The Better Angels...

Where have they gone?

I read Steven Pinker’s book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, a good few years before the Covid pseudo-pandemic broke in early 2020. When I read the book, I was in broad agreement with its argument: that violence had declined and that humanity appeared to be getting more humanist. But that was then and this is now.  The title of Pinker’s book was based on a phrase used by Abraham Lincoln is his first inaugural address:

“The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely, they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

One of the reasons given by Pinker for this emergence of peace and relative harmony was the new-cast role of The Leviathan - essentially as a big, magnanimous, liberal democracy.  Given the democratic nation-state’s monopolistic role as justice provider and arms-holder it increasingly works to defuse the temptation of individuals to take up arms or use violence to make their arguments or seek retribution for perceived injustice. 

In short, people - citizens - have happily outsourced law making, justice and even the use of violence to The Leviathan.  Pinker made the argument that Thomas Hobbes, author of Leviathan in 1651, was essentially correct: strong government could defeat the natural tendency for men to kill themselves and each other.  

However, there was, of course, a statistical aberration in Pinker’s analysis of relatively recent history - and that was the 2nd World War.  This was a war that killed around 80 million - including about 60% of the global population of jews (or around 6 million men, women and children).  The leviathan of Nazi Germany wasn’t exactly an exponent of our better angels.  It also emerged as liberal democracy was, supposedly, taking hold across the West.  

Hannah Arendt in her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, discusses Hobbes’ definition of the Leviathan and reframes it, post-Holocaust, as one that accumulates and monopolises power leaving “each person powerless, deprived of his natural and human capacities. It leaves him degraded into a cog in the power accumulating machine, free to console himself with sublime thoughts about the ultimate destiny of this machine, which itself is constructed in such a way that it can devour the globe simply by following its own inherent law.”  

In the post-Cold War world it did appear, for a while, that things were getting better. But now, it’s pretty obvious, nothing was resolved. Since 2008 the Leviathan has been running amok, its central banks have been further debasing money and asset values, and the military industrial complex puppet-masters have apparently decided it’s time to wreck and build again - but, probably with more machines, AI and surveillance, and less people - the annoying ghosts in the machine.  

The globalist mantras make it clear that humanity is a problem - devouring all those hydrocarbons, making all those babies to make the problem worse. What is it, in fact, that we need to “build back better” from?  Is a war to end all wars the only salvation? Is NetZero, in fact, a call to arms?  

The New Era, the post-Covid era, has the feel of one that will either result in victory or death.  As Jeffrey Tucker argues, in this piece, what has followed from the totalitarianism of Covid response is inevitable:  

“If, for years, you have asked the question, “Where does this end?” we now have our answer, which seems inevitable in retrospect: war. We are looking at the deaths of innocents and probably this is just the beginning. The lockdowns broke not only the old moral codes and agreed-upon limits to state power. It broke the human personality and spirit the whole world over. It gave rise to a bloodlust that was barely beneath the surface.”

The resources being mustered by the warlords and power brokers are immense. But don’t assume that the leviathan is going to defeat the individual. We can argue that none of this war-mongering is done in our names. Division, putting tribe against tribe, ultimately puts people against people. Remember that the leviathan depends on full and complete control, full and complete acceptance. But, remember, governments are the deluded beasts in our midst: not us, and not ours.