Tagged: state of nature

Reflections Out of Season

Fast talk usually means weak thought. Speed, as a rule, is superficiality’s colorful mask. In rhetoric, whether political, legal, or academic, the fast talker hopes to mesmerize your senses with how many words he can spew forth without a pause, in lieu of engaging your reason with the profundity of his ideas. The incessant and rapid flow disrupts sober attention and evades hard...

Observations on Natural Man and Political Man

Of all the relationships I lost due to Trumpism, the two cultists with whom I had previously maintained the most personal and friendly interaction (and who initially shared my contempt for Trump and his appeal), but who succumbed most completely to the allure of idolatry — the group paranoia, the inability to communicate respectfully with anyone outside of the cult, the susceptibility to...

Great Moments in Conservatism

This American moment looks strikingly similar to the early days of the Trump cult. Much as we saw in early 2016, people who formerly seemed reasonable and reasonably “conservative” are being peeled away from their reason and into media-stoked lunacy over this virus outbreak, and suddenly turning on anyone who dares to espouse the principles in regard to this issue that they themselves...

Trump in the State of Nature

Donald Trump lives for his ego. He may be the purest living instantiation of Hobbes’ depiction of man in the state of nature, ruled entirely by fear of violent death and vainglory. As he respects no law — let alone the rule of law — he is effectively, subjectively, trapped in Hobbes’ hypothesized condition of raw nature: the war of all against all,...