The Lads: Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbes

I tend to arrange these thinkers in order of how depressing their social ideas were. First, Rousseau, the most cheery of the bunch. He believed that the state of nature was compassionate and that government corrupted that natural state, and so government should be small and serve the people. People were the foundation of his ideal society, their government only ensuring the minimum necessary for functional society while the individuals that comprised it acted in the group's interest. Locke was the more centrist of the two, believing in stronger government that countered itself and checked its own power. His ideal was where government was where the people were subject to the government, but the government was still dictated by the people. Hobbes was in favor of a large, powerful government to counter humanity's brutal state of nature. The leader's power should be directly tied to the well-being of the people, and as such, the leader would make decisions that benefit the people. 

In terms of my ideal society, I, perhaps paradoxically, subscribe to Rousseau's views on government and also Hobbes' views on human nature. My ideal society would be one made up of smaller, self-sufficient, decentralized units. It would function like a village, skilled labor and community providing for the material and social needs of those that comprise it. This has the side-effect of reduced industrial capacity, and thus a reduction in technology and modern medicine. The question then becomes what right would I have to set back infant mortality, end the medical frameworks to save the chronically ill, and cleave life expectancy. I would say that these issues are not even the most problematic of my ideal society’s follies. The unfortunate reality of this framework even disregarding technological regression is that the inherent selfish drive to expand one’s power beyond any reasonable sense of sufficiency would lead to a swift end to these tenets of a series of smaller more independent social units. Someone, somewhere would be able to create at least a loose confederacy of units and thus have the manpower and material required to enforce a centralized model of governance upon their neighbors, eventually establishing a new baseline for which to increase the standing of their new dominion, and thus their world presence. This ideal society is not a stable one, for an example, the Amish only exist because we allow them to. should the decision be made to destroy them, the fall of their culture would be immediate and decisive because our assembly of power dwarfs any resistance they could muster, and it is for this reason my ideal society would inevitably collapse. With this new social order, kingdoms, nations, and industry would rise once again, just as they had before. With that, nuclear technology would eventually be discovered again and allow for the nuclear die to be recast, perhaps apocalyptically. Our technology would rapidly outpace our wisdom once again, history would likely repeat. In short, I really need to think about what a good society means to me, since I clearly have no idea what I'm doing.

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