Leviathan and Utopia

Leviathan is the title of a book written in 1651 by the Englishman Thomas Hobbes during the English Civil War and the Thirty Years War, in which Hobbes argued that in the absence of a powerful sovereign the life of the average person was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short". 

In this essay, senior contributing editor Prego de Nada challenges the conventional wisdom which says that, because of the enormous power Leviathan can wield, he can be enlisted to do much more than merely protecting the citizens and that the exercise of this power provides a means to create an ideal world.

Transcript

Leviathan

 Good day to you, and welcome to Fascinating!  I am your host Rik, from Planet Vulcan.  My ongoing mission on Planet Earth:  to plant seeds of a way of thinking, a way that is based on an understanding of evolutionary processes, with the ultimate aim of helping to sustain and increase the momentum of Earth’s long arc towards prosperous and happy societies, founded on ideals of liberty and justice.

 Senior contributing editor Prego de Nada has submitted an essay which explores the lasting influence of Leviathan.

 Prego writes:

 “Leviathan” is the title of a book written by the Englishman Thomas Hobbes in 1651 during a protracted state of warfare in the British Isles between Parliament and the King, the English Civil War.  Oliver Cromwell led the Parliamentarian forces, and in 1649 they brought to trial, and then executed by beheading, the reigning monarch, Charles I.  

 Continental Europe from 1618 to 1648 was wracked by what we now call the Thirty Years War.  England had little direct involvement, so Hobbes was not as strongly affected by this war as he was the English Civil War; however, he did know of it, and the same endemic fighting and total breakdown of social order that happened during this war also happened during the English Civil War.

 Hobbes himself during this war was walking a tightrope, because even though he cast his support with the royalists, even going so far as to stay with them during their exile in Paris, many of his radical ideas conflicted with those of other royalists.  For example, he rejected the idea of the divine right of kings in favor of a social contract.  And of course, the parliamentarians considered him an enemy because of his support for their enemies.

 Hobbes famously described the lot of the average person existing in a society without a powerful sovereign to keep order as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.

 He argued that without an institution that was capable of wielding overwhelming force against those who initiate violence, i.e., protecting citizens from all enemies foreign and domestic, things were naturally inclined to devolve into the sort of chaos he had witnessed both in his home country and on the continent.

 The idea of Leviathan caught on and has provided a model for the fundamental mission of the modern state, which is to protect its citizens.

 The scope of Leviathan’s duties has since the time of Hobbes been expanded.  Many people now believe that Leviathan, since he has enormous power, can be enlisted to use that power to promote many more causes besides maintaining order and protecting the citizenry.

 But Leviathan can’t do just anything; he can do his basic job of being a supreme force in defense of liberty and justice, but if you say “look at this guy, he makes offers no one can refuse – let’s put him to work on other things too”, then you are creating a monster, and to mix a metaphor, I believe we should nip this idea in the bud.

 The belief that Leviathan can be enlisted as a general-purpose fixer al la deus ex machina betrays the belief held by the advocates of intervention that the ability to coerce is an indispensable, or at least the most effective, means of advancing collective goals.

 To give Leviathan the additional assignment of trying to run the economy, for example, you first have to make him even bigger, and capable of exerting even more coercion.  And once you have created this monster, you cannot guarantee that people with good intentions will always control him.

 And that doesn’t even count the fact that even the people with good intentions, even while believing that they are doing good, are in truth often throwing monkey wrenches into the works, with a hugely inadequate conception of the complexity they are taking on, and with no true understanding of how an economic system functions; and who believe that they can make sweeping changes without disturbing things, that they can destroy evolved feedback loops, and that everything else will continue as before.

 Let’s take a look at a recent example of someone who is telling us that Leviathan is the ultimate fixer.

 The Dutch journalist Rutger Bregman has written several books recently, the most recent of which is “Moral Ambition”.  This is the third book he has written, the first titled “Utopia for Realists” and the second titled “Humankind: A Hopeful History”.

 Bregman appeared recently on Sam Harris’ Making Sense podcast, and he also gave a Ted Talk in 2017 on the subject of poverty.  He was a recent guest on Bill Maher’s program, Real Time.

 I find much to admire in Bregman’s work, particularly his optimistic vision of human nature and of the possibility of an exciting future for humanity.  And he is clearly motivated by a spirit of kindness.

 But he believes that the best and the brightest ought to be pursuing careers, as he characterizes it, in which they can do good rather than pursuing careers where they earn lots of money.  He is making the classic mistake of assuming that doing good and making money are at odds.  

 But any time spent thinking skeptically of this notion leads to a conclusion that the reason you are making money is that you are doing good.  You are involved in the production of goods and services that benefit everyone, and the income flowing in your direction is a measure of how much value you are creating.

