Friday, March 26, 2010

Amoral Politics and Obama's Hobbes

Before Marx there was Thomas Hobbes, in his struggle bring intellectual order to the social and political events of his time. Hobbes grew up in challenging times, poor and a son of a vicar, with the help of a wealthy uncle he went to Oxford. Educated and prepared he found a place as a tutor for the Cavendish's and his journey through important social and political circle begins. Having a place near the wealthy and powerful, Hobbes would have a unique perspective from the loft instead from the proletariat. Hobbes shares a few ideas with Marx in their thesis that the problems of political power must be justified. Where social and economic inequality is prevalent, religious authority is questioned and the concept of equality and the rights of man.

Marx believed that men should work together to not alienate themselves in isolation contrary to the natural state of their nature. Economic classes in capitalism according to Marx, leads directly to the workers' disillusionment of his true natural state of a collective purpose. Hobbes held that it was important to understand the inevitability to save ourselves in his "natural condition of mankind" as a fundamental right. In contrast, Marx strayed away from any fundamental rights of man, especially moral or otherwise.

One aspect of Hobbes, is his disdain of scholastic philosophy infected with faulty political ideas or ideologies. In Leviathan, Hobbes writes, "men vehemently in love with their own new opinions and obstinately bent to maintain them, who give their opinions also that reverenced name of conscience." When words are used without any real points of reference, not only is our thoughts and point meaningless, but the danger is in the interpretation, no less the reaction. Obama's mantra of fundamental change for this country parallels this argument. This in of itself lies the potential for the distortion of the common good and eventually our own good. To be deliberately deceived by the political body in to believing in such a departure from current wisdom and the promise of some future or future events of a perceived right of man. Is as Hobbes puts it "the future being a fiction of the mind," and the perceived benefits of its reliability remains unsound and deductive with in the premise of the argument.

The science of Marx and its future premise of the demise of Capitalism is flawed in that his scientific historical materialism lacks the historical reality of faulty human judgement. Excepting Hobbes' view that "knowledge of consequences" does offer knowledge of the future and therefore can overcome the frailty of human judgement. Marx spends little time on the morals and ethics of humanity in his works, instead he is convinced that dialectical materialism is the theme of the future. Treating a countries citizens like your citizens or the body proletariat is separating the human from his humanity by replacing the individual with the collective.

President Obama lacks the aptitude to separate the scholarly philosophy of failed political ideology and as Obama has stated on many occasions, "the same old tired ideas." The ideas of inalienable rights, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" are not a historical footnote in the foundation of this nation. They are unchangeable natural laws endowed by our creator and not a gift from government. Even Hobbes struggled with the natural rights of man against the ideas of Locke, both having ties to Thomas Aquinas, but Hobbes believed that man had to be ruled by the state instead of letting it be in a position of free will.

Can it be argued that the state is the master of it's citizens? It can and has been, where Hobbes ends and where Obama begins is a distortion of government's responsibility. This country has been exceptional in it has given more to the world in 234 years than at any time in recorded history. For you loitering sophistos at City Lights or the back alleys of Berkeley, this is for you and your acceptance of such ideological deception from a backroom professor of persuasion. Beware of the Hobbesian Damocles, yet let it not in your preparation to disrupt the plans for your planned society. Hobbes had two egos, one psychological and the other ethical...we can agree that Obama has both in that he is self evident and self fulfilling....