Episode 3: Hobbes’s Leviathan: The Social Contract

0:08 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. The topic for episode three is the Social Contract, focusing on Thomas Hobbes book Leviathan Chapters 1315. Find out more about the podcast by looking at partiallyexaminedlife.com links to the readings. We'll have a link to our Facebook group, which has a discussion board so you can get on and discuss and really just fill your entire life with this podcast. My name is Mark Linsenmayer. I'm currently situated in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:43 Seth: This is Seth Paskin. I'm in Austin, Texas.

0:47 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:50 Mark: Are you all better, Wes?

0:53 Wes: I am for the most part. I'm having some nausea for some reason, but.

0:59 Mark: Was it just because of Hobbes?

1:03 Wes: Yeah, exactly. I'm gonna let you guys fight it out tonight on the Hobbes.

1:09 Seth: I'm sorry that I did not send you best wishes while you were ill, but I do hope you are feeling better.

1:14 Wes: Damn you. I would have gotten better sooner with them.

1:21 Mark: I'll go ahead and present the ground rules for our discussion to be revised for future episodes contingent upon our whims. Do you remember the first one, Seth?

1:30 Seth: Let's see. The first one is that we.

1:37 Mark: You don't have any idea?

1:39 Seth: No.

1:39 Wes: Wait, wait. I couldn't name a single rule myself.

1:42 Seth: Wait. One of the rules is we don't. We don't drop names unless we think it would be interesting or. No. Is that we won't force you to read the text. I can't remember.

1:54 Mark: Rule rule number one, we do not assume that our audience knows anything about any of this.

2:00 Seth: Right. Okay.

2:01 Mark: Rule number two, as sort of following from rule number one, no gratuitous name dropping. Right? So we are all about ideas here. Not with fetishizing a bunch of dead philosophers. Although I think we violated that quite a bit on the last episode, which ended really in an argument between me and Wes. Not about the substance of the value of what Descartes was saying, but how he fits into the philosophical historical landscape. I think that's my retroactive interpretation of that. Which is something that our audience probably doesn't care about at all. But it was still fun. So anyway, if you have a point to make, just make it. You cannot say, you know, you'll understand what I mean if you go read my Misery. Entitles me to the Bones of Schopenhauer by Morrissey.

2:46 Seth: Yeah, I remember buying that on. That was a B side, wasn't It B side on some 40, 45.

2:52 Mark: It's a 400 page text. He just sells it on his website. Rule number three. We shall be rigorous and exact in all that we say, except in the case where not doing so seems like it would be more entertaining. The reading for this week was the Social Contract. Do we, by being members of society, implicitly agree to obey its laws? For instance, is some particular form of government natural given human nature? These are the many topics that Hobbes brings up in this fantabulous reading.

3:23 Seth: Right, So I want to start by asking you why you were so vicious about the text when we ended the last one. Because you literally. There are. There are words that I can't pronounce that describe your attitude towards the text, but you basically said it was unreadable and horrible and terrible. And I did not find it to be that way at all. And I'm speaking to Mark, of course.

3:48 Mark: I feel I should just read a portion of this to let the audience decide.

3:56 Wes: Do we have any. Are we going to accept calls?

4:01 Mark: From this equality of ability ariseth equality of hope in the attainment of our ends. And therefore, if any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies. And in the way to their end, which is principally their own conservation and sometimes their delectation, only endeavor to destroy or subdue one another. That is one sentence.

4:21 Seth: Okay, all right. So he does have a very Germanic use of the comma. That much I will agree. However, there are a number of very, very. And I'm going to bring them up over the course of the next hour and a half or whatever poetic parts of this text. For such is the nature of men that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty or more eloquent or more learned, yet they will hardly believe there to be so many wise as themselves, for they see their own wit at hand and other men's at a distance. Now that's just good English right there, my friends. Beautiful. You didn't appreciate that.

4:59 Wes: Sounds better coming from you, Seth.

5:01 Seth: Yeah, maybe it's all in the performance.

5:03 Mark: He that performeth.

5:05 Wes: Hey.

5:06 Mark: He that performeth first in the case of a contract is said to merit that which he is to receive by the performance of the other. And he hath it as his due. Also, when a prize is propounded to many which is to be given to only him that winneth or money is thrown amongst many to be enjoyed by them that catch it. Though this be a free gift, yet so to win, or so to Catch is to merit and so have it as due. Okay, Perry and Matt, I'll agree.

5:30 Seth: A lot of the stuff that came down in the details of the covenant has stuff I kind of skipped over and I just focused on the good stuff.

5:37 Wes: Kind of like the elaborate style as well I should have.

5:40 Mark: I should just say that I wasn't really reflecting so much on my own experience of the text as by the experience that I'd had. In fact, the reason I picked this text because I had some recent experience of it when I was teaching college students people that are not interested in philosophy. Students who are taking this merely as a requirement. And this was one of the assignments for their first week. People that had never read philosophy in their lives. And so they read some of a couple of novels, they read a couple chunks of those, they read some of Lord of the Flies, which is a light and fun book.

And then they read the mass of this text that we're reading today and wow, that really ruined their day. So, you know, I'm experiencing this vicariously through the people that I for about five different semesters, led by the nose, sentence by sentence, through this, I would say in their eyes, horrific text. And of course, just like if you watch a movie with your girlfriend or wife who really thinks that kind of movie sucks, it kind of makes it hard for you to enjoy it. And at least if you are a sympathetic fellow like I am, then your attitude will inevitably be swayed toward that viewpoint.

I have been similarly influenced.

6:55 Seth: Wow, that was a very Hobbesian sentence. But I appreciate your point. It can be very, very torturous to get through some of these longer sentences and just follow all of the grammar associations that are broken up by commas. That's definitely true. But then there are pithy points as well where he says things like for prudence is but experience really it comes

7:21 Mark: down to the overall fake geometry structure that sort of turns me off. That was still used in Descartes but was relatively free flowing and like a diary. Diuretic is not the right word, is it?

7:36 Seth: No, no. Journalistic, no.

7:44 Wes: Propaedeutic.

7:47 Mark: I will not use that word propaedeutic. That is against my religion.

7:52 Wes: That just means philosophical diuretic.

7:55 Mark: But you know, there definitely is a very list like quality to the text in the manner of. I don't know what the best mathematical analogy is, but he certainly influenced by that. Here's the basic postulates, just like Descartes and. And here's all the many things that follow from it. And he uses his text to try to Be, you know, let's get clear about things that we already think about, which is to some extent what all philosophy is. But there are ways of doing that that seem very well digested, and there are ways of doing that that make it seems like, wow, I'm reading your tedious scratch pad. Thank you so much for publishing your tedious scratch pad for me to read.

8:33 Wes: Don't you think these are just artifacts of the time?

8:37 Mark: Yes, I think to be taken seriously, you probably had to write more or less like that.

8:42 Wes: But also, there are things I like about that elaborate style as well. I mean, there's a mixture of things going on there. Right. Partly it's the fact that sentence length, stylistically, it's not frowned upon then. But then there are the grammatical constructions, which are just different. I think the combination of all that may make it seem wordier than it might have been to seem to an audience at the time. It's something aesthetically pleasing about that as well, because you're not exposed to that in contemporary writing. That's not the style.

9:17 Seth: I mean, if I remember correctly, isn't the entirety of the book. I mean, it's dense, right? It's a long, long treatise. It is not. He's going at great lengths and covering a lot of topics, and I think he's trying to talk his way through to some extent. This is very much not dialogic. It's not intended to be a discourse. You're not intended to be brought into kind of the collegial experience like we talked about with Descartes and kind of the dialectic of Plato. This is much, much, much more like a. Intended to be more of a treatise, which in many respects, I think, makes it much more English. He's very much a modern philosopher in that respect. And this is also, I think, stylistically very much a. This is the way things are. I am telling you, of course, this is the way things are. And let me elaborate in detail.

10:10 Mark: Let me make a list of three.

10:13 Seth: There are three ways that these things can be done. This way, that way, and of course, the third way. And I was about to drop a reference because I've been watching a lot of YouTube videos about philosophy, but I'm going to withhold and try not to do gratuitous name dropping. Okay, so who's going to give us the summary of the argument, overall structure?

10:37 Mark: And really, I wanted to talk about Hobbes as a representative. He's the guy that, as far as I know, came up with this idea of the social contract, this deal that we make to be in society. And he thinks that stems directly from the nature of man. And in the introduction to the work which we didn't read, but it was in one of the anthologies that I had. That had pieces of this in it. He says that all this stuff about the nature of man is based on self examination. It sounds very Cartesian or like early phenomenology, a word that I'm sure we will use a lot in the future.

Right. Which is supposed to be just a thorough description of your own experience. So he says people that figure out human nature by judging others always have very catty things to say about how. Because they really think that they're superior to everybody else. But it's a skill to learn to read human nature in yourself. So he thinks these are all things that we can independently verify by consulting our own experience. So he gets this idea of the nature of man from that which is not a very nice nature. And then from there goes through this series of like a mathematical treatise directly because of the nature of man.

There are certain things that we do or that we should really. He blends those things together but agree to. And that all builds up into. Well, we agree to be in society and do whatever the king says. And that's where this part ends. And in fact the end of the selected reading, he even says this is a. Which seems to be a completely separate point beyond this political point that other philosophers use it to me later. He actually makes this the one and only possible ground for morality. That there is no morality outside of, you know, a society. And that makes laws.

One society makes laws. Then there's right and wrong. Before that there's not.

