Blog 3: Difficulty

Kallas 1

Michel Kallas

Prof. Dania Adra

English 203 Section 43

10 October , 2015

Blog 3: Difficulty

 This picture taken on my way home from university is a usual sight for Lebanese people especially in Beirut. Construction towers and scaffoldings lay in every corner of the capital, but the bigger picture here made me feel optimistic toward the Social Contract that binds us all. Which roughly translates onto the famous saying: “No pain No gain”. In other words every individual agrees to spare part of his freedom so that the community as a whole benefits. The picture above is a clear concretization of the contract; here the work and effort of several persons (architects, workers, engineers…) are joining to create a home for all who are interested. These people sacrificed time, physical and mental effort and were constrained by working hours, thus weren’t free to act as they wished, to the advantage and benefit of the future residents of the building.

 In “The Social Contract” Jean-Jacques Rousseau advances interesting opinions about the legitimacy of Political Authorities. First he states it cannot be found in nature nor founded on force: “But the social order isn’t to be understood in terms of force; … But it doesn’t come from nature” (114). We can find his arguments acceptable and logical notably paragraph 6.  Another statement he makes cannot be argued: we obviously all realize that our rational, law binded acts differentiate us from animals and makes us a unique species among all the others.

The main idea of the text is whether we can find a state relying on a legitimate “rule of administration”. Rousseau sees the social contract as an efficient and useful method of connecting people with one another and constraining them in some ways but preserving their overall freedom. All the hard working employees of all professions will in the end benefit from one another and their effort wont go in vain. We can assimilate the community to the human body and every individual being part of it carrying different roles and functions without anyone being able to survive without the others and all of them working for the general wellbeing of the body.

The picture extends the conversation of the text no new horizons by tackling the effort-benefit relation of each ‘worker’.  An easily arguable matter that lies in the question: why should some work ‘less’ and be more rewarded? The issue here is represented in the very different vision of less or more work by each person. For example we can see in the picture an business man riding his fancy jaguar near the construction site some have the right to ask why is the one sitting in his desk all day should be living in better conditions than the workers on the site? Is the amount of effort we put in our job and the number of constraints we face always proportional to the reward we receive?

Works Cited:

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. "The Social Contract." Shifting Narratives. Ed. Zane Sinno, Lina Bioghlu-Karkanawi, Dorota Fleszar, Najla Jarkas, Emma Moughabghab, Jennifer Nish, Rima Rantisi, and Abir Ward. 1st edition. Beirut: Educart, 2015. 113-15. Print.