The 18th Century Was Born Free, Dude!

The 18th Century Was Born Free, Dude! 

"You got to wake up, man. It's the system, dude. The people should shape their government and should rage against it when it's unfair." 

This is the outlook of the 18th century, an age of anger, the era of the son, the younger man. In direct opposition to the uniform conformity of the denial era, the anger stage is one of division. The son rebels against the father. The 18th century tried to do the opposite of the 17th century out of spite. The 17th century was fantastical. The 18th century was gritty and realistic. The 17th century believed in the traditional world and its premodern values. The 18th century wanted people to "wake up".  The 17th century wanted to maintain the status quo, and the 18th century wanted revolution. But keep in mind, the outlooks presented in this series are not strictly generational. There were indeed people from the 18th century that think like people from the 17th century and people from the 17th century that though like people from the 18th century. They are just far less common. 

I believe this 18th century mindset, the teenage boy way of thinking, the anger worldview, is present in almost anything concerning the political. Shock does things without thought. Denial goes along with the status quo. Bargaining opts for escapism. Depression gives up. Testing acts out of necessity. Acceptance and Peace have accepted and made peace with things. And Death and Rebirth obviously got rid of things and want to replace it with something else  So Anger is the only mindset that is truly a political mindset. It is intentional action, not mindless action (shock) nor shying away from action entirely (depression) but action with a purpose. 

What's interesting is that even opposing political views can both be expressions of the anger mindset. Both the manosphere and feminism are the same mindset just expressed by different demographics. They are both driven by resentment and a desire for change. They both make calls for action and view people who aren't invested in their cause as either fools or traitors. Again, I feel I am proposing yet another hot take here by suggesting that feminism is masculine coded rather than feminine coded, but it actually makes perfect sense. The son rebels against the father. And I'll note here that while people use the term patriarchy to mean "rule by men", its technical definition is "rule by fathers". So, the 18th century seeing the beginning of feminism actually checks out as the son era fights the patriarchy. People seem to view the 2010s as peak feminism, but in reality, that is when it became the most unpopular, as it was seen as beating a dead horse by that point. The 18th century was the era that saw feminism emerge and get a following. It had Mary Wollstonecraft, Olympe de Gouges, and Abigail Adams letter to John Adams. 

"Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation." 

And as I mentioned in previous posts, the former son era would have been the 8th century, which was when non-elite women worked in agriculture (e.g., harvesting, dairying, brewing, spinning/weaving), managed households, and raised children alongside men and where Burgundian or Visigothic codes allowed widows or unmarried women property rights or management of land when husbands were absent. 

In addition to gender war stuff, the 18th century also got real with race. The 18th century saw the peak of the transatlantic slave trade and plantation slavery in the Americas, alongside emerging critiques of slavery rooted in Enlightenment ideas of natural rights, equality, and human dignity. Enslaved people resisted constantly through flight (marronage), sabotage, and revolts. The 18th century saw large-scale uprisings, often led by African-born individuals drawing on military experience from regions like the Gold Coast (Akan/Coromantee). Rebellions exposed slavery's instability and sometimes prompted repressive laws or, indirectly, reform debates. It was the era of the Haitain Revolution, the only successful slave revolt founding a nation with Haiti. It terrified slaveholders everywhere and accelerated abolition debates. Rebellions in North America (e.g., Stono 1739, Gabriel's 1800) were smaller but part of the pattern.

While the culture was unified in the 17th century, it became much more divisive in the 18th century. The premodern, traditional worldview is a clear ideal to work towards. But waking up from that worldview can send people in very different directions. The biggest cope of this era is the delusion of populism. People thinking they can just change the world by getting a megaphone and shouting the truth at people. Even if you successfully wake everyone up, even if you enlighten everyone, who's to say they'll even share your values or have an interest that aligns with your own? They very well could be opposed to you. You could be creating new enemies, and that's assuming that the people actually care or that they even have the power to do anything about the situation at all.

Everyone likes to think they are the chosen one, that they're the Founding Fathers, and that they're going to get everyone to fight against the Crown and be the hero. But this is the egotistical delusion of a teenage boy. I previously mentioned the covering up of the 17th century denial era, but there is another form of covering things up in the 18th century anger era as well, being covered with rage. 

And no one likes to feel powerless. Social contract theory argues that individuals consent, either explicitly or implicitly, to surrender some freedoms and submit to authority in exchange for protection of their remaining rights and maintenance of social order. Government legitimacy is derived from the people's agreement, not divine right. But who's to say which person wants the consent and which ones don't? 

