Redefining Reality - The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science

Because everything could be useful in some way, we were in
Similarly, because everyone else was a potential mortal threat,
the state of nature was a constant war. Life in this state, Hobbes
famously said, was “solitary, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Realizing that we would be more likely to survive if we ended
the state of nature, humans entered a social contract that gave
our natural rights to a central government that we expected
would keep order. Any oppression we experienced from the
government would be preferable to the state of nature. We are,
at heart, brutal animals, and the glory of human culture needs a
strong authority to keep us in check.
The 18 th -century French thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau disagreed.
To him, the state of nature was idyllic. Without a political structure
restricting our natural freedom, we would blossom into creative
beings. If we are nasty and brutal, it is in reaction to the authority of
the state and to the existence of private property. For Rousseau, we
did not cease to be savages when we became civilized; civilization
turned us into savages.
What these psychology experiments contend is that it is not the
structure of civilization itself that made us or corrupted us, but
rather, it is the distribution of power and authority that corrupts.
20 th century in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and even
Apocalypse Now.
region that Westerners consider to be controlled by savages in
order to secure something of value to those with power in the
civilized world. But instead of subduing the savages, Kurtz lives
among them, establishing himself as a deity to them. Through
sheer brutality, he becomes the ultimate authority over them.
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