Hobbes vs Rousseau: are we inherently evil or good? » IAI TV
The answer depends on what you think of politics.
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"Hobbes saw societies divided by war and offered a road to peace. Rousseau saw societies divided by inequality and prophesied their downfall."
As with truth everywhere, in my opinion, the closer you get to it the more you encounter paradox. Both views, in my opinion, are correct based on the assumption they make, but ones I have problems with. We can have peace if we are willing to submit to authoritarian rule willing to impose inequality in result, or downfall owing to inequality. These are essentially the same at root.
The problem, as I see it then, is that authoritarianism leads to the ant kingdom for man, where we can survive as ants, or undertake to change a system predicted to be unable to be changed once it is established and rooted due to human nature at core being selfish.
What both observers fail to note in my opinion, is that this striving for social position that is as strong as the survival instinct as Hobbes claims is not founded in our human nature but in the fact that our use of language makes us susceptible to it. That competitive instinct is activated by having our natural sense of self respect destroyed by being put down as children and the development of an ego to replace it based on social achievement according to norms we are inculcated to worship as alternatives.
We are stuck with the system we have only to the extent we believe in the lie there is something evil about out nature. All that is needed to undo that lie is to remember how we came by it. But that will hurt. Perhaps the end of all the potential we humans have should just go extinct and there should not be anymore beautiful children born in the world.
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