By Stephen L. Hall
There was a comment a few days ago on twitter, in response to a fellow commenter on this blog, this time Woot, which started me thinking about the sheer lack of comprehension from the modernly educated youth our nation appears to be producing in distressingly high numbers.
It was not the lack of thought or the failure of understanding or the unwillingness to consider alternatives which was disturbing this time, but rather the absolutist nature of the thought process of the individual commenting.
Leftists constantly deride their political opposition as always seeing the world in stark terms of black and white, right and wrong, without seeing the gray areas and nuances in between, of a complexity of moral ambiguity which allows those leftists to excuse any and all deviances, perversion, and general flakiness.
However, politically the left is often vastly more absolutist and hard-lined than they pretend to be, and in certain comments it comes out in glaringly stark terms.
This particular tweet featured a number of prominent people in history who were quoted as supporting the proposition of anarchy, and equating such anarchy with true liberty in contrast to the absolute power of the state. And that perspective is key to understanding the liberal ideal of reality.
@WootpoolTheMad @InsanityIsFree @SecretService I doubt you regret involving the Feds, but if you do… this is my belief… if you are willing to read and learn instead of squealing. pic.twitter.com/oiDTJ52yHI
— Skip_Gab_ai (@thefreerifleman) May 18, 2017
The expressed idea being that society will inevitably be either a totalitarian state or it will be free of any and all rules. Society is an all or nothing proposition of either an absolute dictatorship or chaotic wilderness. Any society not one of these extremes will invariably move to become one or the other.
Either you are fascist or free, police state or anarchist, conservative or liberal, the political world is simple, it is black and white. The fact that the tweeter posted the quotes of historical figures to back up his point, and his conclusion that anarchy is the only solution to tyranny, does show that this simplistic notion has a long standing historical precedent.
It was this idea which formed the basis of Thomas Hobbes’s support of the absolute power of the state, taking the contrary view of this tweeter in his tome, Leviathan.
For those unfamiliar, Leviathan is an obscure biblical reference from the book of Job, which refers to a gigantic beast, the largest in the world which lives in the oceans, the Leviathan, while the largest beast on land was the Behemoth.
Thomas Hobbes asserts that a state or a nation was analogous to the great beast in its immense incomprehensible size, wherein the people of that nation are like the cells of the body, different industries and institutions are like the tissues, and that it is through acting together that they form the body of the state.
He compares this to “the natural state of warre (sic)” of man against man which exists without government, where chaos and brutality rein, robbery, mayhem, rape, murder, and pillage are the everyday nature of the barbarism without the state. Thus, the power of the state, he argues, is the force which protects man from lawless anarchy; ergo the authority of the state is naturally without limit.
These views do not differ in perspective, merely in which side of the same coin the individual wishes to call in the political coin toss of their lives. They agree about the nature of reality, merely differing on which team they are cheering. They are all wrong.
The truth is that in such times as man lived before the creation of government, it was not the anything goes chaos envisioned by Hobbes, not the utopian dream scape imagined by Tolstoy. Once civilization was created, even in the most absolutist of tyrannies, it has never been, and could never be, the orderly perfect society of which socialists fantasize; nor could it descend into the dystopian nightmares of science fiction.
In both extremes, reality prevents any habitat of only predators or only prey. As anti-hunting schemes repeatedly show, the docile herd animals breed themselves into beyond their food supply without predators; and logic reasons that predators without prey quickly die of starvation as well.
The political extremes these fear mongers sell to their acolytes to motivate the hordes of useful idiots, could never happen because such a result is simply unsustainable. One needs only see the horrors of the past and present for any rational mind to see that it doesn’t work. Venezuela shows the totalitarian nation starving; Haiti shows the lawless nation starving.
Americans are very familiar with the second line of the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” (We will ignore for present that people tend to completely ignore the first sentence, or that glaring absence of the Oxford comma in the second sentence.)
It is the third sentence which I think merits our attention with regards to the mentality of the tweet discussed afore, “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, . . . laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” (Yes, I skipped over language not relevant to the present discussion but certainly not unimportant in the context of the document.)
It is in this sentence that the founding fathers expressed what we would not call a “mission statement” for their revolution, which would later be embodied in their Constitution and concepts of limited government. The sentence is not so much of weight of law, but clarity of philosophy with regards to the nature of a limited government.
Recognize the collective will of people in forming governments to avoid anarchy, while limiting their powers and forms to effect the “safety and happiness” of the people. It is not a midway point, a compromise of those extremist views naively expressed above, but a different conceit of the purpose of government altogether.
Society is simply a machine, and like any machine it is built to a purpose of improving man’s life. The State is not a beast unto itself, a Leviathan, independent of man with a will of its own, nor is it a divine gift bringing utopia to that beast which is man. It is a creation of man, a machine to more easily allow man to accomplish certain tasks.
If one were to analogize society, as Thomas Hobbes did, it would be more akin to a car than a beast, serving a purpose, but designed and build for that purpose by man himself. The economy is the motor, the body would be arts and entertainment, and the controls would be the government.
