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MORE: " The most notable exponent of this was the man who almost invented socialism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He declared, “I am the friend of all mankind”, but treated his wife and children with revolting heartlessness: he ordered her to send one after another of the infants she produced to institutions where two-thirds of those committed never reached their first birthday. Rousseau, who was at least honest about his own behaviour, wrote: “How could I achieve the tranquillity of mind necessary for my work, filled with the domestic cares and the noise of children?” He believed the task of improving the lot of humanity absolved him from the need to nurture his own family. Dickens, with his unerring eye, characterised this moral delusion in Bleak House in the person of Mrs Jellyby, so devoted to the cause of starving Africans that she had no time for the care of her own children: the consequent wretchedness of their plight scarcely crossed her mind. A recent, entirely non-fictional example of what we might call Rousseau-Jellybyism is the case of Arthur Miller. When the playwright died in 2005, one noted obituarist described him as “the moralist of the past American century”, while The New York Times acclaimed this man of the left’s “fierce belief in man’s responsibility to his fellow man”. Yet two years after his death it was revealed that in 1966 he had committed his newborn son Daniel, who had Down’s syndrome, to an institution — one that someone who worked there at the time described as “not a place you would want your dog to live”." http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/dominic_lawson/article6814927.ece?openComment=true

Arthur Miller’s callous behavior reminds me of how another leftist icon, John Lennon abandoned his son by his first wife. He never visited him or gave him any of his money. The boy lived in poverty in a modest neighborhood where all the kids at his school thought he must have been rich because his father was John Lennon.

The most notable exponent of this was the man who almost invented socialism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He declared, “I am the friend of all mankind”

"In general, it may be affirmed that there is no such passion in human minds, as the love of mankind, merely as such, independent of personal qualities, or services, or of relation to ourselves." - David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739