Bill Whittle has done it again. A while ago, I posted one of his videos about the American nuclear attacks on Japan and their legitimacy. Well, he’s back with a basic, easily understandable, philosophical explanation of the two diametric visions of humanity and, most interestingly, the outcomes of their implementation.
Simply put, one view of humanity (Hobbes’s and Adam Smith’s approach) has created the greatest, richest, most intellectual, healthiest, and safest civilization to ever inhabit the earth. The other (Rousseau, the French Revolution, and its descendants: socialism and communism) created universal poverty (except for a tiny minority of plutocrats), a censored intellectual community, a population without refuge, fearful of terror from both neighbor and government, and mass suffering. The choice is obvious.
Of course I’m just a high school student and have no authority whatsoever, but I find that one of the fatal flaws of Rousseau’s argument of a noble savage is that it relies solely on speculation. Humanity was noble in the wild, but now is corrupted in society. In this situation, there is only one observable and provable point: society is corrupted. The entire premise of being noble in the wild is in no way verifiable (as that nobility expired with the development of something so fundamental as consciousness), yet the offspring of Rousseau’s philosophy continually pursues perpetual revolution to achieve this dubious state of utopian, noble savagery.
Hobbes, on the other hand, admits that humanity is corrupted in society, but contends that it was even worse in the wild, and humanity was and forever will be flawed. Instead of unachievable revolution that attempts to “restore” man to his initial greatness, the descendants of Hobbes try to limit humanity’s present imperfection with the construction (not deconstruction) of societal institutions to control people (through laws) or channel their selfishness for the greater good (through capitalism).
A view of history will confirm this, as Hobbesianism has wrought democracy (or, more accurately, republicanism) and capitalism, two ideas essential to the flourishing of the human race.
