CONCEPT
Amour-Propre
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s name for the comparative, positional self-regard that arises when human beings begin to live in one another’s presence and compete for esteem—a purely relational passion, incapable of
satisfaction, that he identified as the engine of nearly all social misery and that AI platforms have learned to exploit at industrial scale.
Rousseau drew a distinction between two kinds of self-love that may be the most psychologically acute thing he ever wrote. Amour de soi is the natural instinct of self-preservation, a primitive and innocent desire for well-being that needs only enough to thrive. Amour-propre is something altogether different and altogether more dangerous: a self-regard that arises only in society, once human beings begin to live in one another’s sight and compare. It does not want to be well; it wants to be better regarded than others. It is purely positional—its satisfaction requires not merely having but having more, not merely being esteemed but being esteemed above—and therefore impossible to satisfy, since someone can always be regarded more highly. In the Second Discourse, Rousseau traced the
emergence of amour-propre to the moment humans gathered and “each one began to look at the others and to wish