 Bregman believes that humanity’s future is necessarily in the hands of Leviathan, for better or for worse.  He, along with so many others in our day, takes this proposition for granted, to the extent that it doesn’t even occur to him that there might be any other path to follow, let alone a better one.  This is a classic example of what we call “conventional wisdom”.

 My fond hope is, first of all, that the well-intentioned De heer Bregman will eventually come to realize that Leviathan is not up to the task he wants to assign.  Leviathan is well-suited for his basic job of meeting force with more force.  But to think that we can employ the coercion Leviathan is capable of to “make it so” when it comes to creating ideal social structures, it just illustrates that we are failing to recognize the lessons of history about the limitations on the effectiveness of coercion, and it betrays that we believe, deep down, that force is a more effective way to deal with one another than is persuasion.

 The second realization I hope he will come to would be that a deep understanding of the way of nature will serve as a guide to humanity’s way forward.  

 And the way forward to wherever the process will take us, which we will not know in detail before it unfolds, is to cultivate, and not try to dominate, the evolving complex dynamical system within which we all live and move and have our being for our brief individual lifetimes, a system which is best understood as a superorganism with a life of its own, and which will survive our individual deaths and continue to go its way with new people constituting its cells, et cetera ad infinitum.

 With this understanding, i.e., that the attempt to dominate nature is both futile and damaging, we come to realize that the plans we have and the things we want Leviathan to achieve by domination must be abandoned if we truly wish to make things better.

 Bregman proposes for example, as a means of achieving a feasible Utopia, a universal basic income and 15-hour workweek, in his book Utopia for Realists.  The subtitle of the book is, and I’m not making this up, “How We Can Build the Ideal World”.

 We’ll just give the job to Leviathan.  What could go wrong, other than everything?

 A contemplation of the evolutionary processes evident in what we refer to as the natural world, as if we humans were somehow separate and apart, leads us to the conclusion that our proper focus is not the building of social structures, but the cultivation of social processes.

 Social processes take place, and always will take place, as a simple consequence of the fact that we humans exist, and that nature has sculpted us as social creatures.  

 And by “cultivation” I mean just that.  Some will take a leap from the ideal of intelligently designed structures to the ideal of intelligently designed processes.

 But this would just be a repeat of the same error that has led us to believe that we can build ideal structures.

 We need to never forget, and always keep in mind, that order emerges in complex systems from the behavior of the individual components of the systems.  In the case of human social system, the individual human beings, each with the capability of making decisions and choices, are the cells that comprise the superorganism.

 It is far outside the realm of possibility that we can ever achieve a workable and sustainable system by mandating individual behavior.  The complexity of the system is orders of magnitude greater than you think it is if you believe we can.

 A workable and sustainable system, however, emerges spontaneously when individuals behave by observing simple sets of rules.  For example, the flow of automobile traffic is organized by the drivers’ observance of right-of-way, right-of-way which is defined by a set of simple rules.

 In the same way, the flow of production and commerce is organized by the market participants’ general observance of property rights and the sanctity of the contract.

 Now let’s give De heer Bregman some credit where he is due.  

 He advocates for moving in the direction of open borders – he claims that fully open borders everywhere would lead to a doubling of world-wide GDP; and he says that his argument is “evidence-based”.

 His source for this claim was a 2011 paper authored by economist Michael Clemens, who argued for a phenomenon called a “place premium”.  A place premium is the extra earnings a worker can earn in a country with an advanced economy vs what the same worker can earn in a country with a less developed economy.

 However, I think we should point out that it’s not the geographical location per se that is determinative.  What he is calling a “place premium” is in fact due primarily to the existence of more physical capital inputs, and also to institutions that are more hospitable to the conduct of production and commerce in the advanced economy.  

 You could more plausibly argue that the worker in the less developed economy needs more capital investment in his own country, and a less oppressive and kleptocratic government.  And the additional capital investment would be necessary in any case, wherever the worker is working.

 Don’t get me wrong:  I believe in the opening of borders as a means of cultivating a more prosperous world.  And let us not forget that the natural state of the planet is no borders at all.  If you are in an airplane or a spacecraft looking down at the planet, you do not see the lines that we draw on maps.  So we ought not to be thinking of controlled borders as the default, and we should think very carefully about the purpose of national borders.

 Less admirably, Bregman advocates a universal basic income and a 15-hour workweek, with both policies to be imposed by mandate.

 Bregman supports his advocacy of the universal basic income by pointing to small-scale experiments which have been conducted in Canada and the U.S.  He says the data show that giving people cash, as opposed to providing specific benefits, improves health, education and productivity.

 If this argument strikes you as odd, it should.  If we want to understand incentive effects, we ought to be comparing getting the cash vs. not getting anything, not comparing getting cash benefits vs in-kind benefits.