12:29 Seth: What he says is you have this state of nature where it's basically every man against each other. And the only thing that they all have is that they all have the liberty to do whatever they can for self preservation. And the only sort of natural law in this state is that you can't do anything which is against self preservation. So that's the state of nature.

12:51 Mark: Right. Which follows directly from his concept of individual human nature. That people are selfish, that we all just do whatever we can do to further our own ends. Which really ends up meaning that we have to be aggressive towards others. Right?

13:07 Seth: Yeah. I don't think he even characterizes it as selfish. He just basically says if you're in the state of nature, you're basically at war with everybody else for self preservation. So you have no. There's no justice, there's no injustice, there's nothing to right or wrong, all there is is you as an individual trying to do whatever you can to preserve yourself and to, I guess, hypothetically advance yourself so, you know, get food.

13:33 Wes: And I think preservation, though, is just one of the motives, right? There's glory, competition, and then fear for your safety.

13:43 Seth: Well, I think those, those are things that would cause individuals become aggressive towards others. But in terms of just kind of like the base layer of the state of nature, it's basically everybody for themselves for the sake of self preservation. And then you get to this point where it's like, well, if it's just you against everybody else and somebody takes

14:01 Wes: it, isn't it more than self preservation, though, that's motivating the nastiness and brutishness?

14:09 Seth: Well, those motivations exist, but I'm talking about what he thinks is kind of like the. This is kind of going back to what Mark said about whether it's a law or not. And that kind of is basically if you just talk about what the state is, the state is that everybody's out there just fighting for whatever they want themselves, right? Whatever they conceive of self preservation. And you have a right to do that. You have a right to use whatever means necessary because there is no law at all. Right?

14:39 Mark: He uses that word right. And before you used liberty. And the reason you were using those interchangeably is because he actually defines right as liberty. So that's very counter to the way we usually use the term right. We usually use right as a normative term, a moral term, to say it is right that you can do this thing. So I have a right to free speech means it is not okay for you to try to stop me from speaking or for the government to clamp down on my speech or something. But when he says that we have a right in nature, it's that we have the ability, it sounds like we have the liberty, we have the power to do this.

15:15 Seth: Yes. And if you combine that with the other part, which is that you can't do anything to kind of self abnegate or do something against self preservation. It's almost like an obligation. So in the state of nature, every individual has both the right but also the obligation to do whatever is necessary to preserve and further themselves. Now, the flip side of that is that you're constantly at risk that as Wes said, if anybody takes it into their head to take your stuff or dispossess you or kill you or whatever, you have no recourse. All you can do is fight back. And there's nothing Wrong about those people doing that. Right.

15:57 Mark: Or is there, yeah, this is supposed to be the limit to selfishness. That there's this picture that the proponents of capitalism, the right wing, would have of, you know, this greed is good. Hey, yeah, we can all just work for our own ends and we can all just happily coexist. But that wouldn't happen in a state of nature because somebody is going to be aggressive. And so even if you're stronger than other people, they can gang up on you. You're always going to be at risk.

16:23 Seth: And even if you're not actively fighting with somebody, the fact of the matter is, because there's no law, because there's no right or wrong, because there are no structures, you. You're constantly going to be brought into a state of conflict over one thing or another, whether it's resources or opinions or whatever.

16:40 Wes: You could call it a state of paranoia. And one of the things that Hobbes mentions is that the definition of your own conservation becomes broader than you might think it would. So in other words, you start thinking about preemptive strikes and I've got to control other people or else they can hurt me. And all of these things are allowable. Gain as much power as you can, because otherwise it could be the end of you if you don't do everything you can.

17:12 Seth: No, that's a really good point. It's that you can never be secure unless you are completely dominating everything around you. Right. There could be nobody within a thousand miles. You might not sleep comfortably at night because you never know when somebody might show up and take your cattle or something along those lines.

17:28 Wes: Right. I think from this question of whether we think there's any morality here and this idea that man has a right in the state of nature to do what he wants to anyone else. I think there is in a sense, because this idea of self preservation and the importance of self preservation is in a way, its own fundamental moral commandment. And the idea is that outside of society, that commandment sort of runs amok, and yet it still has its own fundamental moral force.

18:01 Seth: We'll probably want to come back to that, Wes, a little bit later. But he doesn't talk about the difference between, say, a rule of reason and a law. And kind of that if you're rational and you kind of look at this, it only makes perfect sense that you wouldn't want to be in that state.

18:17 Wes: Right.

18:18 Seth: And that, that, that's the foundation of the moral philosophy are these rules of reason that just basically say if your number one impulse is towards self preservation. And you exist in this state of war where everybody is fighting in this paranoia and dominating each other just for self preservation, that actually your impulse to self preservation would lead you to try to create a compact or a contract with somebody else. In other words, to take yourselves out of this state of war so that you weren't constantly paranoid and fighting for resources and so forth.

And he basically says, this is like a rule of reason. It only makes sense that you would want to do that and that that's kind of the foundation of its moral philosophy. And at one point he kind of throws this out where he says, of course, if you believe that that is given to us, delivered by the word of God, then it becomes a law. So kind of like, oh, okay, well, to play it how it lays.

19:15 Wes: Yeah. I think it's interesting that the sort of do unto others principle, that there are two versions of it and it depends on context. The idea of the moral foundation being the golden rule makes sense within society. But when you do away with that context, it reverts to do unto others everything that they might do unto you and do it before they do it.

19:43 Mark: Are you saying Hobbes is committed to some version of the Golden Rule?

19:47 Wes: He explicitly talks about them.

19:50 Mark: Isn't that not how his political view pans out? That we all give up our freedom because the state of nature is terrible. So it only makes sense that we would want to give up our freedom to be part of a society and to obey the ruler. And so from then on, the ruler is who determines what's right and wrong. And he can't abridge our liberty so far as to. If he says, I going to kill you now, then we are not obliged to lay down and die. But that's the only thing that we retain is this right to defend ourselves.

20:20 Wes: Right.

20:20 Mark: So it doesn't become the Golden Rule. He could have great disparate, you know, high class and a low class and all sorts of what we would call injustices written into law. But as long as, you know, that's what the ruler says, and the ruler is what's keeping us all from descending into a state of nature.

20:36 Wes: I think the Golden Rule, though, is itself purely pragmatic. Right? It's I don't want to get hurt, so I'm not gonna hurt. That makes sense only within context of an enforcer, an overarching authority. It doesn't work in nature and I forget what law it is. But he does explicitly trot that out, I think, as one of the laws, you know, where that is Seth.

20:57 Seth: Yeah. I think one of the key points is that Mark sort of skipped a step there, and that is that. So we're in this state of nature, and the three of us are at war, and we're concerned about our security and our safety. So we're constantly scheming and conniving against each other.

21:13 Mark: Could I just read the famous quote here, that life in this situation is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

21:21 Seth: I actually think you should read the full sentence, because I. Absolutely. To me, that was. It's beautiful. I love it.

21:27 Wes: A lot of fun.

21:28 Mark: All right, I'll try to make this sound poetic. Whatsoever, therefore, is consequent to a time of war where every man is enemy, to every man the same. Consequent to the time where men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry because the fruit thereof is uncertain. And consequently, no culture of the earth, no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving or removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, which is worst of all, continual fear, in danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

22:15 Seth: All right.

22:15 Wes: You know, that's the opening voiceover to Conan the Barbarian, by the way.

22:19 Seth: Actually, at the beginning, part of that, Mark sounded a lot like that guy who does the voiceovers for the movies.

22:24 Wes: Yeah.

22:25 Seth: In a time of war, a land divided seeks a king. You know, that kind of. But don't you think that he's kind of driving at something here where if you bind this premise that without society, basically everybody's out there fighting for themselves? He's describing this thing where you can't create the arts. You don't build buildings. You don't, you know, sow the ground and create agriculture. You don't. There's no science. Right. Because there's no security. There's no certainty that you won't be, you know, overrun or abused or dispossessed or what have you. And if you buy that premise that that's the way things are in the state of nature, it's a strong motivation to get out of that. Don't you think?

23:08 Mark: Sure.

23:09 Wes: Yeah, absolutely.

23:10 Seth: And so basically, you know, this idea that if I'm in this state where I have never have security and I can't do anything, I can't further anything. So in Order to gain security, I'm going to go to Wes and I'm going to say, hey Wes, why don't you and I make a pact, we'll agree not to steal each other's stuff and trespass on these lands and so on and so forth, that we're basically mutually sacrificing some bit of this liberty, this false liberty, which is really just unbounded kind of self interested action for the sake of security. So at least I know that on the border where Wes lives, you know, I don't have to put up a gate or a fence or post guards or dots or whatever. That makes perfect sense.

23:54 Mark: Just a screen so you don't have to look at him.

23:56 Wes: That is by the way, the second law and the one that I'm sort of relating to the golden rule, that a man be willing when others are so too, as far forth as for peace and defense of himself, he shall think it necessary to lay down his right to all things and be contented with so much liberty against other men as he would allow other men against himself.

24:17 Seth: The problem is, and this kind of bridges to Mark's earlier point is that he does acknowledge that there's no way to guarantee that you'll keep your word. So if I enter into this agreement with Wes, I have no guarantee that Wes will keep his word. Which is why you need this external third party to enforce. Hence you need some sort of civil authority to enforce it. That's the chain of reasoning. You're in war, you get out of war because you want security. But you can't really rely on the other guy to do what he says. So there's got to be somebody else that you can trust who can enforce the rule between you.

