State of Nature Teaching is Bullshit

Modernity is the result of a handful of people realizing they could create "religions" and ideologies that would advance their own agendas. (This idea is really the topic of this blog.) As this notion leaked out into the public at large over the centuries, religion creation was put at the service of the most crass activities: sports and selling corporate goods. (Apple cult and Tesla cult are two good examples)

Hobbes was one of the very early practitioners of religion creation. He was the second generation of thinkers who inherited this teaching and he applied it to building the corporate state. His bumper sticker assertion that life in "the state of nature" was nasty brutish and short is known to many. It's in the Genesis chapters of the Enlightenment's books on politics.

A similar thought was espoused by people who attempted an axiomatic argument for private property--as opposed to a long held common (really communally held) piece of land. "Nature" for them meant unworked or fallow, and unproductive (in the sense of not traded for shekels) land.

The state of nature thought experiment goes off the rails immediately. The basis for it is that without human labor or human planning, chaos ensues and opportunity is wasted. Implicit in the teaching is that nature without man doesn't really exist. When European settlers moved to the Ohio terrirtory, for example, and cut down every single tree they were putting this idea into practice. They didn't see the trees or wildlife as valuable in themselves and in their original circumstances. They saw them as an impediment to shekel shuffling.

No amount of labor or planning will put a flower on a cherry tree or stitch a blade of grass together. At best, humans are a caretaker of the natural world and as dependent on it and woven into its fabric as a squirrel or a deer. Similarly, human beings aren't blank slates to be shaped by corporate states into commodities. Each of us has our place and our own glory.