ARISTOTLE

The State Exists by Nature

In order to understand anything, you must look at the smallest parts. Its natural that things which are incomplete should seek the things that complete them. For example: 1. Male & Female 2. Natural Rulers and the Ruled (Master/Slave) both need each other Female and Slave are different Non-Greeks dont recognize this, which is why they should be ruled by Greeks. Households are made up of the two associations: Man and Woman, Man and Labor (Slave or Ox). Households meet day-to-day needs. When several households get together to meet needs other than day-to-day, a village is formed. The village is a higher degree of a household. Just as men make the rules in their houses, somebody rules the village. The final step is that villages get together to form the state (a government) so that all needs can be met. It happens to get needs met, but it stays because it is good. It is whole and complete in this form. The state exists by nature and man is by nature fit for state. Men without state are wretched, lonely, and keen to go to war.

THOMAS HOBBES

The Misery of the Natural Condition of Mankind

Men are equal. In body, the weakest can kill the strongest (by secret planning or working with others)In the mind, they are even more equal. You can gain good judgment through experiencing things, which everyone gains equally. Although any person may admit that others are smarter, funnier, or better speakers, few people think there are many so wise as them. You KNOW what you know. If everybody is equal, if two men want the same thing that they cant both have, they will fight for it, becoming enemies. If youve got something in demand, you can count on somebody coming to take it. You cant defend yourself against this except to dominate enough people that you are strong enough to be safe. Men fight for 1. Gain (what they want) 2. Safety (to protect what they have) and 3. Glory (to protect their name/reputation). Without law, men live in a state of war. Not a war of battles, but a war like a stretch of bad weather that goes on and on with no end in sight. In the state of nature/war, there would be no security, no inventions, no culture, no knowledge or learning, no sense of time, and continual fear. The life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Proof: you lock your doors even though you HAVE laws and Government. This state of perpetual fear exists often in kings, but they keep their countries safe, so their people do not feel it. Nothing is wrong until there is a law against it. In the state of war, every action is justified. Every man for every man, get what you can get and keep it for as long as you can. Men are inclined to make peace to avoid fear and death, they want to live easily and to keep what they work for. These things make them work together to make peace and eventually, a government.

John Locke

The State of Nature and the State of War

To understand political power and governments, we need to understand the natural state of men, a state where they are perfectly free, within the law of Nature. In a state of nature, also needs to be a state of equality. But a state of nature it not a state of do-whatever-you-want. You cant harm another persons life, health, liberty or possessions. (we are all Gods property dont mess with Gods stuff!) The only reason you could do that would be to do justice and punish somebody. Everybody has a right to punish people who break the laws of nature, but you cant punish with vengeance, you may only punish as fits the crime. You should punish to 1. Fix it and 2. Prevent it. Offenders dont live by Gods rules and that makes them dangerous. Every man needs to protect the species, teach the offender a lesson and prevent it from happening again. Proof that laws of nature exist: Foreigners in a country can be punished for breaking the laws even though they have no allegiance to that country. There must be natural rules, even without government. Everybody can punish an offender, but only the injured can say what will fix/forgive. To prevent crime, you gotta do what you can. There IS justification in putting murderers to death, they are like man animals that must be put down. In punishing, it is too easy for men to go easy on their friends and harder on their enemies and that is why we need government, to balance that out. Of course, governments are made up of individuals who have the same flaws. The state of nature is a state of Peace and Equality, it is only when one group breaks the laws of nature that there needs be any war.

Baron de Montesquieu

Fear and Peace

Man is a physical being, governed by physical laws. (like gravity!) Because man is so intelligent, he frequently breaks these laws of God. He is smart and passionate and busy and he forgets God. Religion is created to remind him of his duty. He also might forget his fellow man, and this is why governments and laws, to remind him of his moral duty to other humans. To understand mans laws, we must understand man before society existed. Man wouldnt know anything other than himself. He would think only of his own preservation and would feel only his own weakness. FIRST: He would be afraid, trembling at the motion of a leaf and flying from shadows. Men wouldnt be in danger of wars, they would be too afraid of each other to attack one another. Hobbes is wrong about this. He is looking at todays man and then tracing that backwards. Its not correct. SECOND: Next to his weakness, man would start to feel what he wants, namely, he wants nourishment. Although he would be afraid of other people, he would eventually figure out that other people were afraid too, so they would agree to work together. THIRD: He would start to feel the attraction of man and woman. Because he is not an animal, because he can learn and can cooperate, men can unite with one another and FOURTH: he desires to live in a society.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The Noble Savage

Other philosophers have tried to describe the state of nature but they havent done it right. They are looking at todays men, not truly savage men. Animals in the wild are much stronger than animals raised in captivity. This is also true for men, especially so because men indulge themselves. Primitive men dont worry that they have no clothing. They get along just fine with the basics. It makes no sense for men to invent things that they have survived without their whole lives. Besides, you can only work for things that you either can imagine or things you desire by instinct. Since savage men arent really smart, they cant imagine things and cant invent things. He only wants 1. Food, 2. Female, and 3. Sleep. He only fears pain and hunger (he cannot imagine death). Men would have no reason to associate with other men, so you couldnt really say whether men as a whole would be good OR bad, you could only look at individuals actions as good/bad on whether or not those are helpful or hurtful. For certain you cant agree with Hobbes and say that he is bad because he doesnt know good. Hobbes sees all the problems of modern men. Savages arent bad because they dont know good and its not the knowledge of that or laws that keep them from being bad. They dont know the difference! Animals have compassion for one another, and dont like to see each other suffer. The same is true for man. Men would be just like animals, without speech who could not learn or advance as a species, but would just survive.