24:50 Wes: And that. Enforcement is twofold. On the one hand it's religion and on the other it's the monarch or the worldly authority. Interestingly, of course, he relates them. You know, the whole idea of swearing on the. You know, which is another interesting point. The extent to which everything that we know about law is grounded in much of what Hobbes is saying, which probably comes from English common law. But the whole idea of swearing on a Bible, sort of inserting the spiritual threat into what is otherwise, you know, merely an enforcement by the king or by the legal system, so on and so forth.

25:24 Mark: It was interesting that the God part, which is only in a couple places in here it seems like an afterthought. It's just tacked on because he explicitly says there is no injustice, there is no justice or right or Wrong before there is a state to dictate what right or wrong is the implication of which of course is that you don't have God out there setting what morality is right, it's people, it's monarchs, and that it seems like he's maybe adding that extra stuff, the God stuff, just as because he's going to get crucified if he doesn't.

26:01 Wes: Unless we think that there is some moral force to the first law, to the idea of self preservation, it leads to horrible consequences. But one might think that there is some fundamental moral force to the idea of that self preservation. And then we could also ask ourselves if without the idea that we should use all our advantages to war when it's necessary, whether there's a way to build up the legal and moral system the way Hobbes does. In other words, Hobbes wants to talk about the idea of liberty and so on and so forth. I'm wondering if it's a foundation you can't do away with. I'm wondering if Hobbes understands that he's not going to be able to get to the concept of morality within society if it's not this nasty, brutish and short scenario outside of.

26:53 Seth: Oh, I think there's no.

26:54 Wes: Does that question make sense to me?

26:56 Seth: There's no doubt that he needs that. You have to have that in order to get to his foundation of morality. But he doesn't need God. That's the thing, is that this is all right of nature, law of nature. And you know, he basically says that these are sort of rules of reason. It stands to reason that if this is the way things are, this is the way men should be. And then again, to my mind, he throws it on at the end where he says, and if you believe that that's given by God, then you can call it a law, you know, then it becomes. It has the moral weight of the deity behind it. But this is very, very much like a pragmatic and natural moral philosophy of some sort.

27:33 Mark: Well, it does seem like he is. I'm just reacting to what Wes was saying, that maybe this view of human nature is teleological. In other words, purpose driven to name drop from Aristotle, which the idea is that it's not just that people are motivated in a certain way. It's not like the laws of physics and we're bumped and so we move a certain way and we have this drive towards self preservation that just pushes us a mechanical way. And I know that's the way Hobbes is normally conceived as Being very mechanistic. And that's one of the biggest criticisms that was made of him that actually this ethical bit, we remember him most for his political thinking because of guys after him that ran with this idea of the social contract.

But at the time the statements that he made about morality were very. I don't know if influential is a word, but I read a whole bunch of things in this philosophy class in grad school and the British moralists that were all arguing against Hobbes and his mechanistic determinism and trying to reduce ethics to something else. But if you want to give him a teleological reading to say it's sort of like this is what human excellence is, is this. It's like the excellence of a tiger. This is sort of jumping ahead to Nietzsche to name drop more

28:50 Wes: breaking your own rules.

28:51 Mark: That the excellence of this is not a state of nature, Mark, is to be, you know, big and strong and fierce. And that's what makes a good tiger. Right. So if you have an especially kind and gentle tiger, that tiger is kind of an inferior tiger to other tigers. Well, maybe what's the excellence of a human being is this self striving quality is the amount of power that's within us. And it's exactly that purposefulness that will lead us not just to keep being selfish under whatever circumstances. In other words, even after we join society, we would then try to, you know, whenever possible, we would keep stealing if somebody's not going to notice.

We would keep doing selfish things. No, no. Once we get into society, we really do lay down this right to do whatever we want, which says something that's not just a mechanistic. Like we have this drive of selfishness within us pushing us at all times, but that it's more of a purposefulness that's built into us. So it can be a little more complex. Like you were saying, whenever peace is not possible, we try to put ourselves on top because that's the only way to be safe. But whenever peace is possible, we'll do whatever we need to do to achieve that peace.

And that goes pretty well with a religious point of view. Like if you say people are purposeful, that sounds like God has a purpose for each of us. You know, even though Aristotle and certainly not Nietzsche, you know, put that in teleological discussions, it's a fairly easy leap to make.

30:11 Wes: Yeah, that's very interesting. And just to rephrase it again, it sounds like you're talking about sort of expanding on the idea of self interest and the motivations in the state of nature to define them as maybe the seeking of power and including our own excellence, including what we might call virtues. Is that right?

30:33 Mark: Yeah. I'm a little thrown by like you were referring to the inclusion of glory and things is one of the, you know, how does that help you survive? By being able to say that you're great and better than other people. Like that doesn't really seem to have a direct. But he seems, you know, this is part of this drive that we have in ourselves, right. Competition, you know, to have other people look up to us and just to have glory. Like it seems there's only an indirect relationship between that and keeping my stuff safe and keeping myself safe.

31:04 Wes: Absolutely.

31:06 Seth: Are we disagreeing that basically he's saying that, you know, in the state of nature the impulse of, of all men is to self preservation? Because basically it's clear that there's this counterpoint to that, which is that there is obviously a bunch of people who have a, an impulse to glory and competition and diffidence, whatever that is, that really human nature is actually quite a bit more base. And it's not simply that we're all just trying to self preserve, but you as a kind of a reasonable person are self preserving against people who are very unreasonable. People who want your stuff or who take offense to a trifle or a word or a difference of opinion and those kinds of things.

31:49 Wes: It's interesting, I always think about in these sorts of situations, the Diary of Genghis Khan in which he. And that's another thing that Conan the Barbarian draws on. Genghis Khan is asked what's the best thing in life? And he says, to crush your enemies, ride their horses, sleep with their women. And he goes on and on and on for sentences, giving all these terrible things as sort of the moral imperative. I think the idea we're entertaining here is that beyond survival there's this idea of. So Genghis Khan is doing more than preserving himself, Right.

He's expanding an empire and he's exalting in his own power and the feeling of being the excellent warrior and so on and so forth. Hobbes tends to reduce all that to the need for preservation. Right. Everything is reducible to that even because again, it's that element of paranoia. But I think what Mark is suggesting is that we could entertain the idea that mere preservation isn't really the single motive in the state of nature, that it goes beyond that. Is that right, Mark?

33:02 Mark: Well, he does. I'm just still looking at the first page or so the conclusion of this it says. So that in the nature of man we find three principal causes of quarrel. First, competition. Secondly, diffidence. Thirdly, glory. So that's what Seth was referring to that before in terms of diffidence. And these are all reducible. He tries in the, in the three previous paragraphs to reduce these all to issues of self preservation. Competition is obvious, right? If other people want the food that you want, then you have to compete for it. Okay, the diffidence thing, it says, and from this diffidence of one another.

There is no way for any man to secure himself so reasonable as anticipation, that is by force or wiles to master the persons of all he can, so long till he sees no other power great enough to endanger him. So in other words, if I can make everybody my slave, then I don't have to compete with them because they'll just be obeying things. So that's one step beyond mere self preservation. That's setting up a sort of permanent system. And then in the third paragraph, again, men have no pleasure, but on the contrary, a great deal of grief in keeping company where there is no power able to overawe them all.

For every man looketh that his companion should value him at the same rate he sets upon himself and upon all signs of contempt or undervaluing natural endeavors as far as he dares. Which amongst them that have no common power to keep them quiet is far enough to make them destroy each other, to extort a greater value from his contemners by damage and from others by the example. So that sounds like Genghis Khan. That's what glory is all about, is by awing everybody else, they will become your slaves or defer to you in all things.

34:34 Wes: The question is whether that's motivated by this fundamental anxiety for preservation, right? If it's all reducible to that, or if there's something that goes beyond that, or if it is its own category and not reducible to self preservation.

34:51 Seth: So maybe I'm the one who's at fault for getting us kind of stuck on this track. But I kind of feel like the point is whether or not the fundamental issue here is whether there's self preservation or other motives. The reality is that what he's saying is without some kind of social structure, you are at risk, you have no security and your life is poor. At the very least, you are forced into a position of constantly striving to dominate everything around you in order to defend yourself or avert possible threats against yourself. And that that's not a desirable state you're constantly impelled to fight, and that really it's much more attractive for human beings to live in a state of the opposite of war, namely peace. And that that's really the motivation here.

35:47 Wes: And do we think that's true? In other words, we could imagine an alternative scenario and ask where that leads. What if the state of nature is noble savagery and hunting and gathering? And in that case the fundamental imperative isn't the need for preservation. And so you don't get a grounds for liberty, for instance, once you've set up society. I think that's an interesting alternative to think about, or that's something to keep in the back of our minds because we're getting a ground here for liberalism, for the idea of society as. As we understand it. And of course, the alternative conceptions are, let's say a communist conception might reject this idea of a state of nature.

36:31 Mark: Well, it seems like the different. If you want to learn more about the noble savage thing. Right. That's Rousseau. Right. Who is shortly after this. And then the other guy that really ran with this was John Locke, whose conception of the social contract had a great deal of influence on our own constitution. So, I mean, that's really the link that folks have to be aware of.

36:51 Seth: Why I'm not disagreeing with that. I'm merely pointing out that you're still name dropping. It's just not gratuitous name dropping, which is exactly what the rule is specified to.