Around the time of the pandemic, many people were enraged and believed they did not consent to the authority of locking themselves up to stop a disease, but if that didn't wake people up, neither will posting quotes from the Founding Fathers or angsty memes on Facebook. The Social Contract theory seemed to have forgot that most people will not be on the same page as you, sometimes not even in the same habitat. What one considers not consensual or not an agreement to the social contract and feel they need to break it, someone else finds it completely consensual and view this authority as a good thing. There are people now who already have nostalgia for the 2020 pandemic lockdown era. What one person views as oppressive and dystopian, another regards as cozy and evoking good memories.

One person sees a 1% risk as a catastrophe; another sees it as a Tuesday. If we can't agree on the level of danger, we can't agree on the price of protection. When we lack a "common square," the "General Will" (as Rousseau called it) becomes impossible to find. We end up with two or more separate "contracts" operating in the same country. The fact that many people miss 2020 suggests that for a segment of the population, the "normal" social contract (commutes, office culture) is actually *more* oppressive than a lockdown.

The biggest "naivety" of the theory is the idea of Tacit Consent. John Locke argued that just by walking on the highways of a country, you implicitly agree to its laws. The pandemic proved that "walking on the highway" is not the same as agreeing to be confined to your house. When the state exerts power in ways that weren't "in the brochure," the illusion of the contract fades, leaving only the reality of state power versus individual will.

Not only that, but anger is rather easy to control and manipulate. You can be made into doing things against your own interest, like a bull fighter waving a red flag in front of a bull, except you are the bull. The volatile reactivity of anger can make it easy for others to steer you in whatever direction they want by deliberately provoking you. Your anger, their agenda, guided around by the dangling carrot of outrage.  I know I'm particularly harsh here, but I used to heavily identify with those Enligthenment thinkers and Founding Fathers, so I get it. The world pisses me off, too. But aimlessly lashing out and rage quitting when things don't go your way achieves nothing. 

That all said, there was an age of revolution in the 18th century. The 18th century was the first of the youthful centuries alongside the 19th and 20th centuries, and youthful rebellion is a common trope of the era. usually a son rebelling against the father, but it doesn't necessarily have to be that literal. It could be a son rebelling against his mother, or a daughter rebelling against her father. The more important aspect for this theme is the young rebelling against the old. Typically though, it does revolve around some tension between son and father. Sometimes, however, the tale is even more straightforward and just about the son defeating his father. 

Things get a lot more complicated in the following stages. But this is the thing about being enlightened. Candide goes on a series of horrific and absurd misfortunes such as war, disease, natural disasters, and religious persecution that challenge his tutor Pangloss's optimistic worldview, but in the actual 18th century.but most people don't go all the way. I mentioned the 17th century was surface level, and if that's the case, the 18th century was merely shallow. The people who think of themselves as enlightened and in the know of how the world really works are often just scratching the surface, just dipping their toes in the water. I know I've been pretty harsh towards this era, and that's because people of this mindset can be quite annoying. They seek things out just to dismiss them. They can't leave well enough alone, but they are also unwilling to engage seriously with the material. These are the people who would go up to someone minding their own business just to tell the person how wrong they are and how wrong their lifestyle is, unironically believing they're brilliant for doing so. Seriously irritating people. 

But despite the negatives of this teenage boy mindset, the snarky attitude that has to criticize everything all the time, there are indeed positives as well. The curiosity and willingness to enter the door of the unknown is admirable, even if they tend to just immediately slam the door and pretend they didn't see anything. And the aggression and determination associated with this phase is invaluable, even if it is often misdirected. Every phase has its pros and cons. I'm not here to tell you that you should give up and never attempt to change the world. I'm not here to tell you that you should never be angry and that you should just be stoic like a monk or something. Although that does seem like where society in general might head. 

If the 22nd century is the acceptance stage, the crone era that I predict that it will be, then that'll be the exact opposite of the 18th century. While the 18th century was the beginning of the youthful era, which continued through the 19th and 20th centuries, the 22nd century may be the start of a more elderly era, much like the 13th, 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries, an era of greater wisdom and maturity at the cost of the carefree and hopeful attitude of youth. 

But even if the 18th century was rife with naive optimism and misguided, incomplete views of realism, I think the perspective of this angry son is something we should always keep in mind. The desire to look through the keyhole, the will to fight, and the yearning for a better tomorrow are all things that I appreciate about this utlook. Action with intention. As people will seem to be entering an age of inaction and without intention, those who will remain angry will seem rather perplexing.