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 