Prestige or Security?

The State of Nature Revisited

Everyone today has a political opinion, but far fewer have a political theory.

In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt claims that political differences between people are a function of differing psychological tendencies, different value sets. There are blue state brains and red state brains, as it were. Conservatives care about loyalty and purity more than liberals do, for example.

But great modern thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, came to their conclusions about the role of government and society not on the basis of temperament, but by imagining what life was like in a state of nature.

The more terrible life in a state of nature is, the more government and society are needed to protect us from this state. The better off life in a statue of nature is, the more government and society are a thorn in our side. Hobbes, ever the pessimist, offers us a liberal argument for an absolute sovereign. Rousseau, ever the optimist, thinks that the great evil is society itself, which acculturates us to envy and alienation. For Hobbes, the essence of life in a state of nature is war. For Rousseau, it is innocence and abundance.

Hobbes takes a zero-sum view of social relations, while Locke takes a more positive-sum view. For Hobbes, the essence of social interaction is conflict, while for Locke it is collaboration and trade.

A core reason people might disagree about politics, then, might have more to do with differences about their conception of the state of nature, rather than, say, differences in value sets or brain states. The question isn’t whether you value security, but whether you think the state or society can offer it, or whether people can find it on their own.

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For Hobbes, the default state of man is war. For Locke, it is hunger. Hobbes thinks we should put up with anything if it gets us out of war, while Locke assumes that war is derivative of famine. Both think the goal is security—but what they seek security from differs.

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According to Hobbes (and Nietzsche and Hegel), the core difference between people has nothing to do with Haidt’s taxonomy. Rather, there are two kinds of people: those who prefer security to prestige and those who prefer prestige to security. Security types are willing to sacrifice their egos for self-preservation. Prestige types are willing to sacrifice self-preservation for a higher mission.

Different thinkers call these types by different names. For Nietzsche it was the difference between Übermenschen and Last Men; for Hegel it was the difference between Master and Slave. For Marx it is the difference between the ruling class and the bourgeois.

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Reasonable people can disagree about what counts as security. Reasonable people can disagree about what counts as prestige. But our debates would be different—and probably of a higher quality—if we did not conflate the two.