37:00 Mark: Yes, exactly, exactly. And when I was looking at the portions of their writings that were talking about this in particular, they all seem to have a similar idea of what the social contract was, that we all implicitly make this deal because it's better for us to do so than us not to do so. And we make it due to human nature, and we make it as soon as we experience any of the benefits of society. And so therefore we're obliged to obey the laws. Now, what they differ in then is what kind of governments they recommend. Right. Hobbes thinks the state of nature is so bad that it doesn't matter how terrible the monarch you have, how un.

I was about to say how unjust his laws are. But by definition his laws cannot be unjust. According to Hobbes, that's where morality comes from, that's where justice comes from, is whatever the leader says, it's legal moralism. Whereas somebody like John Locke seems to have a better idea of human nature, such that if the monarch is too bad, we should overthrow the Monarch. That's not going to throw us immediately into chaos. No. We'll be able to regroup, refocus the social contract, put a different monarch. You know, in other words, the monarch is part of the social contract in a system like Locke's.

Whereas for Hobbes, the monarch doesn't sign anything. The monarch is just somebody we put up there because we need somebody to be in charge. And really. So the monarch has the same right that people do in nature.

38:24 Wes: Right.

38:25 Mark: Has the complete right to do whatever I was going to say he or she wants, but I think we can safely say he wants in Hobbes imagination here.

38:38 Wes: Well, this Queen Elizabeth is. Yeah, that's. It's around the time of.

38:41 Mark: Okay.

38:42 Wes: It's not too many. It's a decade or two before her. I think that this is published.

38:47 Mark: So it comes down to what the differences are about human nature. And this is why we're dwelling on this part, is that this is the fundamental postulate that's supposed to drive everything else in here, is that I phrased it in describing it to students, is that people are selfish. And one of you pointed out that he doesn't actually use the word selfish here. And I did a little.

39:08 Wes: He does, but he does talk about something very close. He does talk about self interest as being the fundamental motivator. The important point is to think about this foundational premise. Because if you attenuate or you get rid of this idea that we're all out for self preservation and that things are going to be nasty and brutish and short without authority, if you do away with that, then you have some radical consequences for what we get within society. So, for instance, the concept of liberty could be utterly transformed. And perhaps there are principles that go beyond liberty, so for instance, communal property and so on and so forth. But I think we've done a nice thorough analysis of that first.

39:57 Mark: Well, what do you think of that? I mean, that seems to be my initial gut reaction to why Hobbes is full of. It is this idea, which most people seem to agree with, that everybody is selfish, which seems to me to be. Well, to be selfish, you have to have some concept of self. You have to have some real concept of what your self interest is. And it doesn't explain, for instance, the ease in which people throw themselves into causes, the ease in which they will join up and fight in stupid wars and, you know, like the Hundred Years War between Protestantism and Catholicism over whether Jesus is in the bread when you eat it or not. Like there's. There's nothing. Saying that people are selfish does not explain why people would get hyper about

40:37 Wes: that or that self preservation is. Yeah, not just selfish, but self preservation people. Arguably, self preservation seems to be actually low on the list.

40:48 Seth: I think that's fair. At the same time, there's still something. And I, by the way, am very much a proponent that people are generally good. I'm very Anne Frankish in that way. But the point that he makes that you really have no true security, you have no sense of security, you have no guarantee of personal safety, of the security in your property or your family or whatever, until there is some kind of social structure in place where you and everybody who could possibly threaten you or who's likely to threaten you, you all agree to some sort of arrangement. I still think that's a very powerful idea.

41:33 Wes: Yeah, I agree.

41:33 Mark: Sure.

41:35 Seth: Well, look, he makes a point. He says, you know, there are people that say that it was never like this. Right. Because he's not claiming that this is some sort of evolutionary theory that, you know, we all started out this way and then you. You kind of enter into it. This is much more, to my mind, hypothetical. But he says there are places in the world where it's still kind of like this.

41:55 Mark: He says explicitly.

41:57 Seth: Yeah. And he cites America and then America. You know, my mind is immediately taken to, you know, like the Westerns, like Western movies where you've got these individual settlers who are out there kind of in the middle of nowhere and, you know, they're kind of in a state of nature. And there is something compelling about the idea that it's like, well, Joe or Jane, settler, can make an agreement with the other settlers that are within 40 miles. And the native.

42:25 Wes: Yeah, I was wondering if he was thinking about the Indians or the settlers, because.

42:31 Seth: Yeah, or the Indians.

42:33 Unknown speaker: Right.

42:33 Seth: But I mean, no, he is talking about the Indians.

42:38 Mark: I thought he was talking about the Indians.

42:39 Seth: The problem is the Indians never enter into a contract.

42:42 Wes: Right.

42:43 Seth: They never agree to be bound by the same.

42:45 Mark: Well, they are within their tribes, which is. You know, the way he talks about this is that it's not just a whole country getting together, that this happens on the family level. That as soon as two people get together, one is gonna more or less take charge. Right.

43:00 Wes: Yeah, I think I agree with you, Seth. I'm probably more pessimistic about human nature than you as well. And I think that regardless of whether we think that there are other irrational things going on, the state of nature is still not the place to be. On the other hand, it's Interesting that Hobbes is a die hard empiricist and he starts this treatise with epistemology and talking about sensations and imagination. And he does that in most of his writings. And here we have something that, you know, as you said, is hypothetical. And again, one could accuse him of sort of reverse engineering English common law and the state of English society to come up with the premise that would ground that.

43:47 Seth: Just trying to follow kind of, I think basically he's. That's a good question, I guess. What is he actually trying to accomplish here? Is he trying to found a moral philosophy? Is he trying to do some sort of natural law investigation? In other words, identify some kind of absolute or immutable laws through some sort of investigation of human nature? Or is he just trying to justify the contemporary political system? You know, is he another one of these guys that's like just trying to please the king or the archbishop or some, you know, some group of learned scholars?

44:23 Wes: Actually this leads to some interesting historical context. In fact, he got in trouble. So he wrote this actually in exile in France because of similar writings during the English Civil Wars. He was considered a royalist. So you're right, Seth, he may have done it at some point to please the king, but because he was considered a royalist, he basically had to get out of England and go hang out in France for I think it was something like 10 years. And at the very end of that time in France, he wrote this and then returned to England shortly thereafter.

44:55 Mark: And we should point out, which I think is fascinating, he's not relying just on this imaginary state of nature or referring to isolated savages for his evidence here, but he thinks that whenever there's no overarching authority between two people, then they're at this state of war. And he says that's the way it is for the sovereigns of all the various countries. So all countries, unless you have like an effect, even just having a treaty between two countries isn't going to do anything because it's not enforceable. As soon as one of the kings gets rascally and breaks the treaty, well, okay, then you're, you're. So you're still in a state of cold war, right? Of conflict could break out at any minute. As long as there's not some third party, the giant UN of the medieval world, ready to come down and wail on you.

45:43 Wes: So perhaps that's the best evidence for the state of nature, looking at this sort of proclivity for waging war when it's not really necessary. And then the idea he talks about spies. It's interesting, of course, that allies, countries within NATO, Britain and the United States still spy on each other. So there again, you have the state of war even when you're supposedly allies. There's always that fear that someday, you know, it'll be necessary.

46:12 Seth: Well, I guess then that that mark that kind of explains why he gets to this need for the absolute ruler. It's basically if even amongst nation states or countries or what have you, that you can't trust each other, that you still need some kind of third party. You keep needing a third party, there's always got to be somebody else until you eventually get to somebody who's ultimately trustworthy, all powerful and just and good and all that. Oh, I wonder who that would be.

46:40 Mark: They don't have to be just and good and trustworthy, they just have to be.

46:43 Seth: But there has to be one enforceable power. There has to be one that can enforce the power between everybody. And obviously you would prefer that that one be just and good, I suppose, than the alternative.

46:53 Wes: They still have to enforce covenants in certain ways, otherwise you get the same sort of chaos without some level of consistency. In other words, why is he enumerating all these rules about covenants and thou shalt not, you can't make a covenant with brute beasts and so on and so forth.

47:12 Seth: The rules that govern the covenants are determined by the people who enter into the covenants in a lot of ways. I mean, there's a few, you know, like I can't enter a covenant and give up my life to you, but that's the only rule we can agree to anything. And then all that the external power has to do is enforce that. If it's violated, right?

47:31 Wes: But if it's not enforced, impartially talks about the need for impartiality among judges, then I think you do start to get an element of that chaos. We could think about some contemporary situations like, say, oligarchs in Russia or countries where the mafia starts taking over because of the level of corruption within the government and so on and so forth.

47:54 Mark: I'm wondering if there's an inconsistency here, because if he says that you can't ask whether the tyrant is good or evil because the tyrant's law creates the concept for him of good. Obeying the tyrant is good, not obeying the tyrant is bad. So we're not in a position to judge these things. And certainly he believes no matter how bad the tyrant is, he definitely says this, it's still better than the state of Nature. So there's still no justification for overthrowing the tyrant. And in fact, if you say, well, we can mutually agree to whatever we want and the tyrant has to be there just to enforce that. Well, if the tyrant has the power of enforcement, the tyrant can also just redefine the entire thing. Right. Whoever has power sets the rules and sets morality.

48:41 Wes: And what's the purpose of all these rules that he's enumerating?

48:44 Mark: I took it that he's trying to understand the social contract itself, the covenant that we enter into by saying we're going to be part of society and give up our right to do whatever we want to the sovereign. That's the extent of the social contract. He's not saying that we make particular covenants about where my land ends and your starts. And the sovereign's going to enforce that? No, the sovereign can come along and screw with our land values as much as he wants. The only thing the sovereign can't do is just say, you have to let me kill you and not defend yourself. That that's the limit of the sovereign's power because it's just not in human nature to be able to get.

