Rousseau opens The Social Contract with his most famous words: "Men are born free, yet they are chained everywhere." From this intriguing start, Rousseau goes on to detail the numerous ways in which civil society's "chains" hinder man's fundamental entitlement to bodily freedom. Among other things, he argues that the existence of property rights and inheritance laws is necessary to ensure cooperation between people, that taxes are inherently unfair because they take preference over effort and talent, and that religion is used by powerful people to control the masses. To prove his point, Rousseau describes several actual societies where men have no government to rule over them. In all of these cases, he says, people lose their ability to think for themselves and fall into a state of perpetual violence. They end up living as slaves under someone else's authority—their former friends or relatives—and are no longer free. So, men are born free, but they exist in civil societies which contain chains all around them. These chains can be seen in institutions such as property rights, inheritance laws, taxation, bureaucracy, and the church. With these examples before him, Rousseau concludes that men will never be free until they have formed a society based on perfect equality of condition. Men then would have equal access to the means of self-preservation and could decide for themselves how they want to order their lives.