How did Robert Burns’s father’s hardships influence his views on society?

Robert Burns’s father, a hardworking tenant farmer, faced persistent misfortune and died bankrupt and exhausted in 1784. Witnessing his father’s struggle against these harsh circumstances profoundly shaped Burns’s worldview, fueling his development into a rebel against the rigid social order of his time.1

This experience instilled in Burns a deep-seated resentment toward systems that perpetuated suffering, leading him to become a sharp, bitter satirist of any religious or political ideology that condoned or ignored such inhumanity. His observations of his father's plight contributed to his lifelong commitment to humanitarian Deism and an instinctive belief in the potential for a more equitable social order. Consequently, his poetry frequently championed individual freedom and challenged the hypocrisy of the established institutions, such as the dominant Calvinist wing of the church in Ayrshire.12