49:19 Seth: I feel. I feel compelled to point out that I'm not 100% sure that that was in the section that we read.

49:26 Mark: Which part?

49:27 Seth: The tyrant piece.

49:28 Mark: Well, they don't refer to it as the tyrant, but when they say that until there is a state, you're right. I'm extrapolating from some of what's in

49:34 Seth: this section just for the sake of any listener.

49:38 Mark: I haven't read any of the subsequent sections anytime recently. So I mean this.

49:42 Wes: So here's an example of. And maybe Hobbes is just inconsistent on this point, but here's an example of some of these rules that he's laying out. So if a man be trusted to judge between man and man, it is a precept of the law of nature that he deal equally between them. For without that, the controversies of men cannot be determined but by war. These principles are supposed to sort of flow from, you know, again, all from that initial law. And the question is now, and this is a classic contradiction, but in a way, it does seem like the sovereign would be bound by these in the sense that you would be returned to a state of war if he didn't. And there are many others. There's the talk of evidence obtained under torture, and they go on and on.

50:32 Seth: Wes, Actually, I'm glad you brought that up. I mean, first off, just the piece about torture, which I thought was topical. Because when I read this, there's that whole thing about Pelosi getting the memo about waterboarding. And he says basically, essentially that anything that people confess when they're being tortured is not really for the purpose of informing the torturers, but really is, for

50:54 Wes: some prisoners, no good information comes of it.

50:57 Seth: Yeah, you shouldn't. And this kind of gets to. I think what's kind of poetic about the text is that he's basically saying the state of nature is a state of war and that the opposite of that is really desirable, which is peace. And so during that whole section where he's talking about arbitrators and the mediators being allowed safe conduct and all that, is that basically anything you do which puts you in a position where you are taking advantage or being rude or expressing hatred, you know, anything that basically puts you in a state of war against somebody else is bad.

You know, whether you're just some guy and you're talking about some other guy, or whether you're the sovereign or what have you. One of his laws, right, is you should strive to accommodate yourself to the rest, like the greater society. If somebody you know is nice to you, you shouldn't give that person cause to repent their goodwill. If you're revenging yourself against somebody, you should be doing it for the value of how what you do is going to generate good in the future, not out of vengeance in the past. Right? Never declare hatred or contempt for another.

Right. You should always acknowledge others as equal. And the reason you do all these things is that if you don't, then you're basically gonna make people angry and put them back in the state of war with you. And that the goal is peace.

52:21 Mark: Right?

52:21 Seth: The goal is harmonious society.

52:23 Mark: So I see all these things, again with the context, is not that here are a bunch of rules we should live by. It's that these are things about human nature which motivate us to sign the social contract. And then including the part about torture I'm looking at right now is this is all in a discussion of what a covenant is, what a social contract could be. And so he's trying to give a defense for how he can justify saying that we have all by our own nature, signed this contract, you know, willingly. So if you kidnap somebody from another land and you bring them to your land and you treat them as a slave, they're not citizens, right?

They haven't signed the social contract. If you force them to do this kind of thing, you can sort of think about, well, if they're Peaceful and obedient, then it's going to. Maybe they've secured themselves a position and self preservation will advise that they obey the laws of the sovereign. But it doesn't seem like they're signers of the social contract in the sense that the rest of us are.

53:21 Seth: That may be true, but again, I don't think this is intended to be kind of an evolutionary description or what have you. I mean, none of us consciously take part in the social contract. I mean, we're born into it, right. And at a certain point if you violate any of these agreements, right, you go out and you do things that are against the social norms and those kinds of things, then you become an enemy of the state. You essentially put yourself in a state of war against the state. Now what he's saying is in the state of nature you put yourself in a state of war against individuals. And in that state you're not wrong. But if you choose not to participate in the social contract when there is a functioning social society, then you go to war with the state. In which case you are wrong.

54:04 Mark: Yep.

54:05 Wes: But there is still this tension. The one place in this reading where he does talk about the sovereign is in the case of rebellion. It's not permissible. And he does talk about consent there. So that it is that sort of social contract. Implicitly we've consented to the sovereign. But it seems to me that, you know, again, the tension is that if the sovereign behaves in such a way as to create what is close enough to a state of nature to have himself violated the contract or to not be enforcing anything that is, you know, noticeably different from the state of nature, then one might argue, well then rebellion is necessary again. So the question is, you know, Marx idea seems to be that if the sovereign stands completely outside of that contract, then we have a real problem. We can produce an inconsistency in Hobbes

54:58 Mark: picture as long as he doesn't go so far again as to actually murder you. Which is, which is a pretty big concession. But he really, his picture of the social contract is that we give up, you know, really the entirety of our power to the sovereign.

55:12 Wes: I think the sovereign can accept the

55:14 Mark: power of the murder.

55:14 Wes: You, you can't sign away. It's inalienable in the sense that you can't say, give me three apples and, and you can kill me after I eat the apples. The sovereign himself, though I'm not sure that Mark, you might know about this from other parts of the Leviathan, but I didn't gather that the Sovereign himself is bound by that.

55:34 Mark: No, actually, to be precise, what you can't sign away is your tendency to defend yourself. And again, I want to say the right to defend yourself. But he plays. This entire thing is trying to conflate the normative terms, like right. With the descriptive terms, like, you know, this is human nature, like tendency. So however you want to say it, your right to at least try to defend yourself when they come to get you is something you can't sign away. But that's really pretty small. That's pretty. Because how effective is that going to be if the army comes to get you to kill you? Like, okay, so when you fight back, we can't say you were wrong to fight back, but big deal, we can still take you in. We can kill you.

56:13 Seth: Well, I agree that during the course of the discussion, he conflates the normative and the descriptive. I mean, it's tough to tell whether he's prescribing or describing. But if I can refer to just towards the end of chapter 15, he has a sentence here where he says, the laws of nature are immutable and eternal for injustice, ingratitude, arrogance, pride, iniquity, exception of persons, and the rest can never be made lawful. For it can never be that war shall preserve life and peace, destroy it.

56:44 Wes: So that does seem to bind the

56:46 Seth: sovereign, I think very much so. And he says, you know, and this is the science of these natural laws is the true and only moral philosophy. Because moral philosophy is nothing else but the science of what is good and evil in conversation and society. Right. And so I really think that these rules of reason are these laws that he's coming up with, you know, even. And it's like, don't express hatred and don't. Whatever he believes these things follow from. And this gets back all the way to Wes's point earlier, which is, if there is this state of nature where you're at war, then the reaction to that, the appropriate, reasonable, quote, unquote, law of nature reaction to that is to endeavor towards peace.

And here are a bunch of things that put you in opposition to peace and in the state of war. Jealousy, hatred, avarice, iniquity, you know, a good word, arrogance, pride. And so he's basically saying there's this moral philosophy that's basically grounded on this natural philosophy or something along those lines.

57:53 Wes: And once you get inside the system, I think it's perfectly fine to be normative. You could frame everything as a hypothetical. For instance, you could say, well, if you don't want to return to A state of nature, then this is the way to go, I guess, or a sort of pragmatic. But you get the initial sort of descriptive situation and then you get a set of prudential commandments with the normative approach, do this, don't do this, so on and so forth.

58:22 Seth: I mean, you know, ultimately it sounds like what he's saying, Mark, is that even though he can kind of describe all this moral philosophy, there's a couple of points where he goes on to say, you know, like oaths and verbal covenants and all that stuff are just not sufficient, is that he's kind of acknowledging that there needs to be civil authority that exists to kind of enforce the moral code or to vouchsafe the moral interaction between individuals who want to act morally towards each other. And then going beyond that, if his logic leads him to the point where that has to be some kind of absolute authority that can do all the nasty things that, you know, are described, then I guess that's the way it is. But this idea that human beings should strive towards peace and away from war, I find, you know, very, very sure.

59:11 Mark: And. And, you know, it's a matter of, well, we should just read more Leviathan or whatever. But that means that we're starting to argue about what Hobbes actually means by some of this. Whereas the interpretation that I got out of Hobbes from reading this, and I guess this is just what I had been told earlier, is he's very much the royalist, like Wes was saying, and that the monarch is not part of the, you know, does not sign the contract. And so it gives a lot of room for the monarch to be selectively just. But you can, from some of the other things you're pointing out here, you can definitely see how one could read this and say, no, really, what follows from this is, you know, a pretty tightly constrained monarch.

And so you could see where somebody like John Locke would get all these ideas of rights of individuals. But really, you know, Hobbes doesn't talk like that. He wouldn't talk about the Bill of Rights or, you know, natural rights that people have. No, there's just this right or the liberty, the power that we have to do whatever we need to to survive. And then we give that up to the sovereign. So the sovereign therefore has all the rights and we have no rights other than, you know, the right to defend ourselves when they come to get us. That's what he explicitly says.

But, you know, so what? That's a silly thing. We're not going to really Buy that anyway. Why defend that?

1:00:19 Wes: He's more of a Scalia than a Ginsburg.

1:00:25 Seth: Hey, speaking of which, did you see Obama's nominee?

1:00:28 Mark: I thought it was Rousseau.

1:00:30 Seth: Very interesting. Obama nominated Rousseau.

1:00:36 Wes: Yeah, she's the right wing attack machine is already going at her.

