Episode #045 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

Ahoy, maties! I’m Stephen West, the host of the Philosophize This! podcast. And I want to start the show today by using our imaginations about something, alright? We’re going to start the show with a thought experiment. I want you to imagine that we’re all taking a vacation together. Everybody listening to this right now, we all meet up in Los Angeles harbor. We all got our suitcases packed. We all went to Walmart and got our absolutely horrifying Hawaiian shirts. We’re all wearing them. We’re all getting on the Philosophize This! cruise line. We’re all going on a cruise together! We’re going to talk about philosophy. We’re going to play board games. It’s going to be great! We all file onto the ship. We get out into the middle of the ocean. And then, pew! The ship runs directly into something. It springs a leak. The ship’s going down.

And look, I don’t want to hear anything from you people about my sound effects. I got to do this. I mean, okay, I don’t have the budget of a Radiolab or a This American Life. I got to do my own sound effects. Pew! The ship springs a leak. We look out onto the starboard side of the ship, and we realize that we hit something big. I mean, it could be anything, really. We hit that giant patch of garbage that floats around in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. How about that? We hit the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It sprung a leak in the ship. The ship’s going down. But lucky for us, nobody’s going to die in this shipwreck because there’s a perfectly good, deserted island right next to where the ship crashed into the garbage patch.

So, we all survive. We look around us; we assess the situation. We realize very quickly that things are not looking good. Alright? The captain of the ship was drunk. He was asleep at the wheel or at the helm of the ship. The point is, the Coast Guard’s not coming to get us. A rescue team is not coming. We’re here for the long run. The only possibility of rescue is if a plane flies over or if a ship sees us passing by; we’re frantically waving around on the beach, alright? What do we do now? Because there’s going to be that moment when we all look around us and start to size each other up, alright? At least I know I would. Look, the problem with being stranded on an island with you people, with this audience in particular, is I know every single one of you guys has read Lord of the Flies, okay? I’m not going to be Piggy on this island. Am I going to be Piggy? No, I’m not going to be.

Look, I know how this works. And the fact is, everyone’s going to be looking around for somebody that’s weak, useless. As soon as we find out that there’s no food on this island, I’m going to have an apple in my mouth, spinning around on a rotisserie. I know how it works; I’ve seen the cartoons. But it doesn’t need to be like this. We’re going to be standing around on that beach after the shipwreck asking a lot of questions like, what are we going to do? Who’s in charge? Is there anyone in charge? What do we want this person that’s in charge to do? What are the limits of this person’s power? Why does it have to be a single person? Can it be a council of people, a wise oligarchy?

And the fact of the matter is, if you were an Enlightenment Age political philosopher, like the one’s we’ve been talking about and the one we’re going to talk about today, this is the situation you had to put yourself in to be able to properly think about what the role of government is and why it’s justified. You know, we’re all born into a world where it’s very easy to just take things for granted. It’s very easy to just take for granted that there is a government; I pay money into this government. It protects me; it tries to do certain things for me. That’s just the way that it is. Most people don’t really even question it as a possibility. It’s just there. And historically, dictators have realized this fact. You know, you can be born into some sort of tyrannical regime and never really question why you’re paying these people taxes or why you’re listening to them. Have you ever asked yourself why you pay money into the country that you currently reside in? I don’t think most people have thought about it that much, and they just do it.

Well, there were a lot of things in this new Enlightenment world that were getting rethought. And as we start to think about all these old assumptions that we were making that were potentially holding us back for centuries, what’s the first place you’re going to start looking? Oh, how about that guy over there in the velvet robe with the scepter in his hand that always tells me what to do? Like, who is that guy? When did I ever agree to be this guy’s sugar daddy for the rest of my life? Some guy comes up to me on the street and demands my money from me—you know, takes it from me by force. That gets that guy three to five years in a federal prison. Some guy in a velvet robe on a throne comes up to me and demands my money, well, that’s called a tax. How is this justifiable? What is he doing with that money? What is the extent of his power, and how do we insure that?

We were asking a lot of questions during this time period. And the biggest one of all is probably the first question that you would ask: Why do we even need a government at all? This is a very good question to ask, and it’s far from an obvious answer. Are we better off as individuals without a government? Well, to answer that, let’s think about what a government even does for us, and then we’ll try to imagine ourselves without it. And lucky for us, this isn’t going to be very difficult because we’re all stranded on an island right now!

