Law as Empathy, or: Natural Man’s Need for Society
Posted on | June 5, 2010 | No Comments
Law requires faith. Man must be faithful in the institution of law and in his contracted brethren with whom he shares the empathy of petition — namely, that they share the common bond of having signed the social contract and agreed with each other to follow it in its legal manifest.
Those not involved in such contracts are, by definition, not citizens, and are neither obliged to treat others with the empathy of petition (to follow the laws of that institution) nor can they be guarded by such from harm, because they have chosen by exclusion to live in an anarchic state apart from social man. These men will not last long, either in death or resignation to the system at large, for a man not interested in his own social cultivation is in fact, by the very nature of things, no man at all.
Man has found it exceedingly difficult to live permanently in anarchy, for in his natural state he has an innate desire to design social contracts with others to ensure his and their livelihood. The closer one is to his brethren, the more he feels a natural bond to them, and the more a state of anarchy feels contrived and alien to him. At present, the only perpetual anarchy men have been able to achieve is that of the world stage, where each government represents a systemic Leviathan-man composed of all men in his boundaries, and for whom diplomacy and war are both bred from the very human hopes and fears that play out on the individual level as conversation and barbarity (but where one man only has a club to defend his fears against others, the Leviathan has a multitude of clubs, all beating in synchronicity to the drumbeat of collective war.)
In any other sense, fighting at the anarchic, systemic level is no different from fighting in those anarchies we see on the individual level during transitions between governments. This occurs in that murky fog of revolution that leads to riot and tumult when the sense pervades, during a changeover wherein the national flag is not completely in the hands of one leader or the other, that the flag is owned by nothing and therefore ceases for a moment to represent anyone.
This need for contract denotes a feeling of common purpose shared by all men, though they may not understand the contents of such purpose. When order becomes too overbearing, he chases increasingly apparent manifestations of anarchy, but recognizing that anarchy requires no order, and places no demand on self-regulation, man places on himself a wholly new and unnatural demand for order: that of apathy. In the unnatural state of social man apart from the order of social contract, he forces himself to lose the natural state of his own mind; in other words, man in the absence of state takes absence from his own mind.
This contrived apathy (for words such as apathy and anarchy at this point can be used interchangeably,) leads ironically to an empathy with all other men in the same nothing-state. In the very pursuit of their goal apart from each other, the citizens of nowhere find that they share the common bond of nothing, and its familiar discontents of constant fear and want for order. Again familiarized with one another, they awkwardly approach each other in the midst of violence and together sign contracts which place an increasing number of regulations and demands on themselves. This is born from the learned understanding that man has an innate want for order because he recognizes that apart from order he exists in too much fear to pursue worthy goals.
Hobbes and Locke, then, were both only partially correct in their diagnoses of man in the state of nature, but when synthesized paint the whole picture of man. For life of man in the state of nature is not merely, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” as Hobbes suggests; nor is it simply an extension of his God-given rights of “life, liberty and property,” as Locke purports. Instead, man in the state of nature is as complex as man in any other state, carrying on a Hobbesian natural existence only when he has not accomplished what desire was put into him by nature’s God — namely, the creation of social contracts. Hobbesian man is therefore only natural man in a state of psychological regress, a psychopathic entity necessitated by what psychologist Erik Erikson would call the fundamental failure in the [socio-political] formative state of basic trust versus mistrust. This is because, unrecognized by Hobbes, man in the state of nature creates states.
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