared and worried about things that represent uncertainty, push us out of our comfort zone, or are beyond our control. All types of change—big, small, sudden, expected, positive, or negative—require some mental adjustment. The truth is, we find comfort and security in routine, even if we also think it’s boring. And for some, their fear of change will be closely linked to their fear of the unknown, or even a deeper existential crisis in the face of a big change.
What Causes a Fear of Change?
A combination of genetics, brain chemistry, and other biological and environmental elements can contribute to the development of an irrational fear or phobia related to change.
Common causes of a fear of change include:
Being raised in an environment where change was seen as a threat
Genetic factors or having a close relative with fear or phobia
Distressful childhood experiences related to change
Self-doubt, self-criticism, and feeling insecure about adjusting well to changes
Feeling a loss of control
Signs of Fear of Change
People who are overpowered by a fear of change are more likely to cope by avoiding new situations. They often lack interest in exploring new things, and may be reluctant to achieve goals or improve their situation. They might even find themselves stuck in toxic relationships or jobs they don’t like, which can bring about stress, anxiety, pain, depression, and a lack of energy.
Signs that you or a loved one have a deep fear of change include:
An immediate feeling of intense fear and anxiety about new situations or change
Awareness that the fear is irrational but an inability to control it
Increased anticipatory anxiety as the change approaches
Going to great lengths to avoid change; so much so that it interferes with your personal or professional life
When the situation cannot be avoided, it is endured with intense fear and anxiety
Panic attacks with symptoms like increased heart rate, sweating, or shortness of breath
If you’re experiencing these symptoms in an intense or sustained way and seeing negative consequences in your life as a result, you may be living with a specific phobia and could benefit from working with a therapist.
So this again was a little haphazard in its entirety, as this mind bounced from place to place. But hopefully I brought forth some useful information and stimulated some thoughts that may help build ideas on how to approach the threats we face today.
51st posting, July 14, 2023