“Man is a wolf for man”: obituary of a curse

Repeated over and over again, this crucial commonplace is a perfect example of how a proverbial habit is enough to lock the mind into an inextricable framework. Emblematic of the whole process that led to our time of technological dominance, it carries within it three successive axes of progress: the State, the Market, Technology; three axes to which we will oppose a fourth: that of our freedom. This attempt to review the history of this idea has only one objective: to get out of the usual binarity in this area in order to find a way out.

I — A common place for the State

The state of civil war promised to erase liberalism at the time of its philosophical birth. With the specter of religious wars and the First English Revolution looming then, what could be more understandable than this desire to redirect the belligerent temptation of human beings towards economic satisfaction. However, this mutation was not as simple as it seems.

It is to Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), in Of the Citizen (1642), ten years before the leviathan, that we owe this — truncated — revival of a Latin quotation. In his words, turned into chiasmus: “In the state of nature, man is a wolf for man, in the social state, man is a god for man.^[1].” At the outset, it is obvious that the quotation that is so often repeated must be understood differently. As a pioneer in political science, Hobbes created the concept of “state of nature” as opposed to civil status. This conceptual fiction thus serves him to better explain the meaning of civilized life, which depends on the State for internal peace. And what could be more normal for this author in exile, fleeing England in the grip of a civil war, than to act in his own way in favor of peace.

But the above explanation would remain incomplete if one did not focus for a moment on the nature of the state, as theorized by Hobbes. An image is worth more than a thousand words, just take a look at the frontispiece of Leviathan, illustration made by Hobbes himself (image in one of the article).

As Hobbes wrote: “The submission of all to the will of one man, or of an assembly, is called union. [...] The union thus formed is called a city, or civil society, and even a civil person; because, as the will of all has become one, it has thereby become a person.^[2].”. This giant wielding both the sword (military power) and the bishop's crook (religious power) thus symbolizes the union of the two previously opposed powers, temporal and spiritual. In this way, Hobbes announces political modernity and the absolute triumph of the State. But the devil is in the details, so pay attention to what forms the skin of this giant: human heads. With humanity fading into political union, the last man for whom Hobbes' famous epistle is still valid is the state, Leviathan, himself. In Hobbes's politics, wolf-man refers to the relationship that exists from state to state. The State is a wolf for the State; and the much-vaunted inner peace is in fact nothing but the submission of the human mass to the absolute power of the sovereign. Let us quote the words of Bernard Charbonneau to grasp this first nature of the State:

“The State creates the individual who is isolated and interchangeable. Instead of considering the diversity of men, he reduces them to what is identical; at the beginning, all individuals are equal — before the law of the sovereign. And it is from there that he classifies them according to their usefulness. [...]

The vigorous state is the one driven by the will to power, the decrepit state, the one from which it withdraws. The State is the can ; to speak of an authoritarian, centralized or hierarchical state is to commit pleonasm; to speak of a liberal state is to state a paradox. Pluralism and freedom are not in his nature, the game of creative activity is not his business but that of individuals and groups. A state can be officially federative or democratic; left to itself, it will soon become centralized and authoritarian. Every President of the Council is an aspiring dictator, just as any policeman is the opponent of individual freedoms. Because their reason for being is not man, but efficiency in action. And it is not the day when the sovereign orders to act that tyranny threatens, but when, tired of asserting themselves in the face of the State, men call freedom the necessity: political coercion^[3].”

Let us be clear: the peace of the State is that of the prison; that of the prisoner deprived of any real control over his individual and collective existence, who only has the leisure to watch the time pass without being able to act.

II — A selfish statement, passed from the theory of the State to that of the Market

The egoistic side of Hobbesian theory, for its part, appears in what it says about the origin of societies. His conception of the state of nature is in fact based on the mutual fear of men and not on the social nature of a political animal:

“It is therefore a well-established fact that the origin of the largest and most enduring societies does not come from the mutual benevolence that men have for one another, but from the mutual fear that they have of one another.”

