Up@dawn 2.0

Wednesday, April 26, 2017

The idea of a Sovereign Installment 1

People, just like everything else in the universe, have inertia, but differing from physical inertia it’s in fact a behavioral inertia. The human behavioral inertia is an explanation of why people do the things they do, someone will keep doing something unless an outside force is acted upon it. Hobbes’ views are that a person without a sovereign will do anything possible to eliminate the threats done to their personal being; stating that a person will choose the option that harms them the least no matter what outcomes it haves on other people. Whenever a situation arises that involves risking your own well being, without a sovereign, Hobbes claims, everybody will choose the option with the least amount of risk to them.
With limited resources and unlimited wants, humans are quick to battle because, Hobbes writes, the human nature is driven by physical appetites and disgusts. Without a sovereign, everybody is out for themselves and it would quickly turn into chaos. Human nature seems like it would be the best way to go about in a natural world but evidently humans would end up just killing each other until no one is left to get the last bite. With the invention of laws and social contracts we can see that human society works in some sense, but without them, Hobbes argues, we would have no flow of knowledge, or art, or infrastructure because we would be in the eternal state of fear. Fear drives our instinct of not wanting to be in the state of nature and reason helps us find the way to get out of, or avoid, the raw state of nature.

All humans have the right to self preservation and with that every human should respect the other’s right to self preservation if the other is not causing harm. Human reason gives us the ability to choose our battles and compromise to not reach war because war can be avoided and war is detrimental for both sides involved. With the creation of laws, humans can take care of more important things than mere surviving and focus on engineering, agriculture, politics, and other things that would facilitate the survival process for others in the community. Every man wants peace and with different ways to obtain it, and disagreements on how to get there, humanity is always going to have trouble getting there if we don't have a set sovereign that is sufficiently powerful but not concentrated into an elite of some sorts. Hobbes calls this the leviathan.The leviathan is the state that is ruled by the people and it is for the people, protecting them from the fears that come with the raw state of human nature. The people in one end being being protected by their own social contracts and the state protected by the leading power, the sovereign. This is the only way human society can sustain itself, Hobbes argues. With this I say that humans are not to be trusted but only with a sovereign that is trusted by the person in question.

1 comment:

  1. "sovereign that is sufficiently powerful but not concentrated into an elite of some sorts. Hobbes calls this the leviathan."-Hobbes' maximum state, and the individual(s) personifying it, seem pretty concentrated and elite - definitely not "ruled by the people" and ultimately unaccountable to them. What are the people to do in such a state, when trust has been squandered but security is imposed with an iron fist? I'll take Locke's version of the social contract. Or Rawls'.

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