So, let’s think about it. Let’s say that we never organize a government, and the island turns into an every-person-for-themselves situation. What would that world look like? Would it be chaotic? Would it be very peaceful? Philosophers largely disagree about what this state of nature would even look like. Thomas Hobbes—guy we’ve talked about before—he thought that it would be a constant state of war. Remember, he called the state of nature solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. That was life in the state of nature to Thomas Hobbes. There is no right or wrong because there are no laws in place to deem what right or wrong even is. So, in Hobbes’ state of nature, it wouldn’t be wrong for one of you guys to come up to me on the island, kill me, take all my stuff, because there’s no contract that we’ve both signed that insures anything of mine.

This is a good place to pause and think about something for a minute. When we think about this hypothetical shipwreck that we were all just in, we can all imagine Hobbes’ state of nature becoming a reality. It’s something that we’ve all thought about before. It’s depicted in the movie The Purge pretty well. Maybe people start separating into warring factions. Maybe the most powerful guy just walks around wantonly killing people, taking stuff, enslaving people. The point is, we can all imagine an island where it might be beneficial to band together and make an arrangement. And conveniently, most of us probably agree that we don’t want certain things coming to fruition, right?

Let’s just pick a basic example. We could be standing around on the island, and we could all say, “Okay, I don’t want to be murdered. Do you want to be murdered? Okay, how about you guys over there? Do you guys want to be murdered? Okay, well, now that we all agree on that, listen, I know this really big, muscular guy. The guy’s terrifying. He’s got crooked eyes. How about we all live in this general vicinity that we’re in, and if anybody comes around talking about how they’re going to murder somebody, well, this guy with the crooked eyes will show them the door. But this guy needs to get paid, right? I mean, he’s not going to do this all for free. How about we all chip in 100 bucks? That…”—well, we’re on an island. Wow, I’m a genius— “How about we all chip in 100 coconuts?”—whatever you have on an island— “And he’ll make sure that this doesn’t happen. He benefits from it. We benefit from it. Everybody’s happy.”

Now, from here, it’s easy to imagine this extending beyond just murder. There are certain baseline insurances that we would want this very basic island government to maintain for everyone that’s a part of our group. So, obviously, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau never used this island example with the dude with the crooked eyes. But this is just a way for us to think about this initial question that we’re asking. Do we even need a government in the first place? Well, on our deserted island we can definitely see how having this third party with certain clear tasks assigned to it and certain limitations might be tremendously beneficial to us.

But Jean-Jacques Rousseau didn’t necessarily agree. You know, if you look back at history, whenever there’s giant shifts in the way that entire societies are thinking about things, there’s always going to be a backlash. Things rarely go smoothly when one of these big paradigm shifts happens. I mean, the scope of change that’s going on during the Enlightenment period was completely unprecedented. We can expect some consequences. Like, when you go in such a short period of time from thinking the way that we were thinking for centuries to the Enlightenment—you know, if you go from 0 to the Enlightenment in 4.3 seconds, there’s going to be side effects. And one of these side effects has become known to history as Romanticism.

Now, we all know by now—I’m starting to sound like a broken record—that the Enlightenment period is characterized by rationalism, you know, the application of reason to all of these longstanding institutions that needed fixing. Well, after a while of doing this, some people started thinking that maybe we went a little too far with all this reason stuff. Like, think of reason as though it were medicine, alright? Nobody was questioning whether we were sick. They were saying, how much medicine do we need? You know, when you’re sick and you take some medicine, you feel better. If you take too much medicine, you know, you could be talking like you’re Al Sharpton the rest of your life. Bad things can happen.

When you exalt reason to the level that was being done during the Enlightenment and you suppress something like human emotion—something that’s such an undeniable part of how we experience this planet—you can expect a backlash. And that backlash was Romanticism, a very strong emphasis placed on human emotion as a superior guide and, in not all but many cases, a heightened focus on humans in nature and looking back to times when humans were closer to nature as better than where we are now. I’m not going to be able to sum up Romanticism in a single sentence. Let’s talk about Rousseau’s contribution as an enormous influencer in the movement and more importantly how this all relates to us finding the best way of governing ourselves while stranded on this island.

So, due to circumstances in Rousseau’s life, there was a period of time that he would commonly take a really long trip through the woods on foot. Now, on one of these trips he was trying to pass the time as he was walking, and he was reading a newspaper. In the newspaper on this particular day there was a contest. They asked the readers of the newspaper to give their opinions and write an essay on a particular question. And the question was, “Has the progress made in the areas of the arts and sciences been more of a bane or a benefit to society as a whole?” Now, keep in mind, 90% or more of the people that responded to this question would have thought that people benefited from the arts and sciences. They would have looked around them and saw categorical improvements in people’s lives: systems of governments in the surrounding countries, improvements in medicine, the Industrial Revolution that was kicking off.

