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Comment by vivzkestrel | Hacker News Reader

- I have no idea what I am supposed to take from this book or what this book is about

- the OP has not put even 2 lines explaining what, where, why, how, when etc

- Anyone mind explaining what this book is about?

It's one of the fundamental texts on societal organization from a few centuries ago. It's been a few decades since I finished school, so I may misremember but IIRC:

The author believes that mankind would naturally live in a brutal state of conflict (homo homini lupus est, men are wolves to each other).

But mankind can give up their self interest and give their authority to a government/sovereign (the titular leviathan, a giant monster made of multiple people) that can rule with absolute power and guarantee an environment in which we are all better.

I cannot for the life of me imagine how this ended up on the HN front page, but it's cool.

> I cannot for the life of me imagine how this ended up on the HN front page, but it's cool.

But then again you're riffraff how could you imagine that :)

"It's one of the fundamental texts on societal organization from a few centuries ago."

No Spoilers.

One might consider it the magnum opus of Thomas Hobbes, a pioneering political thinker who had a massive influence on both conservatism and liberalism. For conservatives his arguments on human nature that conclude that we are inherently brutish and violent and cannot be allowed to rule ourselves are very attractive. He proposed an early social contract theory as a solution, which liberalists have found very attractive.

Hobbes was an intellectual on the right, which is a rather uncommon subject here. He was rather well versed in the science and scholastic methods of his time, and took pains to try and think his views through and make good arguments. This is more than you could say about, say, Rand or Mises, thinkers under the same umbrella who loathed intellectuals.

Now the right is plaguing us with crypto- and outright fascists who don't actually know anything, don't want to know anything, and especially don't want us to know anything. E.g. this recent interview with Marc Andreessen, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBVe3M2g_SA&t=56s , who, with unbridled confidence, makes the claim that original sin was invented by Freud in the 1920s and that no "great men" of history wasted time on introspection and self reflection.

I might be an enemy of the right, but Hobbes I can respect and enjoy reading.

Watching that again reminds me that this guy is so poorly educated and not learned. Sure he was an engineering student at UIUC and wrote a neato browser, but wow he does not know history or philosophy well.

But he does the grifter trick of making coy observations like that 1920s bs. And he had so much time and wealth to improve those insights!

Or, he knows but this narrative makes him feel better about his behavior.

I'm not so sure he is grifting, do you have any clips where he slips and shows himself to be knowledgeable of his society and its history?

I have a similar view of Musk, Thiel and Karp, and some others I can't be bothered to remind myself of. Perhaps the Mandelsons belong to this crowd, but I suspect the Kochs have a bit more of an intellectual slant.

It's known to take a lot of discipline to keep your mind sharp and study when your power grows and other people make your life convenient and shielded from the misery of the masses. Marcus Aurelius makes this a core issue of his Meditations, the strife needed to make true and confident measurements of oneself and not get lost in superstition. Perhaps it is an impossible ideal but the ambition is at least interesting, in contrast to whatever Andreessen and his ilk are doing to themselves.

It's a grift tactic (even the exact type of laugh when he brings up Freud), but I agree with you that he's not literally grifting, more like a white-washing.

Thanks for bringing up Meditations -- it was gifted to me three years ago. Although I roughly knew Stoicism, it was my first time reading it. It helped reaffirm my focus on OSS as a channel for personal improvement and contribution to society. With so much world chaos, probably a good time re-read it.

If that's your thing, maybe complement with Augustine's Confessions. He had a somewhat complicated relation to stoicism but was one of the most important patristic writers to make use of stoic ideas.

It's a document that details an interesting person, who takes both ethics and himself very seriously, much more seriously than is common in the contemporary occident.

"For conservatives his arguments on human nature that conclude that we are inherently brutish and violent and cannot be allowed to rule ourselves are very attractive."

I really hope you are European. What you said is true of (most) European Conservatives. If you are an American, that is the most incorrect thing I have read all week. American Conservatives are the exact opposite of what you describe.

The core of the American right wing is to reject the idea in your quote in all ways. The individual is the highest ideal in libertarian ideology. This is why the US Republicans never, ever align themselves with political parties in other countries. They have a completely different set of beliefs. And for some weird reason Europeans completely ignore this and will even react violently when it is explained to them. Its just weird...

Conservatives draw towards authoritarian or "strong" leaders reflect this idea, while its at odds with the more individualistic philosophy. There is a cognitive dissonance there.

You seem to be lumping conservatives and libertarians into the same group, but I think that's a mistake. I agree with your description as it pertains to libertarians, but conservatives tend to recognize as Christians who recognize certain deficiencies of humans and look to a higher power as a source of rule and law.

The American Right of the 80's through 00's maybe. But today's right wing seems more authoritarian than anything post-Trump. There's this weird sort of thirst for a strong-man government on the right that seems to run counter to the individual liberty arguments they tend to make. I don't get it and I wish it made sense.

Sure, the US is weird as it is a one-party state that constitutionally and supposedly is fundamentally liberalist, which has the effect that the only viable collective politics becomes fascist or fascism adjacent. Hence the insistence on historical revisionism, genocidal military campaigns and slavery-like institutions.

To the extent US politics is libertarian it is also very selectively so, it does not extend to all people and discards individualism as a universal ethos, either explicitly or by blaming its victims.

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