 Economists have been saying this point for decades, arguing that utility theory predicts that people will perceive more value in cash benefits than in in-kind benefits.  And pointing out further that the reason for the persistence of in-kind benefits is its support from those who are making a comfortable living in the welfare industrial complex.

 He argues that poverty is not caused by laziness, but by a lack of money.  The laziness part is a straw man argument, and the lack of money part is a tautology.  

 And he says that our belief that someone must produce in order to “deserve” income is merely an arbitrary societal norm which people can be conditioned to overcome.

 We argued in a previous podcast that, far from being an arbitrary norm, the connection between production and income is dictated by reality, because production IS income – they are identical and cannot be decoupled.

 A mature and thoughtful adult realizes that if they are getting something for nothing, then somebody somewhere is inevitably getting nothing for something.  We have a name for those who are getting nothing for something – “slaves”.  If you believe that slavery is immoral, you cannot support a policy that institutes slavery, even if the slavery is part-time, and no matter who benefits.

 So it is far from a mere “societal norm” to connect income to production.  The two can never be disconnected, because they are the same thing.

 And there is more to the discussion than has been mentioned so far.  Since none of us is born with the ability to perform skilled work, we have to learn it; and the way we learn it is by working.  We have to learn it in order to be able to produce actual value that is seen as such in the marketplace – or we can’t pay rent and buy groceries.  Where are the trained workers going to come from without the learning and the incentive to learn?

 And why a 15-hour workweek?

 This stems from a prediction made in 1930 by John Maynard Keynes, in an article titled “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”, in which he claimed that technology and capital accumulation would eventually reduce the hours spent working.

 A famous quote from the article: “Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem - how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure… to live wisely and agreeably and well.”

 Lord Keynes evidently believed that the lower classes in his highly class-conscious society would “keep their place”, continue to live their lives as before, and use their additional income to work less and enjoy more leisure.  It never seems to have dawned on him that these lower-class people would use their additional income to live their lives differently, and to strive for more than “basic needs”.

 The modern definition of scarcity is the difference between the stuff everyone collectively wants and the amount of stuff there is to go around.  Keynes was working from a somewhat different definition of scarcity, as the difference between what is necessary to meet “basic needs” and the amount of stuff there is.

 Under Keynes’ definition, scarcity can be eliminated, or as he put it, “the economic problem can be solved”.  Of course, if his working definition of scarcity was overly simplistic as a description of how people naturally behave, then under the more modern definition of scarcity we must acknowledge that the “economic problem” is unlikely ever to be solved.  We cannot realistically expect the end of scarcity.

 Building on Keynes’ flawed premise, Bregman points to such things as the way that productivity gains have been larger than the reductions in work time.  This evidence is meant to support his contention that we ought to mandate the 15-hour workweek.

 He also points to surveys where people answer questions about how they view their own jobs.  If a job is unfulfilling or “unnecessary”, whatever that might mean, then it gets classified as a “bullshit job”.  This evidence is meant to support his contention that “society” should somehow prioritize jobs that accomplish good instead of jobs that pay well; a false dichotomy as we demonstrated above.

 And his arguments reveal a failure to understand the level of complexity he is proposing to take on, and thus his lack of the appropriate level of humility he ought to be displaying when proposing these solutions, which he claims will most certainly produce good outcomes.  He needs to pay more attention to thinkers such as Richard Feynman, profiled in a previous podcast essay, and who emphasized the importance of approaching complexity with humility.

 Bregman at least acknowledges that implementing the proposals that lead to an ideal world will “not be easy”.  

 I suppose “impossible” might conceivably fall under a broad definition of “not easy”.

 Thanks to Prego for this essay:

 I would like to suggest an explicit takeaway from this essay for all Earthlings.  And the takeaway is:  the seductive belief that directed collective action in the service of good intentions will allow Earthlings to create an ideal world is the worst sort of folly.  

 Such schemes, for a reason that is becoming ever more clearly and widely understood, always have led and always will lead to far more social harm than social benefit, even when intentions are good.

 And the reason I’m referring to is that the future evolves; it is not something that is constructed.  Attempts to construct an ideal future merely screw up the energy flows that might otherwise be cultivated in such a way that they lead to a future that is brighter than the present, even if Utopia will continue to be a receding dream.

 The perfect is the enemy of the good, as the saying goes.

 I invite you to have a listen to the next Fascinating! podcast and a look at the next video on our YouTube channel.  You can find access to all podcasts and videos on our web page, fascinatingpodcast.com.

 Please recommend Fascinating! to your friends if you find the lessons from nature in these essays personally valuable.

 Theme music:  Helium, with thanks to TrackTribe.

 Live long and prosper.

 Practice the art of winning without defeating anyone.

 Savor your experiences.

 Treasure your memories.

 Anticipate a happy and rewarding future.

 And respect nature’s wisdom.