“It may seem that I am making a serious mistake, and that I am setting a stumbling block upon entering this civil doctrine to those who will take the trouble to read it, when I say that man is not born with a natural disposition to society. [...] And from this it appears that, since men are children when they are born; they cannot have been born capable of civil society; and that several (or perhaps the (most) by mental illness, or lack of discipline, remain unable to do so all their lives. However, both children and adults do not allow themselves to participate in human nature. It is therefore not nature, but discipline that makes man specific to society^[4].”

Thus refuting the Aristotelian conception of human nature^[5], but also ignoring our psychological and physiological constitution, Hobbes largely paves the way for political economy that will extol the virtues of commercial egoism. But we will not dare to reproach him for having ignored the existence of mutual aid as a factor of evolution.^[6] or that of mirror neurons; on the other hand, to believe in it even today is the most absolute blindness.

The precursor of this commercial egoism, which inspired Adam Smith, was named Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733). Known for its Bee fable^[7], which served him to formulate his economic-moral doctrine, Mandeville affirms that Private vices make public virtues. In short, if the thief gives the locksmith a job, if gluttony stimulates business, and if vices of all kinds allow greater access to luxury for a mass of bees, then choosing honesty and simplicity would lead the hive to poverty and death. So look at the moral of this fable:

“So quit your complaints, you crazy mortals! In vain you seek to associate the greatness of a Nation with probity. There are only lunatics who can boast of enjoying the comforts and conveniences of the land, of being renowned in war, of living well at ease and of being virtuous at the same time. Let go of these vain fantasies. Fraud, luxury and vanity must continue if we want to reap the sweet fruits. [...]

This is how we find an advantageous vice, when justice denies it, removes its excess, and binds it. What am I saying! Vice is as necessary in a thriving state as hunger is necessary to force us to eat. It is impossible that virtue alone will ever make a Nation famous and glorious [...]^[8].”

For Mandeville, the anti-social has a market value that makes it intrinsically superior to the existence of a healthy community. That the major economists who followed, such as Adam Smith or David Hume, renewed the promises of happiness and peace through trade is not surprising as they had an interest in it. And it is clear that it is this point of view that has prevailed over more than two hundred years.^[9]. However, this philosophical rubbish that the worst among men best serve capitalist society could not go on for long without running into its own contradiction, as Michéa notes:

“Until relatively recently, the capitalist system was able to function while still showing itself capable of producing quality commodities that were even, at times, really useful to the human race.

This is simply due, as Castoriadis wrote, to the fact that he inherited a series of anthropological types that he did not and could not have created himself: incorruptible judges, honest and Weberian officials, honest and Weberian officials, educators who are dedicated to their vocation, workers who have a minimum of professional conscience, etc.^[10].”

But in the face of the triumph of capitalism, the state itself had to bow.^[11] ; what Marx emphasized when he pointed to the revolutionary role that the bourgeoisie could have played:

“It was only under the reign of Christianity, which externalizes all the national, natural, moral and theoretical relationships of man, that bourgeois society could completely separate itself from the path of the state, tear apart all the generic bonds of man and put in their place selfishness, selfish need, and decompose the world of men into a world of atomistic individuals, hostile to each other^[12].”

As a partial conclusion, let's summarize our point in one line: the forced integration of the individual and the group into the State forced their disintegration through the stimulation of selfishness. But considering (commercial) exchange too much as a palliative to war — an odd error often committed in anthropology — room was left for the war of each against each. Through a negative mythology that seemed like a curse, liberalism created the race of men it needed to legitimize its rule; and this base was the ideal breeding ground for deadly technological development. Because to tear the earth to shreds, turning humans into selfish machines was an obligation^[13].

III — An axiom to justify the obsolescence of man in the face of technology.

