What Happens When We Believe People Are Basically Good?
A meme on social media quotes my colleague Glenn Sunshine as saying, “If I had a gun with two bullets, and I was in a room with Hitler, bin Laden, and Jean Jacques Rousseau, I’d shoot Rousseau twice!” Glenn insists he never said that, but then quietly admits he wishes he had.
Jean Jacques Rousseau was one of the most influential thinkers and writers of the last 500 years. A defining figure of the Enlightenment, his ideas have especially infected the arenas of philosophy, education, and politics. And not in a good way. Another colleague insists that the world deserves a real-life version of “It’s a Wonderful Life” about Rousseau. Only if we knew how much better history would have been without Rousseau, we’d never want to go back.
Rousseau’s idea of the natural innocence of children, especially from his book Émile, has shaped modern notions of being “child-centric.” In this view, parents and teachers shouldn’t restrain children or push them toward any particular views. Rather, they should be encouraged to discover truth through their own experiences. Rousseau, by the way, left all five of his own kids at an orphanage.
He was also behind another idea that has come to be known as the “noble savage.” In this view, evil doesn’t originate in the human heart but from society. Thus, the further people get from civilization, the better they will be. In his book Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau imagined prehistoric and tribal peoples living in utopia with no marriage, no government, no property, and no morality.
All of his musings came from the comfort of the salons of Western Europe. The explorers who discovered tribal people and witnessed how they lived told another story. Men like Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, and Charles Darwin described a brutal world of poverty, famine, and slavery, despite being without the negative influence of “civilization.”
The most dangerous ingredient in Rousseau’s ideas was an unbounded confidence in human ability. He scoffed at formal religion, assuming that through unaided reason, humans could discover all truth. In his view, we only need to be freed from the chains of superstition and authority.
Ideas have consequences. Bad ideas have victims. Rousseau’s ideas were very bad.
His legacy includes the failed utopian visions of Maximilien Robespierre, the French Revolutionary leader who slaughtered tens of thousands of people in less than 40 years, and Karl Marx, whose legacy led to the deaths of ten times that many people in the twentieth century alone. Without Rousseau, we may have avoided the twisted anthropology of thinkers like Margaret Mead and their appeals for sexual “liberty.” Alfred Kinsey may have remained an unknown, pseudo-scientific, and perverted crackpot, rather than a seminal researcher of the sexual revolution.
Of course, Rousseau is not responsible for the evil of others, but his ideas did provide justification for some of the worst villains in human history. That is why it’s so important to study ideas, including bad ones. A great place to start is Benjamen Wiker’s wonderfully titled book 10 Books That Screwed up the World (and 5 others that didn’t help). According to Wiker,
[T]he best cure—the only cure, once the really harmful books have multiplied like viruses through endless editions—is to read them. Know them forward and backward. Seize each one by its malignant heart and expose it to the light of day.
If that sounds dramatic, consider the words of nineteenth-century scholar Thomas Carlyle: “There once was a man called Rousseau who wrote a book containing nothing but ideas. The second edition was bound in the skins of those who laughed at the first.”
Worldview matters because ideas matter . . . if for no other reason than the misguided musings of philosophers like Rousseau rarely stay in the study.
Photo Courtesy: ©Getty Images/DEA / G. DAGLI ORTI/Contributor
Published Date: August 5, 2025
John Stonestreet is President of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, and radio host of BreakPoint, a daily national radio program providing thought-provoking commentaries on current events and life issues from a biblical worldview. John holds degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (IL) and Bryan College (TN), and is the co-author of Making Sense of Your World: A Biblical Worldview.
The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of CrosswalkHeadlines.
BreakPoint is a program of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. BreakPoint commentaries offer incisive content people can't find anywhere else; content that cuts through the fog of relativism and the news cycle with truth and compassion. Founded by Chuck Colson (1931 – 2012) in 1991 as a daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today's news and trends. Today, you can get it in written and a variety of audio formats: on the web, the radio, or your favorite podcast app on the go.