1:00:43 Seth: She was confirmed by Republicans though, for her appellate position, wasn't she?

1:00:46 Wes: Oh, that doesn't matter though. Yeah, I think she's been twice confirmed. But you, the torture memo guy just published a column saying when compassion trumps excellence or something. Because famously Obama mentioned compassion as one

1:01:02 Seth: of his criteria, suggesting that she has no excellence.

1:01:06 Wes: Yeah. And it's just because she's a minority and this and that.

1:01:12 Seth: There's a lot of hatred. What can I say?

1:01:14 Wes: But there again is a very Hobbesian question. You know, was compassionate, legitimate, still try

1:01:21 Mark: to justify after the fact. You're totally doing that,

1:01:26 Wes: Mark. I thought you wanted us to be ours.

1:01:28 Mark: Actually, I'm totally for that because we were being very dry and interpreting Hobbes. And really what I want to get into is not about what did Hobbes think about this? But what do we actually think about this? So we had a couple, we talked about, are people actually selfish? Did we already exhaust that as a foundation for all morality? Like almost everybody in the class I taught said, oh yeah, everybody's really selfish. That's whenever you come up with an example of when they're not selfish, then, you know, Mother Teresa doesn't seem selfish. Well, she was just doing good things because it made her feel good, because she thought it would get to heaven. So we're all. We're all selfish. Right. That's

1:02:04 Seth: the thing that kind of strikes me is that there's a big part of this that we haven't really talked about where he makes a point of saying that the covenant is actually between individuals or between an individual and other individuals, that you own that right that you give up in the state of nature. You can go to war with anybody over anything, so to speak.

1:02:24 Mark: Yep.

1:02:25 Seth: And so you make the conscious choice as an individual to sacrifice the liberty that you have to go and do whatever you want, but you do it vis a vis another individual for a specific purpose. All the rest of the stuff is just the structure that's in place to enforce that agreement. I think that's a very profound concept. The social contract. Ultimately, you know, it's about individuals and people facing each other and making choices and sacrificing in order to live in harmony or to live in this state of peace with other individuals. And it's really only because they take it on faith and they need some kind of external justification that you need.

All of the civil society, if everybody could swear an oath to God and that was sufficient, that would be enough, right? Like, there's a point where he goes on about how an oath on top of a promise or, you know, a good word isn't enough. But if somehow swearing an oath to God was sufficient to enforce these contracts, then we would never even need any civil society. There would just be a bunch of individuals wandering around making agreements with each other. Now, that may in itself be questionable and unfeasible. You know, ultimately, when it comes to industry and all the rest of the things that come along.

But I think the idea that individuals have the power to engage each other, to build bonds and agreements and covenants and ultimately all those things that he described that you can't have, industry, agriculture, society, arts, letters and all that kind of stuff, really, government is just this necessary evil that we have in order to make sure that those things can subsist and thrive. I quite like it.

1:04:07 Wes: I think you're right, Seth. What's also interesting about it is that the kind of peace that's forged within the social isn't possible without that state of war of all against all where he talks about when push comes to shove, everyone is equal in their abilities. You know, if you're not big and strong, you can be crafty, or you could use your political charm to get together a group of compatriots. So it's the kind of peace that comes out of that and the concept of liberty and equality. If it weren't the case that people were equal in their abilities in the state of nature, you might just have power naturally congeal and you'll have some tribal authority. And there the sovereign is not a foundation for covenants and for the equal liberties of human beings. It's just the raw congealing of power among the people who happen to be the strongest.

1:05:06 Seth: I am so glad you brought that up. I wrote it down in my notes, and then we haven't come back to it. But he really does say something fundamentally powerful when he says, hey, people are essentially the same. People are basically endowed with the same faculties. You know, there's some that are stronger. And he says people are more alike in mind, with the exception of the arts grounded upon words and science. So, you know, there's definitely some people who are more articulate and I guess who have more of a facility for math and those kinds of things.

But his point is that if people are basically equal, then they basically have an equality of desires, you know, and hopes and dreams. And that's something that's like, radical. I would assume he's not hypothesizing, even though implicitly right. Of course, women and children and dogs and things like that don't count. He's really talking about, you know, men, but white men. White men. But, you know, his general point is that you can't look at another human being, or if I generalize, you can't look at another person and say, yeah, you know what, it's unjust or improper for them to want the same things that I do, because it's not.

And this whole thing is just a way of trying to explain how society exists to both constrain and also free individuals to interact with each other.

1:06:31 Wes: And that freeing element, again, just because I think this sort of paradox is one of the very interesting things about Hobbes observation. There's something fortuitous about the state of nature being as nasty and brutish as it is. If it weren't, if again, if power tended to congeal and if it really didn't come down to all against all, you would never get the need for a social contract. You would never be able to found peace, let's say, without the specific type of war that he's talking about, where people's capacities are equal.

1:07:09 Mark: Sort of wondering how deeply this egalitarian runs. That I read it as the way he states it at the beginning of our selection is a very practical matter that, however you want to talk about, whatever people mean when they say somebody is better than somebody else, it doesn't translate into being significantly better able to survive in the state of nature. So even if you are a Herculean, super impressive individual, well, five other lesser people can get together and clobber you. And I guess there's also a cynical thing about wit that he says in there.

You know, everybody thinks that they're smarter than everybody else, but really when it comes down, you know, there's not that great a difference between people. And he definitely believes that to the extent that he has that phenomenological part of his approach that I talked about earlier, which is he thinks that we can figure out human nature by just reflecting on ourselves. In other words, we must all be fundamentally similar. If that were to be possible, that's not a proof of the egalitarianism, but it means he sure believes it.

1:08:18 Wes: Right. And it's certainly plausible to argue the opposite, that it's the strong who end up ruling and the weak are subjected. And there is a moral element to there. There's that idea of might being right. And if you're stronger, you have a kind of excellence that makes you better than others.

1:08:35 Seth: Well, you don't have to enter into a contract. If there was any implicit or inherent superiority amongst somebody for certain traits or certain breeding or class or skin color or whatever, then those people would have no reason to enter into a social contract.

1:08:52 Wes: Well, with each other they might among

1:08:54 Seth: themselves, but they wouldn't with other people.

1:08:56 Wes: Right. You might, for instance, have a class of ubermensch who have a social contract among themselves, but then have slaves or oppress everyone else, which is sort of the model for serfdom, for instance.

1:09:09 Seth: But he's saying that would still be the state of war. I mean, that's profound, right? For him to say, look, if there's anybody who's being oppressed, who is having hatred expressed towards them, who is not getting fair judgment in the law, who is not free to sacrifice their liberty to do whatever they want to enter into contracts with, basically, if you are not in possession of whatever it takes to enter into a contract with somebody else, then you are in a state of war and you are not getting the same treatment as everybody else. I mean, that's pretty significant, particularly from an American perspective with this whole, you know, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

1:09:51 Unknown speaker: Yeah, well.

1:09:52 Mark: And even though he was defending royalism, I believe he got a lot of flack from the royalists at the time because he wasn't giving a traditional defense, the divine right of kings, that he's really saying somebody has to be in charge. And so stuff somebody up there, it doesn't even really matter.

1:10:13 Wes: The one line summary of the Leviathan, someone has to be in charge.

1:10:20 Seth: It's funny because my fiance and I started watching, like the Tudors. I find the character in the Tudors of Henry VIII to be totally objectionable in every possible way. His constant changing of the law and having his guys find ways around the law and all this kind of stuff means he's absolutely not the right kind of Leviathan type leader that Hobbes was thinking of.

1:10:44 Wes: It's good to be the king.

1:10:45 Seth: It is good to be the king. At least if you're to believe this television series it is, that's for sure.

1:10:51 Mark: What else is there to believe?

1:10:54 Seth: That's a good question.

1:10:56 Mark: I believe that in the future, you know, we have holy texts now. I believe that certain TV shows will be regarded as scripture in the future.

1:11:06 Seth: Hey, which reminds me, I caught a few Minutes of something called, like, Trekkies 2.

1:11:13 Mark: Okay, yeah, I remember. Trekkies 1 is the documentary.

1:11:17 Seth: Yeah, there was a documentary called Trekkies that I don't know who made, but they made a follow on to it. And the woman who played Tasha Yar in, I want to say, Next Generation, Crosby.

1:11:30 Mark: Yes, yes.

1:11:31 Seth: Goes around, travels all over the world and visits these Trekkies. And for these people that are interviewed in this documentary, in many ways they all kept talking about the message of the television shows and the message of the movies, about how it espouses these moral values and is a guide to live by and all that. And in many ways, it is a sacred text or a sacred series of texts for them. And I absolutely believe, absolutely believe that people will believe that. I mean, I have a book called something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy and angel and Philosophy.

And now for my birthday, I just received a house and Philosophy. And, you know, there's definitely the will to read TV shows and movies and so forth as texts and to divine meaning and so forth. Now, whether that's playing fast and loose with the concept of a scripture or what's holy or sacred or whatever is another question. But people are seeking that kind of thing. They're looking for that.

1:12:39 Wes: It's interesting. I was actually very excited to go see the latest Star Trek movie. And I was trying to think about, I'm not a Trekkie, but what is it that creates that excitement? And I was telling people, well, it's sort of the mythology of our generation. I remember Wrath of Khan as campy and all that, and Kirk staring up and screaming Khan and all that stuff. It sort of becomes ingrained and it's a decade later. Again, there is something that sort of has that mythological air about it because we really don't have, you know, of course, biblical stories for most of us don't have that resonance. We weren't raised with them in the same way that we were raised, for instance, with Star Trek.

