Not unlike Taoism

Laurie Fendrich writes how she has her students read Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Letter to d'Alembert on the Theatre (1758), where he trashes education and reason, science and art, implying the pursuit of knowledge is actually motivated by vanity and ambition, which are fueled by the arts. The arts trigger a host of artificial desires and many of us are made worse by theater precisely because we're introduced to bad ideas we'd never thought of before. "The continual emotion that is felt in the theater excites us, enervates us, enfeebles us, and makes us less able to resist our passions. And the sterile interest taken in virtue serves only to satisfy our vanity without obliging us to practice it." Rousseau thinks they cause people to become restless and unhappy with their own lives because they make their lives seem, by comparison, boring. He also argues that nature gave women a weapon to protect themselves from more powerful males: modesty,

the means by which women fend off undesirable males and encourage only the ones they regard as potential mates. And once the appropriate male has been snared, Rousseau says, women employ another tool to keep their otherwise hit-and-run mates around for the long haul: love. "Love is the realm of women. It is they who necessarily give the law in it, because, according to the order of nature, resistance belongs to them, and men can conquer this resistance only at the expense of their liberty." ... He says that going to the theater destroys female modesty and replaces it with vanity (I always bring up the irrepressible female longing for a new dress for a party). When female modesty declines, Rousseau argues, men stop loving women because they no longer trust them. Who else, the husband asks himself, is my wife preening for? Such distrust, Rousseau says, in the end obliterates love.