But the position that eventually won the contest for Rousseau, the epiphany that he had sitting under a tree on one of these long walks that he was going on was the exact opposite. See, to Rousseau, we weren’t better off because of all of this progress. In fact, the entire long history of civilization can really be seen as things getting worse for us progressively, because the further we get into this artificial state that we’ve created that we call “culture” and “art” and “sciences” and all that good stuff, the further removed we are from the state of nature, which is where we really belong.

He gives a few different examples in the writing. He talks about early civilizations like Sparta, how they were more simplistic and naturalistic and how they were happier. And he contrasts that with the civilizations of his time and even what Athens eventually became during the times of Sparta. There’s a quote right here where he sums up his thoughts, I think, very well. He says, “While government and laws take care of the security and well being of men in groups, the sciences, letters, and the arts, less despotic and perhaps more powerful, spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains which weigh men down, snuffing out in them the feeling of the original liberty for which they appear to have been born, and make them love their slavery by turning them into what are called civilized people.”

So, right here Rousseau’s obviously taking a very counterculture position. To be what we call civilized during the time of Rousseau is just to be someone that has been made to love your form of slavery. The arts and sciences, all of this progress, they’re just garlands of flowers sprinkled over the iron chains that weigh people down. He raises the question, what is it to be a civilized person, and is that necessarily a better state than what came before we were civilized? And to answer that, we have to ask, well, what came before we were civilized? If you listen to Thomas Hobbes, the state of nature was terrible, a state of constant war. Who wants to live in a state of constant war? And that was his justification for why it actually benefitted people to sacrifice many of their rights over to the sovereign whose job it was to maintain order, to remove that state of constant war. That was the role of government to Thomas Hobbes, to maintain order.

Like, remember back on the island when we were talking about the guy with the crooked eyes that was going to protect us and we said that when we give this guy 100 coconuts, what is it that we want him to do for us? Well, this goes beyond just protection from murder, right? We don’t want to be stolen from. We don’t want to be assaulted. We don’t want to be enslaved, among other things. Well, what all these political philosophers did is they tried to find out, is there something that underlies all of those individual insurances that we want as individuals? Is there a macro for all of these micros?

Well, Hobbes thought that what we were all really asking for—what the role of government is—is to maintain order at all costs. And in a way, he’s right. We can see where he’s coming from. I mean, nobody truly wants to live in that chaotic world that Thomas Hobbes lays out in his social contract, the state of nature. John Locke years later writes what he thinks is a correction of Hobbes, and he says that the role of government is actually to protect our natural rights: life, liberty, and property. And Rousseau, as we read about last time, he obviously disagrees with Hobbes. He says that, sure, sacrificing all of your rights over to a sovereign whose sole job it is to maintain order, that might yield you a peaceful life if he manages to do what he says he’s going to do. But you can live peacefully in a dungeon, he says, right? Just because you’re living peacefully doesn’t make it a good life. There must be more that a government needs to do.

The role of government to Jean-Jacques Rousseau was to promote the general will of the people. Now, this naturally raises the question, well, what is the general will of the people? That obviously changes based on the people in question, right? Well, to give you an answer to that question, I have to answer it from multiple different angles. And in order for me to do that, I have to do an entire episode on it. That’s what the next episode’s going to be. I’ve been looking forward to this one for months, you guys, months! There’s so many interesting questions that come up when you think about the fact that all of the individual people that make up a society are not going to agree on what the best course of action is, but that doesn’t change the fact that the government needs to make one decision. How do they do that?

But anyway, where was I? The thing to take away today is that Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau represent three very different and oftentimes conflicting viewpoints on what the role of government is. And this is fascinating to me. Like, when I first started reading political philosophy, I was kind of confused. I didn’t really understand what there was to disagree about. Like, even if we disagree about how government should be implemented, we’re still talking about the same world, right? I slowly figured out that’s not really the case. One of the reasons there’s so many conflicts between the thinking of Hobbes and Rousseau is because they have two very different views of where we even come from. And what I mean by that is that they disagree on what the state of nature even is.

