March 18 - 9 of Cups

The nine of chalices, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778. Eyes with flames surround the beams shining from a circle inscribed with the title: The Social Contract (1762) Inscribed on the beams are his other writings: Confessions (1782) Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750) Discourse on Inequality (1755) and Reveries of a Solitary Walker (1782). On a second disc surrounded by red flames the quote is inscribed: "Man was born free and he is everywhere in chains. One man thinks of himself the master of other but remains more of a slave than they." Below this is a portrait of Rousseau above an upside-down crown. Additional captions are on circles radiating out from the center of the card: "religious indifferentist" and "spiritual origin of the soul and universe."

Attainment and contentment.

Rousseau's ideas seem kind of basic today but in the context of monarchy and generalized "because God said so" justifications making right, the idea that political power required the general consent of the people, and that no religion was necessarily more or less correct was disruptive enough that he was charged with blasphemy a few times. These ideas form the basis of the collective networking and autonomy that are to me the positive side of technological development.

Though, the Enlightenment/rationalism/empiricism always brings to mind the observation by Adorno in the introduction to the Dialectic of Enlightenment... many felt just shortly before that communism was empirically inevitable, and yet it didn't happen. Do you sit there continuing to insist it's inevitable, or do you try and figure out why it didn't happen? Sometimes it's possible to be a little too contented.