Yeah… Rousseau, brilliant though he was, was clinically paranoid, which totally permeated his life and work. He seemed perpetually convinced of a vast, shapeless conspiracy, against folk in general and against him in particular. Anyone who spent any length of time with him at all was eventually suspected of working with “them.” He even turned against David Hume, who went to great lengths to protect him from actual persecution, because he believed he overheard him say “It’s Jean-Jacques” in his sleep.
I think the whisperers are just manifestations of Danielle’s paranoia, and Sayid hears them now because he’s been exposed to her delusions. Compare the way conspiracy theories propagate in the wild – People are exposed to the idea of a “them” (Jesuits/Masons/Illuminati/Jewish bankers/Aliens/Whatever) out there, plotting against the rest of us. From then on the impressionable person believes they can make out vague traces of these sinister forces in everything they hear.
The voices are just the wind in the leaves, but the perception has changed.
I think from this point out we can expect a lot more exposition on the contraries of the political philosphies of Locke and Rousseau, which are both concerned with human beings’ relationship to nature and society. For Locke, the natural rights of men are largely about the protection of individual rights-- when all of the individuals are allowed their natural rights, the collective benefits. Rousseau’s was similar but inverted-- that to benefit the individual, the good of the collective must be placed above all.
Danielle wiped out every individual in her collective because she considered their individuality a threat to the collective. The “sickness” she’s so concerned with is the will to dominate or conquer nature instead of returning to a sort of Edenic mentality. She destroyed her society to save it, every time she saw symptoms of the “disease,” and never considering the pathology of her own actions, or that the imposition of her standard for social order was an oppressive domination in itself.
The idea of “protective” actions causing a society to self-distruct runs through Sayid’s story, too. For Sayid and his Sunni boys, the bombing that Nadja is suspected of is the symptom of a sickness that threatens society, and they’ve got to treat the situation to protect people. For the people who planted the bomb, Saddam’s regime is the disease, and car-bombs are the solution. What is the disease here, really? Could it be a case of the “Thems”?
Anyway, one thing I’d like to know about the Island Links is how did Hurley trim the greens? What the hell?