Let’s go back to our island example. When we’re shipwrecked on this deserted island, Hobbes thinks that the state of nature is going to be terrible. When there’s no system of government to insure certain things, it’s going to be chaos. But I want you to imagine something different for a second. Let’s imagine that during the shipwreck something crazy happened. Let’s say that during the shipwreck as the ship is going down into the water, we’re all struck with a crazy form of amnesia where we can’t remember anything about what it feels like to be civilized, alright? We’d have zero recollection of private property, zero recollection of social conventions, of how governments operate, everything in that sector. If we all had this case of selective amnesia, would that change the way that the state of nature looks like on the island? Would we still be enslaving each other on that island? Would we still be killing each other over who has a pineapple or not? Would we still steal things from each other, or would we have zero conception of what stealing even is because nothing belongs to anybody on the island?

Rousseau thought that we wouldn’t. Rousseau thought that the state of nature, the original state that humans lived in pre-civilization, was actually pretty great for us. Instead of, like Hobbes said, solitary, nasty, brutish, and short, the state of nature made us peaceful, noble, natural, and good. See, to Rousseau, things were great until they all started going downhill when civilization started getting in the way. In our natural state, we do just fine. But we’ve all been corrupted by civilization. In fact, he can identify the very moment when it all happened. It’s kind of funny. Although he doesn’t claim that this actually happened; he’s just pointing to the phenomena that led to where we are now.

Rousseau speculates that in the beginning it all started going downhill when the very first guy cordoned off a piece of land, told everyone around him that it was his, and they were stupid enough to believe him. That’s when we all started to become corrupted, that very moment. He talks about how this probably happened when early man created a hut so that they could cohabitate with the females of the species. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It’s all gone downhill from there. One day you’re building the hut; the next day you’re building a skyscraper.

He talks about this beginning phase here in his famous work On the Origins of the Inequality of Mankind: “‘Beware of listening to this imposter; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.’ But there is great probability that things had then already come to such a pitch, that they could no longer continue as they were; for the idea of property depends on many prior ideas, which could only be acquired successfully, and could not have been formed all at once in the human mind.”

So, what he’s saying here is that in reality, the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself belongs to nobody. But humans, being naïve as they are sometimes, just cannonballed into this ocean, into the chains that hold them down. They realized the benefits of political institutions, but they lacked the level of foresight to be able to see the problems that were going to be in the long-term with them. Super interesting to think about that quote, “The fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.” Like, I’m sure all of us at some point in our life have looked around us and wondered, how arbitrary and strange is it that anybody owns a plot of land? Like, that’s their little piece of the earth. There was some point in history that somebody just put a flag into the ground, and now that section of earth belongs to that particular homo sapien. It’s kind of crazy to think about.

But anyway, some of the most interesting pieces of Rousseau are in this narrative that he gives for how humans were corrupted by society in the first place. So, let’s say that we’re stranded on this island, and as the ship crashed we all got that case of amnesia. We probably wouldn’t even need a government. In fact, we probably wouldn’t ever want to be rescued from that island. But Rousseau says it’s too late. We’ve already been irreversibly corrupted by society. But it’s just really interesting to think about the difference between Rousseau and Hobbes. Hobbes thinks it’s a constant state of war, that it’s terrible. Rousseau says that the state of nature is a golden age.

But Rousseau says that what happened was, as we learned to love each other, we also learned to be jealous of each other. We started to compare ourselves to other people around us. Rousseau says that this was the very first step towards inequality. And when you create this hierarchy, all of a sudden everybody wants respect from each other. They want to be seen as better than those around them. And eventually, with the very same dynamic existing when it comes to private property, eventually the vast majority of humans are unknowingly sentenced to slavery.

Now, this is far from the extent of Rousseau’s criticism of an organized society. In fact, he points out several flaws in the way that society typically pans out. One of the main ones to him is this. It’s important for us to cover this for next episode. So, one of the common things that people want their government to do is to protect their property. Like, in our island scenario, if we work hard all day and we make a strong shelter and we collect firewood, some food, some coconuts, we don’t want somebody else that’s bigger than us to just come around and take it from us, right? But Rousseau thinks that there’s a problem whenever protecting property becomes part of what the state does.

Rousseau would ask, how is it fair to everybody? How can it be fair to everybody? What about the people that don’t have any property? What about the people who have less property than other people? Although society in that way would benefit everybody to a certain extent, it will always benefit the rich more than everybody else because they have more property that’s being protected. And Rousseau thinks that this situation is going to lead to several obvious consequences. People are going to start resenting each other. People are going to become envious and hateful, and that’s going to lead to all kinds of other problems. But maybe the most interesting one for us to reflect on this week is that Rousseau thinks that people living in a society are constantly outside of themselves. And this is a very interesting thing to apply to ourselves.

