…and the collapse of American Constitutionalism.
If there was one person in history that I’d go back and put an end to with my time machine, it wouldn’t be Hitler, or Marx. It would be Rousseau, who was the originator of collectivist totalitarianism.
You’d have to go further back, to Plato, but then geometry would suffer.
How was anything Rousseau imagined different from Christian Monasticism or any number of cults up to then, outside of eliminating mysticism and obedience to a divine being who’s intentions were to be manifested in some way and not questioned? He stands as one of the great fools of history but I think you’re giving him a lot more credit than he deserves.
He had much more influence.
The cults never gained the influence, and for the most part were suppressed by the Church if they got to big. Rousseau came along at the time the Church was being suppressed in France, and so his ideas “had traction” among the suppressors. The French Revolution gave us all sorts of idealistic, stupid and unnecessary ideas and ideals. (Starting from the metric system and their calendar reforms and working down.) We still suffer from the unintended consequences of that “rationality.”
The Church was the cult.
What do you have against the French Republican Calendar?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar
My fave is Mademoiselle Thermidor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Jacques_Rousseau
Apparently, the man was flattened in an encounter with a large dog running beside a carriage in a narrow street.
I think that time-travel Rand must have had a hand in this!
He didn’t die soon enough.
Also have to take out Thomas Jefferson who was a big fan of the French Revolution. His statue and monument stand in Paris across from the parliament building as he was instrumental in saving some of the French rebels.