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Notes -
Thanks, Mao.
I think you’re overlooking something. Violence is uncertainty. Both about who will prevail and who expects to prevail. We have social and political rights because someone decided to stack the odds in his favor by bringing a friend.
Individual violence is nothing compared to coordinated violence. Cultivating and expending credibility such that other people are your friends and not your enemies’. Or, better yet, to extend the uncertainty in your favor, and let you bluff more strength than you might truly be able to draw. This is where @vorpa_glavo’s status games come in: does that chief command fifty spears or just ten? Will his sons move heaven and earth to avenge him, or let old insults lie?
Social bonds are the fundamental right of humanity. And thanks to the unreliability of people, they supersede any individual capacity for violence.
...I don't think I'd fully agree with this statement, but it is one of the most interesting insights I've seen here in quite some time. It crystalizes some of the serious doubts I've had about my understanding of Hobbes' argument in Leviathan: is the state of nature, the war of all against all that founds his argument, something that does or has ever actually existed? Has there ever been a moment when alliances did not exist?
I’m inclined to agree with @Southkraut and say that “all vs. all” is a figure of speech. While I don’t know where Hobbes would draw the line, I doubt he denied kinship bonds; they’re just categorically different than larger organizations. I’d put the transition around Dunbar’s number.
But then, I’m not sure I’ve fully internalized Unflattening Hobbes.
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Isn't it a war of subsets of all against subsets of all, and Hobbes was just being concise?
In that case, how can we ever be said to have escaped the state of nature? There's never been a time when there was no conflict between subsets of all either. It's entirely possible that I'm misunderstanding his theory, but the above post has me curious if this is another example of false knowledge, something we all sort of assumed was accurate because it sounded plausible.
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I most certainly do not overlook this, it's what makes the system as fair as anything else that exists.
The rest of your comment seems to think that I said violence was the best political system, but that is not my argument. How power is produced from violence is a corrupt and despicable business, but we call it politics. None of that impacts my argument that violence is the only inherent human right.
It is the only method by which the truly disadvantaged can inject some uncertainty into their otherwise certain outcomes.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I didn’t read you as claiming violence was the best political system. My point was that social games—scheming and alliances—are a more effective method for achieving goals than mere violence. They scale better, and leverage the uncertainty of violence. They also carry much less opportunity cost. I think this makes socialization, or perhaps simply speech, an inherent human right. Political power comes from the barrel of a gun, but it doesn’t have to be your gun.
This is true, but only for what I think is a vanishingly narrow definition. It is a rare outlaw indeed who can’t leverage social ties. Even if he only does so to amplify his violence, he will get more with cooperation and threats than with the acts themselves.
I think you're arguing something I'm not arguing against.
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