Rousseau thinks that we’re all constantly away from our true nature which is to be free. And that changes the way that we interact with the world around us. If we were in the state of nature, as we should be, we would get validation from ourselves. But because we live in a society, we constantly look for it in the people around us. Rousseau says that we’re all just putting on a giant show for everybody around us. We don’t ask who we are anymore; we ask other people who we are. And if you’re comparing yourselves to others and looking for validation and it’s making you unhappy, that’s because it’s going against your very nature as a human being. It’s crazy. I mean, it’s like turning down free pizza. Nobody should do it.

But it’s important to note that just because society can never be completely fair and it will always be corrupting us in some small way, that doesn’t mean that it always needs to be unjust. And many of Rousseau’s best works are aimed at creating that just system of government. And what he arrives at is that the way you establish a just society is by the members of the society forming a legitimate social contract. Rousseau talks about how whenever you enter into a legitimate contract of any kind, two things need to happen. One, you are giving something, and two, you are getting something in return. In the case of the social contract, because in the state of nature you were born free, you are sacrificing this natural freedom for what Rousseau believes is a much more useful kind of freedom in today’s day and age—political freedom.

So, we’re going to continue to expand on everything that we just talked about next week. We’re going to continue our shipwreck analogy next week. I know you guys are all excited for that. But I want to end the show today by talking about something that is extremely powerful to reflect on this week. Let’s talk about why it’s important to think about what we want from our government. Why is it even important to do this thought experiment where we pretend like we’re stranded on an island and think about what we want from this fictitious government and how we want it to execute those expectations?

Now, on the surface, this may seem like a pointlessly abstract, waste-of-time question to ask that’s never going to accomplish anything. Like, I’m almost positive there’s people out there thinking this way right now. Like, why would you ever spend your time trying to think of creative forms of government? Ooh, that’s fun. Why would you do that when there have been plenty of good ways that people have already laid out? Look, let’s just learn about those. Let’s talk about which one of them is the best. Pick from what we already have, right?

But I disagree. I think of all the questions that you could possibly think about—like, if you’re just going to sit down on a Saturday and think about an interesting question—this question may be the most productive. This question may be the one that you’re the most likely to come up with some idea that changes the fate of the human species. Trust me, I know, there are a lot of abstract questions that you could sit around all day and just waste your time thinking about. But what makes this question so different to me is technology.

Because no matter how brilliant you are, no matter how brilliant Rousseau, Hobbes, and Locke were during their time, there are just ways of implementing government that were impossible back then that are possible in today’s world that they could have never even dreamed of. Just the efficiency that’s possible with the technology that we have today is something that opens up a lot of new exciting possibilities when it comes to how we govern a populous.

Look, there are tons of examples I could give you of this. But just to give you a sample of what I’m talking about, back during the time of Rousseau, Locke, and Hobbes, having something like an absolute democracy—you know, where every citizen votes on every single issue—was completely ridiculous. There was just no way it would ever work back then. It was one of those things where it sounded great in theory, but if you ever had a population that was over 50 people—like anything over a small hunter-gatherer tribe—there’s just no possible way to execute that. Now, my point is, this wasn’t even an option to Hobbes and Rousseau. There was just no way to ever make it work. But in today’s world of smart phones and instant connectivity and the internet, we can easily imagine a world where every citizen could vote on every single issue if they wanted to, where we wouldn’t need representatives to meet up in this white building in Washington, D.C.

Now, trust me, I am not an advocate of this being the way that things should work. In fact, I tend to fall into the category of people that think that the obstacle is actually a good thing, that we need that filter of people having to set their alarm and take Thursday morning off of work and go down to the local public library and get their free cup of juice and cast their ballot, that that weeds out a lot of people that probably shouldn’t be voting. I mean, seriously, just imagine this for a second. “We interrupt this episode of Duck Dynasty for the 2016 presidential election. Please make your selection on your smart TV now. Thank you for being a good citizen.”

My general point is that with new technology comes new possibilities. And it’s not crazy to think that with all this new technology, there might be methods of implementing government that are way better than we’ve ever done it in the past. It’s not crazy to think that one of you guys might come up with this idea. So, when you’re thinking about things on any given Saturday, maybe think about getting stranded on a deserted island with me.

Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.