1:13:22 Mark: Well, I guess I've observed that a lot of big, established cultural stories, I guess, for instance, I've been reading, just a few years ago, started reading comics. I'd never read any comics before. And so I'm like tripping over these, like, getting into Marvel, which has been going on since the 60s, and this thing building up, and DC, which has been going since the 40s, and these giant mythologies and these really smart people now who are writing these cutting edge things like exploring, like Watchmen that just came out as a movie, is Alan Moore, who wrote that has many, many, many, pretty much every aspect of what it is to be a superhero or the weird idiosyncrasies of how Superman doesn't make any sense is explored in one another of his comics.

And, and so there are all these like, you know, very philosophical things built on a foundation of unreadable crap. Like if you actually go back and read the 1940s Superman or whatever, like, they're not good. They're written toward 8 year olds. They're supposed to be toward 8 year olds. And so it's the same thing. Like Star wars has such a resonance and people are, you know, writing Jedi as their religion on things, but yet it's silly. Come on. The fundamental texts are stupid. And, and I'd actually say the same is true for the Bible itself, but that's probably not.

1:14:40 Seth: Dude, not the place.

1:14:42 Mark: Dude, seriously, not the place to go. Okay, never mind, Never mind.

1:14:45 Seth: No, listen, you can, you can throw out that, that Star wars is stupid and derivative because it is. It entertaining, but it's stupid and derivative. But this is the thing that people

1:14:55 Wes: are defiling my, my religion.

1:14:58 Seth: I'm, I'm being, no, I am being facetious, but no, I was just watching, I was just watching the, the, I think it was Sci FI Channel or TNT or something, was showing the trilogy, the second half of the trilogy, which was the first one to come out this weekend. And, you know, and I was watching Empire Strikes Back and just marveling at how, you know, how much better that one was than anything that came after it.

1:15:21 Mark: But it's still, it still can't be cheese dip and it's supposed to be good. I totally enjoy it. I get where you're going from.

1:15:28 Wes: It is. We used to listen to the soundtrack with all the dialogue in our dorm room. And it's amazing when you listen to it, when you're just listening to the dialogue, how bad it all is. And yet it's a great story.

1:15:39 Seth: It is, it is. And that's the whole thing, is that it combines this visual with the. The key is that a text is all about the dialogue. It's all about the story. It's all about the words. And the reason the Bible is such a great book for any number of, you know, God. What am I saying? How did I get to the point where I'm defending the Bible?

1:15:56 Mark: Because I was.

1:15:57 Wes: I know.

1:15:59 Mark: Look, a lot of people that make biblical religion the centerpiece of their life have read very little of the Bible

1:16:04 Seth: that I agree with.

1:16:05 Mark: And when they read portions of it, like, okay, I Start in Genesis and get to the bats and get to the really painful parts. Like, I'm not saying there's nothing, you know, great to read. There's no great poet. Of course, there's a lot of great poetry in the Bible and things. But as far as what is built around it is only tangential. Whatever the historical ties to the central texts, that's not how people live it. That the cultural things that we create out of these stories, out of these myths, are so much bigger than the little things that initially sparked them off. And so I'm just, you know, making a goofy analogy that it's probably not worth defending or exploring much between, you know, how that's not unique to religion, all sorts of these cultural endeavors. And you can use the word myth, like Wes was to talk about this kind of stuff.

1:16:52 Seth: That's fair. I'm okay with that. I just.

1:16:55 Mark: I mean, actually, this certainly doesn't go for all portions. You know, it seems like the classical music subculture is based on Bach or something. That you could actually go into Bach and like, wow, that's freaking. That's genius. And we can say the same thing in philosophy. Like, we go back to Descartes, but, you know, just as often, it almost doesn't matter whether these seed materials that give birth to everything else, whether they themselves are any good or not. It's this massive thing that they give birth to. And we can say the same thing about Hobbes just. Just to try to.

1:17:30 Seth: Well, is it.

1:17:30 Wes: Let me ask this circle.

1:17:32 Seth: Yeah. Is it a fair. Is it a fair statement to say that, like, in terms of the political philosophy that ultimately informs the founding fathers of the United States, that he's kind of the beginning of that line of thinking that ultimately leads to the guys who, you know, ultimately write our Constitution and all that? I mean, I think that's fair. Right? I mean, to say that.

1:17:57 Mark: Yep. Yep.

1:17:58 Wes: It should all seem very, very familiar.

1:18:00 Seth: Yeah. That this stuff should resonate with Americans in particular, even though it's ironically very royalist and British in some respects, is that a lot of these principles are going to find their way into what ultimately is life, liberty, and the perspective, pursuit of happiness.

1:18:15 Wes: Right.

1:18:16 Seth: Super. Good enough reason for us to read it.

1:18:19 Mark: So what about the argument about the social contract in itself? All these guys who follow him argue that we have all implicitly signed the social contract. And so because we are enjoying the fruits of society, we have an obligation to obey all of its laws is really what it comes down to. So, for instance, fuck that.

1:18:37 Wes: I'm an Anarchist.

1:18:39 Mark: So, for instance, you should not be copying CDs or something else that maybe lots of people do that they think is harmless. And, well, you know, I. I obey the spirit. I have some other moral justification for it. You know, it doesn't actually do any harm to who I think it is, but, you know, it's a law, so. Or pick your favorite law that you think is a little trivial. You know, speeding, whatever. If I speed a little bit and I'm being safe, that what's important is how conscious I am with the road, how likely I am to be in an accident, not actually obeying the letter of the law, but according to the social contract theory, no, you are obliged to obey the letter of the law. You have assented. You're being irrational by not doing so.

1:19:16 Seth: Well, I think ultimately I didn't assent. I mean, no, I mean, you're born into it. And the problem is there's ascent.

1:19:27 Wes: The ascent is the enjoyment of its protection implicit. Right.

1:19:29 Mark: You said before we make conscious we consciously sign this. But no, he's actually arguing you do not. Upon reflection, you can see, oh, okay, I guess I am rationally committed to this.

1:19:39 Wes: But speeding is the slippery slope to the kind of chaos that'll lead to your dismemberment.

1:19:47 Seth: Well, I don't know about that. I mean, how. When, how bad?

1:19:50 Wes: Max style.

1:19:51 Seth: How exactly when I speed, am I somehow entering into a state of war with other people?

1:19:58 Wes: Because you're undermining the enforcement.

1:19:59 Mark: You're so making me want to talk about the categorical imperative that it's. But I won't.

1:20:04 Wes: He does give a. To use a fancy term, deontological description of duty in this very Kantian, do you remember that? An obligation.

1:20:16 Seth: So basically we have to assume that the laws are there in place because they protect us from a state of war and maintain the peace, whether we understand that or not. Because now society is complex enough that we can't track everything and understand every relation to every other human being. So if you violate a law, you're being irrational.

1:20:38 Mark: You're contradictory.

1:20:39 Seth: You're being irrational.

1:20:40 Mark: Yep. I don't buy that.

1:20:42 Seth: I don't either. But you know, I still think that that's kind of like an extrapolation or it's the second part of his argument. And that.

1:20:50 Wes: So it's his idea. This is relevant, his idea of contradiction. I'll read a little bit. So that injury or injustice in the controversies of the world is something like to that which in the disputations of scholars is called absurdity. For as it is there called an absurdity to contradict what one maintained in the beginning. So in the world it is called injustice and injury voluntarily to undo that which from the beginning he had voluntarily done. So there's this idea of. This is what I called Kantian, the idea that the law in some sense comes from within, in this case, by our consent. So on the one hand we've consented, and on the other hand we've broken the law. And so we've essentially contradicted ourselves. It's like violating the law of contradiction.

1:21:48 Mark: But on the other hand, I guess we're seeing again the same possible inconsistency in Hobbes, that on the one hand, what's important is obeying the sovereign because the sovereign is the one who makes up the law. But on the other hand, you could extrapolate from this all sorts of moral rules that seem to apply to us individually and that any good government should enforce. And so those are the ones like if I actually kill somebody, that's really contributing a lot more toward undermining the social contract than my speeding a little when I think it's safe to do so. So on one interpretation of Hobbes, which is the one that is more plausible that John Locke or somebody runs with, it's not really obeying the letter of the law. It's not doing the sorts of things that would put you in a state of war. That's what's really violating the spirit of what you have signed in the social contract.

1:22:40 Wes: But I think for Hobbes, and I think you're right, there is this tension again, in the sense that there could be laws which in fact are likely to promote a state of war. But I think for Hobbes, it doesn't matter. I'm sure it matters. In a sense, there are greater or lesser infractions, and of course there are greater or lesser punishments. But still you've contradicted yourself when you break the speed limit. I guess the question is just how many times you're willing to.

1:23:06 Mark: We do have the same problem. You just. You brought up Kant, I brought up the categorical imperative. We should probably just say something about this. But it's a consistency thing, right? Don't do anything that you couldn't will that everybody do all the time. So if I break a law. Well, if everybody broke laws all the time, then there would be no society. But Kant himself runs into problems in making that consistent, that if in order to preserve a life, I have to break a law. Well, if everybody blew off things that would preserve a life. Then we'd all be dead and that would be a contradiction. I would be dead. I couldn't be making this decision right now. But yet if I blow off the law, then there'd be a problem there. So there's the same kind of problem in Kant itself as we're seeing here. Maybe in a subliminal way in Hobbes.

