True Freedom at a Cost?

"Our politicians make the same sophisms about love of freedom that our philosophers have made about the state of nature; by the things they see they make judgments about very different things which they have not seen. And they attribute to men a natural inclination to servitude due to the patience with which those who are before their eyes bear their servitude, without thinking that it is the same for freedom as for innocence and virtue -- their value is felt only as long as one enjoys them oneself, and the taste for them is lost as soon as one has lost them." Rousseau. From Second Discourses p. 164.


In this portion of the Second Discourse, Rousseau discusses the role of politicians if man's true nature is to serve. He hints that governments are there to keep the people in servitude, which the people obey and serve, on the basis that the government has legitimacy. He makes the claim that man does not truly know what freedom because they never really questioned what it was, and from in his view, he claims that no one actually knows what freedom is.

Rousseau’s reasoning as to why man does not know true freedom stems from being content. He claims that we are happy in our ignorance of what we are really capable of and hints that we are unwilling to discover what freedom truly is.

At first, I thought that Rousseau’s claim about how man wants to live in servitude and that it was our natural inclination seemed a little too extreme of a statement. But after reading a bit more of his Second Discourse, I tend to agree that man does not know what true freedom is because we are inclined to serve. But the major issues that arise with man exploring true freedom is that true order can lead to chaos and the fall of civilization.

Since Rousseau claims that governments are there for the people to serve and that this is limiting their freedom, he must believe that an absence of government must be a part of true freedom. With this, mankind would be free to choose every aspect of their lives. The problem with this is that it would actually be damaging to civilizations because there would be no structure or any overarching authority to keep mankind in line. And if Rousseau's claim that mankind's natural inclination is to servitude, then mankind would join together with other people to form their own types of governments or systems put in place to maintain order and survival. So basically they would just try to reform the governmental structures that they abandoned and ultimately abandon their true freedom to gain order and stability.

So from this, it seems that mankind really does want to serve to better the system of order and rule that they are under. By serving, they do give up a degree of their freedom to follow the laws of their respective systems, but they gain stability and increased chances of survival by being in a community. But do you think that I may not be accurate with my description of how mankind would act if we abandoned our governments? Would we even try to rebuild them? Or is true freedom not even worth seeking in the first place?