Lola del Rey🐇

It seems to me like skincare is basically fake — is this insane?

i can’t believe claude painted this

Claude Monet

why would one need a bulletproof watercolour palette?

Every Christian should understand the impact of Rousseau on our own day: "Most of the ideologies that bloodied the twentieth century were influenced by Rousseau. His writings inspired Robespierre in the French Revolution, as well as Marx, Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, and Mao. Even Pol Pot, who massacred a quarter of the population in Cambodia, was educated in Paris and read his Rousseau. So if you get a grip on Rousseau’s thinking, you have a key to understanding much of the modern world. What exactly was it that made his worldview so revolutionary? Rousseau said the way to grasp the essence of human nature was to hypothesize what we would be like if we were stripped of all social relationships, morals, laws, customs, traditions—of civilization itself. This original, pre-social condition he called the “state of nature.” In it, all that exists are lone, disconnected, autonomous individuals, whose sole motivating force is the desire for selfpreservation—what Rousseau called self-love (amour de soi). Social relationships are not ultimately real; instead they are secondary or derivative, created by individual choice. What did that mean for Rousseau’s view of society? If our true nature is to be autonomous individuals, then society is contrary to our nature: It is artificial, confining, oppressive. That’s why Rousseau’s most influential work, The Social Contract, opens with the famous line, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” He did not mean chains of political oppression, as we Americans might think: For Rousseau, the really oppressive relationships were personal ones like marriage, family, church, and workplace. This line of thought represented a stark break from traditional Christian social theory, which takes the Trinity as the model of social life. The picture of ultimate origins given in the Bible is not one of disconnected solitary individuals wandering under the trees in a state of nature. Instead, the picture is one of a couple—male and female—related from the beginning in the social institution of marriage, forming the foundation of social life. The implication of the doctrine of the Trinity is that relationships are just as ultimate or real as individuals; they are not the creation of autonomous individuals, who can make or break them at will. Relationships are part of the created order and thus are ontologically real and good. The moral requirements they make on us are not impositions on our freedom but rather expressions of our true nature. By participating in the civilizing institutions of family, church, state, and society, each with its own “common good,” we fulfill our social nature and develop the moral virtues that prepare us for our ultimate purpose, which is to become citizens of the Heavenly City. This explains why it was so revolutionary when Rousseau proposed that individuals are the sole ultimate reality. He denounced civilization, with its social conventions, as artificial and oppressive. And what would liberate us from this oppression? The state. The state would destroy all social ties, releasing the individual from loyalty to anything except itself. Rousseau spelled out his vision with startling clarity: “Each citizen would then be completely independent of all his fellow men, and absolutely dependent on the state.” No wonder his philosophy inspired so many totalitarian systems." (From Total Truth)