Rousseau: Savage Vs. Civilized Man

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Savage versus Civilized Rousseau differentiates the savage and civilized man to be completely different from the core of their hearts and even in their natural tendency towards anything. While Rousseau believes a savage man to be naive and peaceful, he describes the civilized man to be working extremely hard all the time and being dominated by selfishness and vanity. I will talk about this distinction from a completely different perspective and I believe that the distinction still holds in the today’s world to some extent. When Rousseau talks about the savage man, it makes me think about the people who are living below the poverty line or people who are extremely poor. I believe that the poor people in today’s world could be considered as savage because the poor people are the ones who have few needs and does not really …show more content…

This is because these are the people who are working in a laborious manner every day, which is similar to the Rousseau’s definition of a civilized man being “moving, sweating, toiling, and racking his brains to find more laborious occupations” (REF). Additionally, while Rousseau describes the civilized man as a person who is not “ashamed to value himself on his own meanness” (REFbk), in my opinion, a civilized person is not necessarily a person who is mean and egoistic. This is because some of these people are working purely so they could do something for the world and the people living in the world. Aria Finger, Yao Zhang, and Mark Zuckerberg are such examples who are working solely to change the world selflessly and even donate huge amounts of money for the betterment of the society. Overall, I believe I could connect to Rousseau’s concept of civilized man to some extent as according to me, a part of it is not necessarily

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