Love, in 21st Century San Francisco

Rousseau's grim assessment of modernity:

This condition can be summed up as individualism., not that virtue of rugged self-sufficiency as prized in American folklore, but a needy isolation in the midst of society. Rousseau foresaw the collapse of all the structures that tie men together. Common humanity is only an abstraction that has no effects on individuals and produces no felt common good. The new philosophy and the new natural science has reduced men to atoms without natural connectedness. Everyone needs everyone else, but no one really cares for anyone.

Hobbes said that all are naturally at war with each all, and in spite of some disagreement with that formula, Rousseau accepts that civil society is founded on that premise. Civil society and the relations among men in it are only extensions of that war by peaceful means, substituting various kinds of competition and exploitation--mainly economic--for mortal combat. The primary relationship is constituted by contract, that is, between two individuals who remain individuals entering into a contract valid only as long as it contributes to the individual good of each. The links between them are artificial and calculated and, above all, tentative. In this condition, man's defense system is always on alert.

The psychological effects of this unending alert are devastating. A being concerned only with himself has to spend his time worrying about the intentions of others and trying to hide his own from them, threatening, flattering, lying. In his selfishness, he forgets himself. His soul goes wandering out over the world of men and never returns, while he becomes hypocritical, envious, vain, slavish, measuring himself relative to the success or failure of others. This is the condition of alienation.

--adapted from Alan Bloom