By God, That Man's A Philosopher!

Portrait of Jean-Jacques Rousseau by Maurice Quentin de La Tour, 1753.

New philosophical debate: Which is worse, having your book burned or your head curb stomped? Rousseau may one day have an answer for that!

A much more wrestling-adjacent than pure wrestling content post today.

I spend a fair amount of time on the train for my commute, and I like to pass the time by reading. There's a great app called Hoopla that lets me access my home library in the US and borrow stuff from their online catalog. It's fantastic and I love it. Yeah libraries!

Anyway, I am currently reading "Emile," aka "On Education," by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It's a treatise on education (obviously) and has had a major influence on the way students are taught even to this day. It is divided into five sections, and the first three are pretty solid (with some weird, understandable because it's ye olden times, stuff thrown in). The fourth section would be fine if not for the inclusion of "Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar" being thrown into the middle of it. This section actually caused the book to be banned and burned in some places because it comes across as an attack on Christianity. My issue with it is that it really should be its own book as including it in part four of "Emile" makes that section a terrible slog to read. Imagine reading "The Lord of the Rings" and a short story like "The Lottery" (but longer) is thrown in just before the Fellowship enters the Mines of Moria. Neither text is bad, but they are very different, do not compliment each other well, and take the reader so far out of the original text that you don't remember what the hell was going on or why someone needs to speak friend to enter when you get back to the main story. But I digress.

Then there is section five... Here the book becomes that drawing of a horse meme where the first sections are really good and the last section is such a mess you are not even sure it is a horse anymore. The first four sections detail what Rousseau would do if he were made the tutor of a young boy named Emile. Section five is about finding the supposed perfect compliment to Emile when he reaches adulthood, a wife. Surprise, surprise, this dude is as enlightened about women and what we are capable of as every other ignorant misogynist throughout history who foolishly put paper to pen has been. Granted, he did think women should have some education, and this initial principle helped influence future thinkers to push for more educational opportunities for girls and women, so thanks for that. But most of the "reasoning" and "logic" he uses to argue for this? So ignorant, so contradictory, so just UGH!

And this is where pro-wrestling comes in. As I was reading section five today, I found myself thinking "If I ever get a time machine, I am going straight back to 1761 (the year before "Emile" was published), finding Rousseau, and curb stomping his stupid head until he becomes at least a little more "enlightened" about women and what we are capable of." And maybe I'll bring Seth Rollins with me to do it; I'd like to think he'd be happy to do so on behalf of Becky and Roux.

1/21 Update: I read more of “Emile” on this morning's commute (almost finished, but this last section is giving me anger-induced heart palpitations and making it difficult to finish), and this jackass really said women can’t do science. So there’s a slight change to the itinerary. In my time machine, Seth Rollins and I will now first be stopping in France in 1903 to pick up Marie Curie just after she received her doctorate. Then we will all make our way back further in French history to show Rousseau just how faulty his reasoning really is (via biting sarcasm, curb stomping, and, now, possibly radiation poisoning). When we come back to the present, we will form the greatest trios team the world has, or ever will, know. I'm thinking Atomic Curb Stomp, but I'm workshopping it.