Robert Owen

Mans Character Is Formed for Him

Weve long believed that man was totally accountable for his own actions, but that is a BIG mistake! It generates and perpetuates ignorance, hatred and revenge, where, without such error, only intelligence, confidence and kindness would exist. If we didnt set up society around this idea, it would be so much better! Your character is formed for you. Your parents gave you the beliefs, ideas, habits which you base your actions upon and YOU CANT CHANGE THAT!! Society has always been set up on the FLAWED principles that: 1. Man makes his own character, 2. he can choose who/what he likes and 3. that some must be in poverty so that other can be happy. But this only causes ignorance, poverty and vice. Facts Prove: 1. Your character is formed for you. 2. You can teach/mold a man 3. You CANT choose who/what you like 4. People can be trained to make more than they use. 5. The state can make sure that all are happy. 6. Any community can be formed so that any individual is happier than they are under the present circumstances. 7. Society now is based on flawed principles. 8. We can get rid of the old system and institute a new system without hurting anybody. We teach people crime, then punish them for being criminals. But if the judges we have now had been brought up poor and criminal, would they still grow up to be judges? Or would they excel in crime they way they have excelled in the law? If circumstances were totally reversed, would the criminals sentence the judges? Clearly, the circumstances are more important than the individuals. I dont like punishment, it causes people to abuse their authority. In order to change behavior, I created the 4-color system to reflect their conduct. Over time their behavior changed because of the conditions that I created. IT IS POSSIBLE.

Karl Marx

and

Friedrich Engels

Man as a Productive Being

We begin by speaking from REAL experience, not from theory or idea. Human history his about the existence of humans and how they have changed, not the physical conditions under which they live. Men are different from animals because they PRODUCE their means of subsistence, they are in essence, producing their own lives. The way they make things depends on what is available but it is also an EXPRESSION of their lives. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. You are what you MAKE/DO. When you are actively producing, you enter into social/political relations. The state is constantly changing as individuals relations with each other change. This way of thinking is real, from real men, not from imagination but in their development, their history. Speculation/imagination ends in real life. You can talk and philosophize all you want, but reality IS and you can only describe it. Our Philosophy must try to describe it and categorize what has happened. It is hard to do! Language exists and is born from the need to communicate with and relate to other people. The animal does not relate to anything. Consciousness is a social product: You are at first conscious of your immediate surroundings. You are conscious of nature, which you cannot change and which affects your being and determines your relationships with other people. You then become conscious of working with those around you and that is the beginning of society. Consciousness/thinking/reasoning takes the place of instinct. Man develops further as he increases productivity and increases population. With this there develops a division of labor that happens spontaneously because some are stronger than others or better at some things.

CHARLES DARWIN

Natural Selection and The Advantage of Morality

Natural Selection Small changes in reproduction cause variation in species which is good for natural selection. These changes do not have to be large and they dont have to occur from sudden or big changes in a population. Slight modification would be enough over time to give an advantage over others. No place or group of native people is so perfect that it cant be improved. As native groups have been conquered by invaders, we can see that they could have been better off, more improved so they could better fight off the invaders. Men select things too, but men can only work from what they can see, whereas nature works with every aspect. Men dont differentiate, they treat and protect things equally. But under nature, even the tiniest change can produce a different outcome over time. Men have so little time and his wishes are so short sighted in comparison that it is no wonder that nature has the advantage at creating adaptations/advantages. Although changes happen all the time, it takes AGES for them to progress, far to slow for us to notice the change. We cant track time well as a species so we forget how things changed and we can only point out that the are different now from what they used to be. The Advantage of Morality Having a high standard of morality may not give much of an advantage to an individual, but a group that works together will defeat one that does not.

PETER KROPOTKIN

Mutual Aid
Competition doesnt exist all the time. You can create better conditions through cooperation and the elimination of competition. You want to get the most with the least waste of energy. Nature rewards this through natural selection. Animals hibernate, migrate, build up stores of food or eat different foods to avoid competition. Competition is bad for the species and there are plenty of resources to avoid it. So cooperate! Its the best way to get the most/best for all. Nature teaches us that! Although war does happen between different classes/species/tribes of animals there is cooperation within the tribes and species and they survive the best. It makes no sense that men (being so naturally defenseless) should be the one exception to the rule of nature: that man would have succeeded or advanced through reckless competition. Yet there are always people who have supported that idea! They draw those conclusions by looking at the history of men, which focuses on wars, cruelty and oppression. Hobbes said this, despite many of his contemporaries who said it didnt make much sense. Since then, science has made many discoveries about the evolution of mankind. Many people, though, take Hobbes views and steal the phrase survival of the fittest to support that idea that the state of nature is a state of war with everybody fighting and the biggest surviving through violence. Using Darwins words doesnt make it any more true. One of the biggest mistakes has been to assume that the earliest societies lived in small families rather than in larger societies. If we look at native tribes and at the evidence of historical people, we find that this is not true. We find that people started out in societies that then evolved into smaller clans, then evolved further into families. Even Darwin believes that we evolved from chimpanzees that live in societies, rather than from gorillas, who live in families (and who are dying out as a species because of that). 9