Essay Two
AN INVITATION TO RETHINK OUR BELIEF IN CIVIL RULE
How Hobbes Led Us Astray
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In his treatise, Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes justified social contracting, in the belief that humans are exclusively self-interested and rational, thus, “they will choose to submit to a sovereign, in order to live in a civil society that is conducive to their personal interests.” This argument, which governmental authorities worldwide have since used to justify the establishment of sovereign states, has three flaws.
First, given that all people are subject to a sovereign, from the moment of birth, no individual has any choice. We either learn to manage the legal impositions to which our birth certificate subjugates us, or we suffer. Second, people, by their very nature, are not exclusively self-interested, as Hobbes believed. Indeed, as social primates, our greatest joy comes from helping others, sometimes at the risk of our own lives. And, third, Hobbes’ greatest error was his failure to recognize that humans are feeling beings, not rational ones:
Like all other sentient beings on earth, human feelings were programmed by evolution, to inspire behavior that enables our species to flourish. Thus, by doing things that feel good, every animate being serves life—not by intent, but because it wants to feel good. But civilization changed everything, for humans. Civilized people are forced to take whatever pleasure they can, in serving the state. They are not free to serve life—a fact to which our presumably rational minds remain curiously unaware. As modern humans, trying to be rational, we mistakenly categorize all the ironies, anxieties, and suffering that beset us as simply the natural pathos of life, itself. In truth, our suffering is evolution’s way of punishing us, for being true to manmade laws, instead of to ourselves.
A question arises: How did humans accept, as gospel, Hobbes’ view that institutional subjugation is necessary, when he was so mistaken about the fundamental characteristics of human behavior? People accepted it, because, when Hobbes authored Leviathan, in 1651, civilized people presumed that uncivilized humans would be as greedy, egocentric, and fearful of one another as they were of each other. But Hobbes and his compatriots were wrong—for, in fact, the behaviors of pre-civilized people could not have differed more!
In the pre-civilized world, Homo sapiens thrived for upwards of two hundred thousand years, during which they found life meaningful by obeying the “Law of Life:” To serve life, do things that feel good, and avoid activities that cause one to experience emotional pain. That law applies to the life of all animate beings. Simply by doing things that maximize their pleasure and minimize their pain, countless individuals on this planet participate in the process of life, in a way that enables myriad species to flourish.
The innate wisdom that evolution programs into each animate being has been genetically accumulating, since the first stirrings of life on earth. This inborn programming maintains the natural order among all animate beings, through feelings of pain and pleasure. The lifestyle of pre-civilized humans was governed by innate emotional programming. They experienced the pleasure of contentment, and avoided the pain of anxiety, by living in spiritual homes—homes comprised of close-knit families, each a small social group intimately bonded by the soul-felt need to love, support, and protect one another, completely.
In their spiritual homes, our distant predecessors lived in a state of contentment, because their lives were governed by their innate desire to take care of one another, and the land that sustained them. Their lives felt eternal. Though they lived in the moment, they had a deep sense that they were serving life, thus attending to the needs of countless generations to come—including yours and mine.
Humans would still be living in intimate cultures, now, had it not been for their advancing linguistic skills. Language increasingly distracted them from their natural inclinations, with abstract concerns—concerns that don’t exist in Nature. Indeed, the first of these was the question, “Will I still be safe in the future, as-yet unknown?” That question, conjured up by our languaged brains, created our obsessive need to guarantee our safety, into the distant future, an obsession that radically changed the course of human history.
Our languaged brains had become so obsessed about securing personal future needs that there came a time when we abandoned brotherhood and sisterhood, which severed our emotional connections to each other. Without realizing it, we had abandoned love. Estranged from our former interdependence with others, suddenly, each of us had to “make it” on our own.
Spiritually, we have been homeless, ever since. To manage the anxiety inherent to an existence without love, we invented legal systems, to substitute for the mutual support once provided by interdependent, familial social groups. But, when survival requires that we honor prescribed law, people are not free to honor the Law of Life! As modern people, we are deemed “good,” only when we comply with all the rules that maintain civil order, and “evil,” whenever we do not. Being guided by the abstract values of good and evil, rather than by our inborn desire to do things that make us feel good, has resulted in a radically changed human behavior, which is evident in the excerpts below:
From The Soul of the Redman, by Thomas Benton Williams:
The culture and civilization of the Whiteman are essentially material; his measure of success is, how much property have I acquired for myself? The culture of the Redman is fundamentally spiritual; his measure of success is, how much service have I rendered to my people? His mode of life, his thought, his every act is given spiritual significance, approached and colored with complete realization of the spirit world.
From Rediscovering the Wisdom of Human Nature, by Chet Shupe:
In the civilized world, success is independence. In the natural world, success was interdependence.
In the civilized world, the payoff for success is material wealth. In the natural world, the payoff for success was spiritual wealth—which is love.
In the civilized world, greed is necessary for any sense of wellbeing, at all. In the natural world, greed could not exist, because it is incompatible with the cooperation needed for a social species to survive.
