![]() Yes, we are also naturally motivated by self-interest, as Bregman points out – but for Hobbes in the state of nature, self-interest is morally neutral. Prudence is but experience, which equal time equally bestows on all men, in all things they equally apply themselves unto. Hobbes never said that human nature is evil, instead he believed that we are blessed with “prudence” – which he defined as foresight, grounded on experience: But I think his reading of Hobbes is erroneous. And so the real-life case of the six boys from Tonga is Bregman’s way of telling us that Hobbes was wrong. That the absence of authority leads to anarchy certainly seems to be Golding’s message in Lord of the Flies – away from the strict regime of school society, the young castaways turn to killing. But that is misleading: the modern Leviathan is nothing more than the legitimate authority of a modern state. This has led some in modern times to accuse the philosopher of justifying authoritarian dictatorship. The only way out of the state of nature is via a social contract and the formation of an all-powerful Leviathan, Hobbes wrote. Society, theorised Hobbes, would thus collapse into an abysmal anarchy – a “war of all against all”, where life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. This essentially says that, without a society to restrain our most basic instincts and left to our own devices, people will turn on each other. Their experience was nothing like that of Lord of the Flies: they survived because they lived in harmony, cooperating with one another, helping each other. In this book he challenges the dystopian scenario in Golding’s novel with a little-known real-life example of six boys in 1966 stranded in a deserted Island south of Tonga in the Pacific Coast for more than a year. The subtitle of Bregman’s book summarises his thesis in three words: A Hopeful History. But a new book by Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, Humankind, argues that humans are fundamentally good – or at least not fundamentally evil – and refuses to accept the conclusions that many before him have drawn from Golding’s book. It is a novel that makes us despair for the human condition. One of the most important was William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), in which a group of young schoolboys marooned on a desert island turn savagely on each other. Fiction is a powerful force in shaping social understanding and, in the 20th century, a number of novels shaped philosophical discourse and influenced the way people think about the world.
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