1:23:48 Wes: Just one note too, by the way, Hobbes does address the question of a higher law, for instance. And the idea that you've recognized that a law is in fact unjust and evil closes on that criticism. I think one of his arguments is that you can't know, for instance, what the higher laws are. You're not receiving commandments from God as if you were Moses, and so you're ignorant of that. And so all you're left with is compliance with the actual law of your society. So it's not for you to say whether the infraction is minor or whether

1:24:18 Mark: so very much not like Kant.

1:24:22 Seth: It seems pretty clear we're going to have to read Kant pretty soon since you guys are in love with him.

1:24:29 Wes: Oh yeah.

1:24:31 Mark: Anything else to talk about with the Social Contract? Do you like the idea that you've consented? I don't like being told I've implicitly consented to things that makes me feel icky. What else have I implicitly consented to that I'm not aware of?

1:24:45 Seth: Well, I guess this would be my time now to do a gratuitous name drop. Heidegger had this concept of thrown ness that you're basically born into a kind of socio political, geographical, historic context that you can't control and that you're not really in a position to choose to make an active decision to participate in where you get thrown. Like we didn't sign up to become 40 something. Are you guys. You guys are close to 40? Close.

1:25:18 Mark: Couple years shy.

1:25:20 Seth: Jesus. Really? All right, 37. Wow. Okay. I'll be 38.

1:25:24 Mark: I'll be 38.

1:25:25 Wes: The baby okay.

1:25:27 Mark: A few months.

1:25:27 Seth: Well, I guess we're close enough near 40. In the neighborhood. In the neighborhood of 40,

1:25:34 Wes: but let's not say that.

1:25:36 Seth: So let's put it this way.

1:25:38 Wes: You in the neighborhood of 35, you

1:25:39 Seth: guys didn't choose to be born into the United States in.

1:25:44 Wes: In the neighborhood of 40, you know,

1:25:45 Seth: in the post World War II era, blah blah, blah, blah, blah, you never made a conscious choice to uphold or adhere to the laws of the United States. It's just that's what you got born into, that's what you got stuck with. And to that extent, you have made an implicit choice because you haven't become outlaws or moved to another country, I guess, which would, you know, be more of an explicit choice. But you know, as long as you're relatively law abiding citizens of the country that you live in, you've made the implicit choice choice to follow those norms.

And as long as you are reasonably accommodating to other people, you've made that choice. So. And maybe this goes back to episode number one where we looked at the unexamined life. I mean, if you don't thoroughly investigate all of your motivations and your reasons for your concepts of justice and really grill and turn over all of the principles that your society is founded upon. Yeah. Guess what? Feel icky because you've implicitly accepted it. Sorry.

1:26:52 Mark: Well, we at least moved out of Texas.

1:26:58 Seth: Oh, wait a second. Is that where this is gonna go? We're gonna have a Madison, Wisconsin v Austin, Texas discussion?

1:27:09 Mark: Boston too?

1:27:10 Seth: I got nothing, nothing bad to say about Boston. Wes also didn't say anything about escaping from Texas. Actually, I'm becoming more of a Texan and more of kind of a. A Texas nationalist as. As time goes on. I like it here more to Stevie

1:27:28 Mark: Ray Vaughan and his descendants and.

1:27:31 Seth: No, no, no, no. We have plenty of other options. No, I just. I begin to appreciate the character of this place more and more.

1:27:38 Wes: It's called going native.

1:27:39 Seth: Going native? Yeah.

1:27:43 Wes: You've gotten used to the nastiness and brutishness.

1:27:46 Seth: Yeah. Austin, not so much, maybe. I'll tell you what, you guys would have a legitimate criticism of me if I lived in Dallas.

1:27:52 Wes: Yeah, no, Austin's. Austin's a great city.

1:27:55 Mark: I wouldn't have mind staying there. It was not my choice to leave. I implicitly said, okay, it's the music

1:28:02 Wes: capital of the world.

1:28:04 Seth: It's the live music capital of the world. Right. So they say live music. All right, I think we're done with Hobbes. I'm happy to talk about other things,

1:28:16 Wes: but Hobbes is not an easy one. Make interesting. I thought that was pretty good.

1:28:20 Seth: I think the text spoke for itself. I was really dreading it to some extent. And then when I read it, I was like, oh, this is quite interesting. And there are a few little poetic passages, but anytime anybody uses things like the fruit thereof, I mean, those kinds of phrases just get me going. It's very biblical.

1:28:41 Mark: I get the sense in the more elaborative, listy parts of it that it's like writing the rules of the clubhouse. Like there's that sort of arbitrariness and satisfaction of writing things.

1:28:52 Wes: Oh, girls, we think.

1:28:54 Mark: Number one.

1:28:55 Wes: I have to admit I did go through some of it pretty quick.

1:28:59 Mark: Number one, there shall be no girls. But if, if you, if there's a fire and you have to bring a girl up to put out the fire, you could do that.

1:29:10 Wes: And look, if there's one recipe for chaos, it's girls. That's really the origin of the state of nature. Look at the Iliad. What is it that led to warfare between clans? It was women.

1:29:22 Seth: Very true.

1:29:23 Mark: It was the gods. The gods and the goddesses were at fault.

1:29:26 Seth: Well, what I like is that it's almost like he's implying that there's this sequence to these laws. Like, well, here's a fifth law. The sixth law is, oh, you ought to pardon an offense if somebody asks for your forgiveness. Like, oh, really? I guess that naturally follows from complaisance, you know.

1:29:44 Mark: Like what exactly sort of complaisance? Acting like things that are somewhat arbitrary are not.

1:29:53 Seth: Yeah, listen, there's far from anything even close to resulting from, say, proof or deduction. And this is very much kind of like, it's very speculative. But no, I spent the whole week prior to this. Like I was watching all of these videos on YouTube about interviews and documentaries about Heidegger and Hannah Arendt and Jaspers and all this kind of stuff, but there's an actual recorded interview with Bertrand Russell. They're talking about how he got to the point that he became such a moral, you know, because he was very much like a pacifist and you know, all these kinds of things.

And just hearing him talk about like, oh, I know this is church with all of these other like anti war guys. And these guys busted in on us with boards that had nails through them and started beating up the women and children. And I was thinking, oh, I'm for it. And then somebody said, I'm a famous important person and the police came and saved me. You know, I mean, he's. But he says things like, I couldn't bear the thought of hundreds of millions of people dying because our rulers are stupid and wicked. And it's really. I felt a lot of the vibes coming out of Hobbes, you know, that kind of like British sort of grounded moral.

I don't know what to call it, but it's very, very interesting.

1:31:10 Wes: Yeah, that is interesting.

1:31:13 Mark: Hey, thanks for everybody for a great discussion. Next time.

1:31:18 Wes: So much enthusiasm.

1:31:20 Mark: Next time we're going to talk about Albert Camus Camus. Camus apostrophe s.

1:31:29 Seth: Let's rub Kamuzes.

1:31:31 Mark: Next time we're going to talk about Albert Camus, absurdity and suicide and the myth of Sisyphus, both of which will be on a single URL linked from our webpage partiallyexaminedlife.com and we will always put the next reading up there far in advance of when you need to listen to us talk about it. And people can also go to the Facebook page and tell us how great they think Hobbes is. Right? Wouldn't you want to do that?

1:32:01 Wes: How great we are as compared to Hobbes?

1:32:05 Mark: That Hobbes dog ain't got nothing on you, Seth, says one gentle reader.

1:32:15 Seth: Clearly not.

1:32:16 Wes: And if no one comments, we're gonna have to go in and make up our own and pretend to be listeners.

1:32:21 Mark: I hear that there's a Wes fan club already coming together. They call themselves the Wespians.

1:32:28 Wes: It's. It's really frightening.

1:32:32 Mark: And they wear T shirts with I'm

1:32:34 Wes: going to have some really bad dreams now.

1:32:38 Mark: Except we don't have your photo on the website yet, so they just have to put your name on the T shirt. It's not a very effective T shirt.

1:32:48 Wes: Quite a few of my friends have listened to it. They seem to like it.

1:32:51 Seth: Oh, that's awesome. People whose judgment you trust are just friends.

1:32:56 Wes: Yeah, people whose judgment I trust.

1:32:58 Seth: That was a joke.

1:33:02 Wes: Some people seem pretty enthusiastic.

1:33:05 Mark: Well, I guess we'll know for sure when we put up a way to buy T shirts and see how many people will pay.

1:33:13 Seth: Let the merchandising begin.

1:33:15 Mark: $34.95 for a T shirt.

1:33:18 Wes: Nice. Yeah, those are gonna sell like hotcakes.

1:33:26 Unknown speaker: Sam, I begin to come and show you some things that I picked up since I last was here to show you I was moving and I know the fears have gotten to you I saw me they've gotten to you do you know the way to kill to carry on. With the deepest future headache of this? You felt I would lose your design of a favor for that dress of yours the one without the back for the final flesh mistaken when I touch up what's mine And I know the fears have gotten to you I saw me and they've gotten to you do you know the way for you to carry on? And I know the fears have gotten to you I'm so mean they gotten to you do you know the ways I kill to carry on.

It. Sailing and cold they own a river at the south of N I begin to sit there with you and try to be you well, if I can I'd like to show you that moved way on and I know the fe have gotten to your I'm so They've gotten to you do you know the way to give to carry on? And I know the feelings have gotten to you I'm so mean They've gotten to you do you know the way to kill to carry on?