Step Outside, Summertime's in Bloom

Lately in Recent Political Theory, we have been reading the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In his Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau talks about how man in his state of nature is a being full of compassion because he is not consumed with his own self-preservation, but as things like private property and personal wealth evolved, so has the enmity between human beings. Rousseau realized that we could not exactly scrap everything and head back to the Stone Age, so he devised what he called the Social Contract and proposed the idea of the General Will as a guiding force in societal decisions.

This discussion in class caused me to start thinking about how much of society walks around living their lives, but do we really examine why we make the decisions that we make? Do we understand our own value and belief system and what influence that has on the things that we pursue and the things that we glorify? Or all too often, do we make decisions because that is what we see others around us doing, and we do not pay a second thought to what those decisions say about our core values or what we believe this life to be all about.

I have written before about a deconstruction of reality and how that can be a valuable step for someone to take when they are facing crisis or a large decision. Sometimes you have to step back and think about why you do the things that you do and what are truly the things worth selling yourself for in this life.

Everyone gives themselves to something, what is it going to be for you?