I understand what everyone below has said, but I disagree. Hobbs said that humans are unable to coexist in the state of nature because of competition, comparison, reason, speech, free will/no fear, and covenant. I don’t think that even one of those reasons makes it so humans can’t coexist.
First off, I don’t see competition as a bad thing. It makes it so people challenge themselves sometimes beyond their limits and end up surprising themselves in a positive way. If there wasn’t competition, then humans wouldn’t feel the need to push themselves harder. For example, in terms of school, people push themselves to do better than their classmates in hopes that that will make them a better candidate for college. In terms of sports, if it were a cross country race and the person in front of you was speeding up, that would motivate you and push you to run faster and keep up with them, whereas if you were running the race alone, you probably wouldn’t push yourself as hard to go fast. So because of competition, it makes humans better than they ever could be than if there wasn’t competition. School wise, you will try harder and get better grades making you smarter, and sports wise, you will push yourself harder to go faster for example, and you will become a better athlete. And if everyone is becoming better, then suddenly the whole state and community become better than they were before.
Secondly, comparison is also a good thing in my opinion. It goes along with competition and how it will make you an all around better human. If someone was comparing themselves to someone else and noticed that that person was smarter than them, maybe that would motivate them to try harder so that maybe they could be as smart, or even smarter than that other person. And when one person gets smarter than another, then that makes that person try even harder than before and before you know it, everyone is smarter, which definitely benefits the state or community.
Reason is also yet another thing that will make the state and community better. Using reason and logic, the aspects of the state that aren’t beneficial, can be questioned and potentially changed. Without reason, the bad aspects of the state would just continue to be used, and it wouldn’t allow the state to be as good as it possibly could.
Speech goes along with reason, if there is something about the state you live in you don’t agree with or you don’t think it is helping the state be as good as it has the potential to be, then you can verbalize that and try to change it. When others hear what you have to say, maybe they will agree with you and support you in changing it. Hobbes thought that would cause chaos and divides the state, but differing opinions aren’t a bad thing. When there are differing opinions, instead of fighting each other, compromises can be made that are sometimes even better than what was thought of originally.
Hobbes believed that free will was bad for humans because although it was natural to human nature, humans are dangerous without laws to follow. I disagree with that, I think that humans are naturally good and aim at some kind of good. Not all humans are so good, but I don’t believe that there are a lot of people that intentionally do bad. Sometimes laws and leaders can make people feel trapped and unhappy. If the leader is instituting laws that they don’t like and there isn’t much you can do, then you have no other choice then to just abide to them, even though you don’t agree with them. And I know I said earlier that with speech you could speak up and act against it, but with a sea monster as a leader, sometimes that can be harder than it seems.
And lastly covenant. Hobbes thought that without a covenant, some kind of agreement, people didn’t have the potential to live together, but he also thought that people can’t agree with one another since they are all so competitive, and so no agreement can be made, so they can’t coexist. But I don’t agree with that because it seems to me that people do have the ability to agree with each other, you just have to be flexible and willing to compromise. I know that is hard, but eventually, decisions can be made.
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