How Equality Generates Fear

2024.03.25

Picking up from my thoughts over the last several days, I want to explain a little bit more how equality leads to fear, because I think that's an important step between natural equality and warfare. 

Fear is an ever-present condition in the state of nature because we all recognize that everyone has an equality of judgment, we all think that our interpretation of reality is the correct one (or, even if we are not necessarily convinced that ours is the correct one, every person has the most trust in their own interpretation), but we also know that everybody else believes the same thing about their own capacity to judge. And that makes them potentially a threat to us because if we have different interpretations of what is right and wrong, or who owns what, or what is the correct way to live – then others could become hostile to us even if we're not currently fighting, even if I and someone else don't have a conflict right now. Because we have this equality of capacity and ability (and especially of judgment), we know that the risk of conflict is always there. 

The way this gets resolved in an organized society that has left the state of nature is there's some kind of authority that can step in and resolve those conflicts or those potential conflicts, or even just minor disputes. For example, I used to own a house where the property line was never that well defined between my house and my neighbor’s. One day he wanted to build a fence between the two of us and I also wanted to put a fence there. We were both dog owners, so we wanted our dogs to be able to run around in an enclosed yard. Now, my neighbour and I had never had an unpleasant conversation in all the years that I lived there. Then, when he came to me and said, “I want to build a fence; what do you think?” I said, “I think that's a great idea!” He was a handy guy; his son ran a contracting company. And he said, “Hey, we can get materials for this. You're welcome to help if you want. I'm going to make this as easy and painless as possible. I don't want to put up an ugly fence that you won't like.” I said, “Yeah, that'd be great. I'd love to help out.”

But then we had to determine where our property line was. And even though we didn't have what you would call a “dispute” over it, we knew we had to get this resolved. Neither of us was excited about hiring a land surveyor to identify exactly where my property legally ended and his began. But we knew that this would be important for both of us, because eventually we were going to have to sell our houses. Obviously, neither of us didn’t want to build a large, expensive fence  and then when one of us goes to sell our house and the potential buyer’s realtor hires a land surveyor to come out and do a survey of the property and find that the fence we  thought was separating our two properties down the dividing line was actually on the property of one house or the other.

So, we had to hire a professional to come in and say, “This is where the line is.” It was a very easy “dispute” to resolve because there was this higher authority, the municipality, who recommended to us a surveyor, and that person would come in and say, “This is where the line is; just put the fence here.” So, we did. 

Now, if that higher authority wasn't there, if the municipal government wasn’t there, my neighbour and I couldn't have resolved that dispute cordially, because it would have been a contest of wills between the two of us to determine where the property line actually was and where it was supposed to be. 

I say all of that to say that this condition of equality structural. It's the fear that is endemic to the way everyone lives in the world before there's legitimate authority. That fear exists not because human nature is evil. It's because the human condition is structurally unable to appeal to higher authority. Because of that, man has to live in this chronic, generalized condition of insecurity and uncertainty. And because of that, as Hobbes says, you can't do anything that requires human cooperation because, if there's a threat to cooperative behavior, if there's no cooperative framework to appeal to, no adjudicator that can step in and say, “No, this guy's right that guy is wrong,” then every dispute, no matter how minor, can potentially turn into an open conflict.

To Hobbes, this condition, this state of nature, is objectively worse than living under a less than desirable authority figure like a tyrant. And I want to provide a little aside here, because lately I've been reading so many commentaries on Hobbes and analyses of this particular passage in the Leviathan, and I have noticed there seems to be a widespread consensus that Hobbes is essentially a moral relativist. That is to say, he doesn't believe there's any morality inside the state of nature; there's just the natural right to defend yourself and to maximize your own power so that you don't so that you can minimize the amount of insecurity and uncertainty that you suffer and the amount of fear that you have to deal with day to day.

I'm not entirely convinced that that moral relativist interpretation is correct. On my reading, Hobbes seems to believe that life in the state of nature is much worse than life outside the state of nature. He seems to suggest that even a tyrannical authority is better than no authority at all, because at least the illegitimate power of a tyrant does bring some measure of stability, it does reduce the uncertainty the individual must face in the war of all against all. It's harder to say if it makes you more secure or less secure in given extreme cases at the margins because you don't have political rights or anything like that. But living under a tyrant is at least more secure than the state of nature because you only have to worry about the tyrant oppressing you. You don't have to fear all of your fellow citizens inside the Tyranny, which is still better than the state of nature. 

So, to me, it seems like he's not an absolute moral relativist. He's maybe a soft moral relativist, because it's true he states flat out there is no right or wrong prior to the establishment of the sovereign; there are no natural rights, there are no laws inside the state of nature. The only natural right you have is self-preservation, the principle of self-preservation. He does talk about that a lot. But I wouldn't say he's an absolute moral relativist because he does seem to say in absolute terms that everyone's life is better off living outside the state of nature rather than inside of it.