In the civilized world, states are sovereign. In the natural world, Nature was sovereign, a sovereignty made manifest by the innate wisdom of every living being.
In this essay, I invite readers to rethink our belief in civil rule, based on what we now know about what drives human behavior. As for Hobbes, we need to energetically forget what Hobbes thought he knew, 370 years ago. Hobbes justified the rise of mass civilization, by erroneously defining humans as purely rational, self-serving beings. His error was even more a travesty, given that happiness and life-sustaining order come only through serving others in mutually dependent relationships.
Whether we humans will ever regain the simple freedom to be true to ourselves remains in question, given that, to survive in mass cultures requires that we be true to prescribed law. And, because we are feeling beings, not rational ones, we cannot recover our natural way of life, by design, or intent. A reawakening to the needs of our souls is what we need, not better intentions.
From our soul’s perspective, on which our innate feelings are grounded, life is not about our individual survival. It’s about our species’ survival. If we feel the need to eat, then we eat—our species would not survive if its members did not seek nourishment. If we feel the need to risk our lives, for the sake of others, we will do so, without thinking about it.
At any given time, whether we think we’re serving self, or others, we are, in fact, serving the life of our species. In its hierarchy of values, our emotional intelligence clearly places the needs of our species above our own. In other words, natural life revolves around our species’ needs, not ours.
The possibility that Life is not about the survival of any individual, but of life-itself, is as difficult for present-day humans to grasp, as it was for people, in Galileo’s time, to accept that the sun—not the earth!—was at the center of the then-known universe. Such profound transformations of perspective require thinking that is far “outside the box.” Thus, they can never occur, by intent—only by happenstance. A prime example of this is our Nature-given spiritual freedom, which civilized humanity has always lived without. Now strangled in the vice grip of modern civilization, it can never be recovered, by intent. Its fate resides exclusively in the hands of providence.
But future happenstance will be kinder to humanity than we can now imagine, if we can become cognizant of the simple mistake mankind made, thousands of years ago, in their effort to mitigate their fear of the imagined future: Our ancestors outlawed the inborn wisdom of their souls! In that act, they unknowingly severed their spiritual connections to the people around them. Once people recognize the painful consequence of that severance, they will want it to be healed. This may well inspire them to do something that civilized culture would consider radical—to trust their futures to the human spirit, as mankind did for upwards of two hundred thousand years, before civil cultures ever appeared.
Should that happen, human beings will bond in interdependent relationships in which they once again trust their futures to the spirits of their sisters and brothers. By “socially bonding,” they will trust their lives to one another, without any record keeping, and without any personal or collective designs on the distant future.
Relationships bonded in spiritual trust are crucial to human wellbeing because they satisfy real and present needs. But civilization turned our focus solely onto the future. The only reason we now accept the spiritual repression required to maintain relationships defined by legal commitments is that they promise to satisfy our imagined future needs. Unfortunately, imagined future needs are limitless, and thus can never be satisfied. Once we make a legal arrangement to satisfy one imagined future need, we imagine another, and then another—ad infinitum. In essence, we humans have gone off the track, by busying ourselves in our futile effort to fortify the imagined future, against all possible needs. The consequence of this monumental “left turn” is personal pain and habitat destruction.
The sheer limitlessness of imagined future needs explains why trying to satisfy them destroys both human happiness and the world’s habitats. It’s my view that trying to satisfy future needs is what caused humans to become “takers,” as opposed to “leavers,” as described in Daniel Quinn’s novel, Ishmael—in which a gorilla instructed a man about living in harmony with Nature. In other words, for a long time, now, we humans have not been living according to our true nature. Hence, the human condition is fraught with pain, and we do not know ourselves, or each other. How can we? We are locked in a dehumanizing competition for personal dreams that reside only in our imaginations. Those dreams hold no interest for our human spirits, which live only in, and for, the moment.
Take the plot of the play, Camelot—a fantasy that glorifies the idea that underpins the whole purpose of human civilization—the goal of creating an existence in which everyone’s needs are permanently satisfied, including their need for love! But know this: To comply with plans for an ideal existence requires spiritual dishonesty, a state in which we must lie about how we really feel, to comply with the plan. As liars, we don’t even know our own spirits, much less those of the people around us. How can we love people we don’t even know!?
Despite having to continually hide how we feel, our spirits, our instincts, our souls—however you want to think of it—keep communicating to us, through our feelings. Of all human feelings, the most significant are the contentment that comes from love, and the sense of meaninglessness of an existence without it. Every human spirit continuously expresses our inborn need for the love of brotherhood and sisterhood. But, for love to exist requires mutual trust, among human spirits. And modern society has so twisted our perspective, on life, that no one wants to trust the human spirit.
Before even love, “what the world needs, now,” is trust in the human spirit. Love is Nature’s reward for that trust. Without relationships based on spiritual trust, love is not possible. With those relationships, love is unconditional. And life is served.
Modern society is a castle on a hill—beautiful, masterful, longstanding. But love cannot dwell there.
—Marianne Ferrari