Placed in the cold hands of the State and then left orphans, unbound by the economy and driven to selfishness, what saint could humans now devote themselves to? To the one whose shapes made Earth foreign to us; to the fire that fell on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the glass and steel plate that haunts our pockets, to those nocturnal lights capable of masking the stars from our eyes, to these towers that replaced the trees, to these gray and smoking roads, to the clouds of its power plants. But maybe this sketch was too sudden, because this is the technology we are talking about. This “ghost” that haunts each of our moments, and whose incessant solicitations have made us lose a significant part of our humanity.

“Nothing alienates us from ourselves and the world more disastrously than spending our lives, now almost constantly, in the company of these falsely intimate beings, these phantom slaves that we bring into our living room with a hand numb from sleep — because the alternation of sleep and wakefulness has given way to the alternation of sleep and radio — to listen to the morning programs in which, first fragments of the world That we meet they talk to us, look at us, sing songs to us, we encourage, console us and, by relaxing or stimulating us, give us the The of a day that will not be ours. Nothing makes self-alienation more definitive than continuing the day under the aegis of these appearances of friends: because then, even if the opportunity arises to enter into relationships with real people, we will prefer to stay in the company of our mobile chums, our portable friends, since we no longer feel them as ersatz of men but as our real friends^[14].”

Faced with technological ersatz, what can our future be? Anders wonders, and asks us:

“Haven't we already reached a state where we are no longer “ourselves” at all, but only beings fed on ersatz on a daily basis? Can you strip someone who is already robbed? Can you strip someone who is already naked? Can we still alienate mass humans from themselves? Is alienation still a process or is it already nothing more than a done deal^[15] ? ”

What is the human race caught in the nets of the technological system? An imperfect being constantly confronted with a destroyed and artificialized world, with “manufactured” objects, and feeling inferior to them. Why hasten the development of artificial “intelligence” so much, why fall in love with transhumanism, why deny its naturalness, if not to quickly get rid of this suffocating, asphyxiating feeling, of inferiority to the machine and of incompatibility with such negative human nature. This is how Anders defines “Promethean shame”:

“If he wants to make himself, it is not because he can no longer bear anything that he did not make himself, but because he refuses to be something that was not made; this is not because he is unworthy of having been manufactured by others (God, the deities, Nature), but because he is not manufactured at all and because he has not been manufactured, he is therefore inferior. to its products^[16].”

However, it is impossible for us to agree with Anders when he writes that “the possibility of our final destruction constitutes the final destruction of our possibilities.^[17] ”; to which he himself will return some twenty years later by explicitly calling on human beings to enter the state of Self-defense with regard to the omnipresence of the danger of nuclear death^[18].

Because the long journey of a negative vision of human nature was used only to defuse all fighting tendencies and even to discourage the wisest among us. Where ferocious despair should only inspire us with disgust and the will to flee the present society, let's also see where the sources of hope are; but first, let's take a short detour.

IV — Corrections on war and human nature

Before we get into the final part of this cliché dissection, let's put war and human nature in perspective for a moment.

A — War fix

We have already seen that, far from annihilating the phenomenon of war — civil war included —, the application of the Liberal plan was on the contrary accompanied by the most horrible human enterprises known. No need to take an inventory of them here, but let's bet that the children of the 20th century^E centuries have had reason to believe in the veracity of the wolf man. Definitely convinced, why would they have been led to believe anything else? They had been promised peace and luxury, and now the storms of atoms and steel descended upon them. But what they may not have known is that even the noblest social plans never succeed — as Theodore Kaczynski recalls.

” VI. The main criticism of this chapter will certainly be that the author used a lot of ink and paper to prove what “everyone” already knew. Unfortunately, not everyone knows that the development of societies can never be subject to rational human control; and many who would agree with this proposition — as an abstract principle — would be hard-pressed to get anything concrete from it. Again and again, apparently intelligent people come up with elaborate plans to resolve the contradictions of society, disregarding the fact that such projects are never, never, never carried out. Several decades ago, during a particularly confused excursion into the realm of the imaginary, the famous critic of technological society Ivan Illich wrote: “I believe in radically inverting industrial institutions, rebuilding society from top to bottom.” He also argued that we should seize “the opportunity to build a friendly society, in continuous transformation within a material framework defined by rational and political proscriptions.” That it was “not only necessary, but possible to establish a friendly society, provided that one consciously used a regulated procedure” — as if one could rationally “rebuild”, “build” or “establish” a society^[19].”

