A Hobbesian Rant for the Disillusioned Masses
Reading Leviathan has me thinking. Nothing new, mind you—just reinvigorated. Hobbes, bless his scowling soul, is the consummate pessimist. People, in his view, are untrustworthy sods, ready to stab you in the back at the first flicker of opportunity. He doesn’t believe in community. He believes in containment.
And to be fair, he’s not entirely wrong. He captures a certain cohort with uncanny accuracy. You know the type. Type-A™ personalities: the Donald Trumps, Elon Musks, Adolph Hitlers, Shahs of Iran, and that guy in marketing who always schedules meetings for 8am. The ones who salivate at the mere whiff of power, who’d sell their grandmothers for a press release and call it vision.
This, in short, is why we can’t have nice things.
Now, I’ll concede that most people want more than they have. Economics depends on this assumption like religion depends on guilt. But not everyone is driven by an insatiable lust for money, dominance, or legacy. That, my friends, is not ambition. It is pathology—a malignant, metastasising hunger that infects the likes of Trump, Musk, Bezos, Sunak, and their ilk. The hunger to rule, not just participate.
The trouble is, the majority of the world’s population are idiots—not technically, but metaphorically. Soft-headed. Overstimulated. Easily distracted by flags, influencers, and “free shipping.” And there are flavours of idiots. Musk is a lucky idiot. Trump is a useful idiot. Most are a hair’s breadth from being cannon fodder.
And then we wonder why everything’s broken.
The world could be configured differently. It could consist of autonomous collectives, each minding its own business, each respecting the other’s boundaries like courteous houseplants. But this equilibrium is shattered—always shattered—by the predatory few. The outliers. The sharks in suits. The ones who mistake governance for domination and diplomacy for personal branding.
So we build mechanisms to defend ourselves—laws, institutions, surveillance, standing armies—but these mechanisms inevitably attract the same types we were trying to ward off. Power-hungry cretins in different hats. The protectors, it turns out, are rarely benevolent dictators. They are predacious politicos, wearing virtue like a costume, mouthing justice while tightening the screws.
And here lies the eternal problem. Not technology. Not ideology. Not even ignorance.
But the recurring infestation of pathological ambition in a species otherwise just trying to get on with its day.
This is the challenge for all of humanity.
And we’ve yet to rise to it.
Philosophics 
What you’ve written here has made me notice this for the first time: some people admire the predators you name. Admire “ambition,” “drive,” “vision,” “determination,” however that constellation of traits is spun. And encourage others to admire that constellation of traits. And deride and denigrate their opposites. Maybe learning to stop doing that would be a decent first step …
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My challenge with Hobbes is that he broad-brushes everyone in bleak black. I read Chapter XIII last night, the one with the “life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Leading up to this and in prior chapters, he describes “man” in the terms I think of Musk, Trump, et al. A am far from rah-rah about humans, but my pessimism is centred around how mundane, dull, and bored they are. It would be overly reductionist to classify people in Alpha, Beta, Omega categories. In fact, this is a problem I have with psychology, in general. In my experience, I find most people I meet do not fit Hobbes’ description, but as I’ve noted, I am aware of some who are – a case of a few bad apples ruin the barrel.
In accord with Hobbes, the danger is real and present. The challenge is how do we construct a society that demotes rather than promotes these traits. Historically, even Biblically, we decry greed and covetous behaviour as immoral, but in the United States, who seem to have a holier-than-thou contingent with a Calvinist streak, as noted by Max Weber. It seems to be that, like a bad diet, we crave what’s not good for us. Yuval Noah Harari and others have it right: humans are predisposed to comfortable fictions. In fact, this has been the driver of many wars and much misery. Most people are relatively content with their workaday lives, going to work, getting paid, watching the telly, hanging with their mates or family. In fact, according to Chomsky, this is why societies promote families, homeownership, and the such. In creates an anchor that most people don’t want to have pulled up. Chaneling Foucault, it keeps people in check.
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There is definitely a “course of least resistance” effect in operation, as you say; I’m inclined to agree with Harari – I think Horkheimer and Adorno, at the end of Dialectics of Enlightenment, say something similar – that we don’t want to face the gap between the genuine complexity of the world and the inadequacy of what we know about the world. I think Karl Barth (kind of a Calvinist) was the one who said most people’s biggest sin is sloth.
Having said all that, however … you might be interested in that book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. by David Graeber and David Wengrow (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021) – they argue that things don’t have to be this authoritarian way, and weren’t, for basically millennia … [which raises the question – why can’t we do something about the mess we’ve gotten ourselves into at this point?]
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Yes. I read the Dawn of everything when it came out. I followed Graeber closely. Sad to have him leave this place so soon. Although not in the vein, the Debt: The First 5,000 Years, is a worthwhile read, as is his concept of Bullshit Jobs.
Josephine Quinn’s How the World Made the West is not philosophical, but it does provide a different vantage for how histories are constructed.
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Agreed, about the sadness – I had read The Utopia of Rules, and really liked it, which made me that much more interested in reading The Dawn of Everything. So now I suppose I’ll need to check out Debt. And Quinn, which looks fascinating. Thanks for that!
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The social unconscious is the antidote to the sharks in suits but how you awaken people to it is the puzzle. Do you have a preferred method?
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The answer lies in cognitive sciences, but I don’t have it. I think that people are inherently drawn to fictions protected by cognitive dissonance mechanisms. Humans are predisposed to believer what they is “true” and will even engage escalating commitment when confronted. I feel that rhetoric arbitrates truth, but rhetoric operates differently on different people.
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I sometimes submit papers to psychology journals and they turn them down because they are “philosophical” – and sometimes I submit papers to philosophy journals and they turn them down because they are “psychological”. This appears to me to be buck passing
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My two cents: If journal X turns a submission down with a claim that it’s too journal Y category, you might try to tailor it to their preferred style even if you lose a bit. You might also rend the offending material in footnotes or endnotes to obscure the content without losing content.
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I was not looking for advice as to what to do when journals reject a paper – the comment was a response to your answer to my question “do you have a preferred answer to how to awaken people to the social unconscious” – I thought your answer to that was avoiding the question by deferring to the cognitive sciences.
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