2024.03.22

I'm going to talk about why Thomas Hobbs believes that the war of all against all is rooted in equality, the equality of all human beings. I'll begin by saying I think this is a difficult idea to wrap your head around in a modern Western liberal democratic state because we tend to use the word “equality” almost just to mean “things that are good.” It's a very positive concept to most. The sense we have of equality is the American constitutional sense that says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.” And all the good things about the human condition flow from that equality.

But Hobbs sees equality as ultimately the reason everyone's at war. His explanation for this is not very detailed. I don't know if he thinks it's self-evident, but he doesn't give much of an argument for it. He basically just says “This is the way it is.” But it is compelling nonetheless. What he says is that we're all essentially equal in our mental and physical capacities and the reason for that equality of mental and physical capacities is that no one is clearly dominant over all others in in both capacities.

The easiest one to explain is physical capacity. Even though we are extremely different physically and obviously unequal in many ways, nobody has a clear physical advantage over everybody else, because if any person tried to assert their physical dominance over others, we can just gang up on that person. You can get two or three allies together and overwhelm the physically superior person. You can also do this through scheming or cunning. You can you against the physically superior person. So, even though some people are seven feet tall and other people are five feet tall, in the ways that really matter, the ways that make us competitive with each other physically, we're essentially surrounded by equals all the time.

As for the me mental capacity, it is a bit more difficult to explain what he's driving at. But he has a great quote that I will give. He says, “For such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may ackowledge many others to be more witty or more eloquent or more learned, yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves for they see their own wit at hand and other men's at a distance .” What he's saying is no one's really that much smarter than everybody else. We all think we're wiser than others because we experience our own thinking very up close and personal. But it's much harder for us to understand the way other people think. And this makes us all equals because we all experience that, we all feel that way. We're equals in that we just assume our own way of seeing reality is the correct way and we know that others think that as well about their own thinking. Even though they might seem insane to us, there's this equality that we all have of assuming that our way of interpreting reality is the correct way

So, even though it seems wildly divergent because we're all basically stuck thinking this way, you don't really have a choice. You can try to understand the way others perceive the outside world or perceive your actions but you can't really know. The best you can do is strive for it, and you don't have to. You can just say other people are not wise. They might even be crazy, or they don't know what they're talking about. But because we're all in that position, we are, in an important sense, equal.

Okay. How does this lead to warfare. Well, because we're essentially stuck in this… I was going to say “society,” but it's not society because he's talking about human relationships before society actually comes to be. Before there is an established order, before there's a leviathan, before there's a community  (and it doesn't need to be “before” in the temporal sense, it could be before as in if society breaks down…) If the government can’t enforce laws, if there is no nightwatchman to phone up and resolve a dispute, there's no adjudicating power, then this is the the equality that we're all stuck in. And it's not the positive, pleasant equality of the US Declaration of Independence, it's actually a very threatening, horrible equality because  if I build a nice house and if I start farming and accumulating food to survive the winter, well, it doesn't matter if I'm the biggest or if I'm the strongest or if I'm the smartest because my peers in the state of nature can just band together and take my stuff. They can kill me, they can outsmart me, they can physically overpower me. And they also have to live with that fear.

So, because we're all equals we all live in fear all the time until some sort of outside force comes in and imposes an order on the group of peers that makes them a community.