To better understand the essence of war, perhaps it would be a good idea to focus on what it meant for primitive peoples. However, it should be noted that, concerning them, Talking about war is above all a convenience of language more than a reality as they never manage to match modern wars in number and atrocities. Indeed, it is difficult to see a war in what is more like a punitive expedition led by a handful of warriors (and not soldiers).^[20]) armed with bows and spears.

Here is a partial list of what was not the cause of war among the primitives:

• nor the warrior appetite inherent in the species (which is a false justification by the biological nature of the species),
• nor the scarcity of resources (economic justification) false since primitive societies could be described as societies Of abundance),
• nor the fact of a failed exchange between groups (Lévi-Strauss's position, according to which war would mean the impossibility of exchange, trade failed).

For Pierre Clastres, war in primitive society is a matter of culture (and not of nature, as we will see later, which is not without impact on Hobbes's statement). It has a political character. Here is an excerpt from his thesis about the reasons for primitive warfare.^[21] :

“War as the external policy of primitive society refers to its domestic policy, to what one might call the uncompromising conservatism of this society, expressed in the incessant reference to the traditional system of norms, to the ancestral law that must always be respected, that cannot be altered by any change. Through its conservatism, what does primitive society seek to maintain? She seeks to maintain her being. But what is this being? It is an undivided being, the social body is homogeneous, the community is one Us. Primitive conservatism therefore seeks to prevent innovation in society, it wants respect for the Law to ensure the maintenance of indivision, it seeks to prevent the emergence of division in society. This is, both economically (impossibility of accumulating wealth) and in terms of the power relationship (the leader is there not to command), the internal policy of primitive society: to preserve ourselves as we are undivided, as one whole. [...] In other words: the permanent state of war and effective war periodically appear to be the main means that primitive society uses to prevent social change.” (p.202-203)

“Social division, the emergence of the state, are the death of primitive society.” (p.205)

War in primitive societies should therefore not be taken as a moral phenomenon; the question of good or evil has no place. Beyond any moral consideration, it allows them to ensure the continuity of an autonomous existence devoid of internal divisions.

Having made this clarification, it should be noted that Primitive warfare and modern warfare are absolutely different. On the one hand, primitive warfare (very limited in its duration and effects) aims to defend itself against any unification and any establishment of hierarchy; on the other hand, modern warfare is fought between entities that have completed this process of unification and hierarchy (the States). Mass eradication in the name of unification is certainly the great novelty of modern warfare, and this was only possible because of technological advances made possible by the breakup of traditional groups, the destruction of their natural environments, and the condemnation of the mass of humans to a life of servitude in the name of hypothetical security.

B — Human nature fix

The work of Pierre Clastres therefore brings a singular light to the subject. Indeed, Clastres has devoted himself throughout his — all too short — career to studying culture of primitive peoples. But, therefore, to speak of culture among primitive peoples means that to classify them in the “state of nature”, as Hobbes and so many others did, is a mistake.. If primitive people live in a state of culture, not in a “state of nature,” then all the arguments based on this error are false because of the wrong premise.. By claiming that man is a wolf “by nature” and by denying primitive societies their cultural quality to justify his claim, Hobbes and his epigones are wrong. To draw this conclusion from the observation of a society living in a state of culture, and not of nature, could only lead to error.

The question of the natural goodness or malice of man actually only serves to stimulate endless debates. (If you tell me it's good, I'll prove you wrong, and vice versa.) It is a pipe dream that only calls for more questions, without allowing answers to be found. If we admit, after Darwin and Kropotkin, that the struggle for survival is perfectly complemented by mutual aid, then Neither the good savage nor the wolf-human can provide satisfactory answers. The human background is undoubtedly complex, and in it all contradictions coexist: joy and fear, love and anger, life and death.

