Man was born free and he is everywhere in chains

Spore Sprout re-read Jean-Jacques Rousseau over the weekend ... some choice passages from The Confessions and The Social Contract.  Some ideas on equality appear even more quaint today,  fast receding in the rear-view mirror of the starship Enterprise as it hurtles through the growing great globalized social divide that has been the last quarter century.  Ahh...but how the words keep their hold on our hearts!

Aristotle ... said that men were not at all equal by nature, since some were born for slavery and others born to be masters.

Aristotle was right; but he mistook the effect for the cause.  Anyone born in slavery is born for slavery -- nothing is more certain.  Slaves, in their bondage, lose everything, even the desire to be free.  ...  But if there are slaves by nature, it is only because there has been slavery against nature.  Force made the first slaves; and their cowardice perpetuates their slavery.

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[T]he social pact ... substitutes ... a moral and lawful equality for whatever physical inequality that nature may have imposed on mankind; so that however unequal in strength and intelligence, men become equal by covenant and by right. ... Under a bad government, this equality is only an appearance and an illusion: it serves only to keep the poor in their wretchedness and sustain the rich in their usurpation.  In truth, laws are always useful to those with possessions and harmful to those who have nothing; from which it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only when all possess something and none has too much.