The authors of the social contract characterize human beings in the state of nature by observing the traits that people display in political society and making hypotheses about what would happen to these traits in the absence of political society , but Rousseau points out that this method ignores the possibility that the traits that people display in society are due to living with others and do not appear in a presocial existence. To prove his theses, Rousseau takes on the task of trying to imagine what human life would have been like in a pre-social form of existence. It asks what kind of life people lived before they lived and interacted with each other. Writing in the eighteenth century, Rousseau assumes that it is not possible to gather concrete evidence to answer questions about the state of nature, so he must rely on a thought experiment. He believes that we need to understand what traits emerge from life and interaction with others, subtract those traits, and imagine what human life would have been like without those absent traits. According to Rousseau, before the onset of social interaction, humans were happy savages. They lacked language and had no moral notions. He believed that humans were conscious and still had experiences but were not self-aware or aware of themselves as a member of a group of people. Human beings in this state of nature are driven only by simple desires such as food, shelter, warmth, sleep, and so on. With the lack of self-awareness, man in the state of nature lacks a prerequisite for having morality. Once you achieve self-awareness, you want to be a person of a certain type, who wants some things and not others. With this self-awareness comes the possibility that… in the middle of the paper lies servitude and submission to the will of others. Human desires and needs multiply, luxuries become needs and people become dependent. on who can provide them. Significantly, property inequality amplifies competitions for status and to some extent alters their character. Only some traits bring out the high regard of others and a higher status, so the individual “was soon forced to have them or to influence them. It was necessary, to his advantage, to appear different from what he actually was. Being something and appearing something became two completely different things; and from this distinction were born great ostentation, deceptive cunning, and all the vices that follow" (67). After all this Rousseau believes that the natural state is compromised and that human society is now aside in the progress of civilization.