The Aristotelian conception of man as Political animal (see note 5) has at least the advantage of being a philosophical and biological explanation. Group living meets a human psychological need. Our need for otherness to characterize ourselves as human beings does not pose a moral question.

In short, the human nature that this sentence by Hobbes purports to reveal is just a big bad wolf intended to frighten us and to justify our collective subjugation to the State, to the Market and, In fine, to Technology. To go further, it is best todiscard the concept of “human nature”, both controversial and ineffective^[22], in order to better be able to focus on human needs which, on the other hand, are very real but denied by the technological system.

V. Human needs more than human nature: the nature of our freedom

Let us keep in mind that the continuous and deadly development of technology has only been possible by making slavery its condition Sine qua non. So the symbol of our time is not the James-Webb telescope, but the Foxconn factories^[23] in which hundreds of thousands of Chinese immigrants work and die to produce technological devices, whose raw materials will have required the rape of the land, forced labor and the death of hundreds of thousands more to be extracted, and which will be purchased by billions of slaves in order to alleviate their servitude somewhat.

But it is precisely in the dissatisfaction and the danger generated by the technological system that the purest element of our condition is revealed: the need to live our lives in a way that way. standalone. Let us cite two major paragraphs from Theodore Kaczynski's manifesto in order to support this claim:

“44. But for most people, it's through the power process — setting a goal and making an effort. standalone to get there — what do you get self-esteem, self-confidence, and a sense of power. When an individual does not have the opportunity to carry out the power process, the consequences (which vary according to their personality and the degree of disturbance in the process) are boredom, demoralization, self-deprecation or feelings of inferiority, defeatism, depression, depression, depression, anxiety, depression, anxiety, depression, anxiety, guilt, depression, anxiety, guilt, frustration, hostility, domestic or family violence, insatiable hedonism, deviances sexual problems, sleep or appetite disorders, etc.”

“75. In primitive societies, life is a succession of stages. Once the needs and goals of one stage have been met, there is no reluctance to move on to the next. A young man accomplishes his power process by becoming a hunter, not for sport or any other development, but in order to obtain the meat necessary for his diet. (The process is more complex for young women, more focused on social power; we won't discuss that here.) Once this stage has been completed, the young man can establish himself and adapt wholeheartedly to the responsibilities of family life. (In contrast, some modern men are constantly putting off having children because they are too busy looking for any “accomplishment.” In our opinion, they need nothing more than to complete their power process — with real goals (not the artificial goals of alternative development). Again, after raising his children and satisfying his power process by providing them with the essentials, primitive man feels that his work is done and is ready to accept old age (if he survives until then) and death. In contrast, most modern humans are anxious about physical decay and death, as evidenced by every effort to maintain their strength, appearance, and health. We think that they are frustrated that they have never used their physical strengths in practice, that they have never completed their power process by really using their body. It is not primitive man, whose body was used in every act of daily life, who fears the decline of age; it is modern man who, using his body only to get from the car to the house, fears this decline. The man who is best prepared to accept his end is the one whose power process has been fulfilled during his life^[24].”

The only way to complete our power process is to act against the technological system and fight for it to die out without devastating everything in its fall. Our aim is not to plan for a future society and to take control of the state to achieve it, which has never worked otherwise. Our positive ideal is that of nature regenerated through the dismantling of the technological system and of life becoming possible again. It is because we want to remain human in a world that is conducive to the development of life that we see no other way out but the anti-technology revolution.

Conclusion

For these last words, perhaps the wisest thing would be to go back to the beginning. Hobbes, exiled, horrified by the civil war, believing he could change the world by affirming that “man is a wolf to man”. I then suggested that this sentence was a truncated loan. It was in fact from Plautus, a Latin comic writer from the 2nd century BC, that he took it. However, perhaps it would have been better to read it twice, because for Plautus:

“Man is a wolf for man, when you don't know him^[25].”

R.F.