The Hobbesian point, which is a very hard point, hard for many people to accept, is that a tyranny can be less harmful in human terms than Anarchy. And that's a kind of Point which in the 20th century was hard to understand, because the greatest Crimes of the 20th century the Holocaust. the Soviet gulags, Poi Pot, and China's repressions were all done by States, by very strong States, so liberals thought that the State is the enemy, we've got to not do that, we can do without it and said we've got to limit it, we've got to have, count, rights, we've got to have huge systems of law to to confine it as narrowly as possible to its'...[essence]. It can do things like welfare but it's all got to be confined with them, a strict straight jacket of law to avoid these terrible crimes of States. And I think that was reasonable in the 20th century, but we're now almost a quarter of the way through the 21st century. And in the 21st century we have the evidence of Iraq, what happened in Iraq, and then later on after everyone said after Iraq, immediately after Iraq, you never do this again, they went and did it in Libya. That wasn't mainly the Americans they went along with it, but it was mainly Cameron David Cameron in this country, and the French, who wanted to do this. And it was almost obvious that the same result would happen there. In fact it's been almost worse because the state of Anarchy into which Libya was plunged after the toppling of um Gaddafi continued, and for a long while there was no government. Now there are two, at least two, and people smuggling, and organized human trafficking uses this vacuum of power as a base, and so by the way, when Western people hear British and other Western leaders say, "Well the solution is to lock up the people so its' going to be okay," but there's no State in Libya at least two governments. Who's going to do the locking up? How's it going to work? There's nothing there whereby you can do it. And the West in particular, the British and the French created this vacuum, so nothing was learned. The basic Hobbesian lesson was not learned. And I think that even now. So I say, I'm usually overly optimistic, contrary to what people say about me is. I thought the lesson, it hasn't been learned even now. To what extent can we view those choices as tragedy, as tragic decisions?
You know the tragic viewer accepts that they are irresolvable dilemas. Either you accept Saddam's continued tyranny, torture of the Kurds, Etc., or you depose him and you have the chaos and Anarchy of Isis, and the power vacuum.
Can anyone spell "Ukraine" or "Israel"? Hobbesian Trap?
Hobbesian trap
The Hobbesian trap (or Schelling's dilemma) is a theory that explains why preemptive strikes occur between two groups, out of bilateral fear of an imminent attack. Without outside influences this situation will lead to a fear spiral (catch-22, vicious circle, Nash equilibrium) in which fear will lead to an arms race which in turn will lead to increasing fear. The Hobbesian trap can be explained in terms of game theory. Although cooperation would be the better outcome for both sides, mutual distrust leads to the adoption of strategies that have negative outcomes for both individual players and all players combined.[1] The theory has been used to explain outbreaks of conflicts and violence, spanning from individuals to states.[2]
History[edit]
The first example of a Hobbesian trap reasoning is Thucydides's analysis of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides presented that fear and distrust towards the other side led to an escalation of violence.[3] The theory is most commonly associated with Thomas Hobbes. Thomas Schelling also saw fear as a motive for conflict. Applying game theory to the Cold War conflict and the US nuclear strategy, Schelling's view was that in situations where two parties are in conflict but share a common interest, the two sides will often reach a tacit agreement rather than resort to open conflict.[4]
Examples[edit]
Steven Pinker is a proponent of the theory of the Hobbesian trap and has applied the theory to many conflicts and outbreaks of violence between people, groups, tribes, societies and states.[2][5] Issues of gun control have been described as a Hobbesian trap.[6] A common example is the dilemma that both the armed burglar and the armed homeowner face when they meet each other. Neither side may want to shoot, but both are afraid of the other party shooting first so they may be inclined to fire pre-emptively, although the favorable outcome for both parties would be that nobody be shot.[7][8]
A similar example between two states is the Cuban Missile Crisis. Fear and mutual distrust between the actors increased the likelihood of a preemptive strike.[7] Hobbesian traps in nuclear weapons' case can be defused if both sides can threaten second strike, which is the capacity to retaliate with nuclear force after the first attack. This is the basis of Mutual assured destruction.[9]
The Dark Forest, a science fiction novel by Liu Cixin, incorporates a Hobbesian trap into its narrative. The dark forest hypothesis, both diegetically and non-diegetically to the novel, is a form of the Hobbesian trap that has been used to answer the Fermi Paradox by arguing that any two advanced space-faring civilizations will inevitably seek to destroy each other rather than risk being destroyed by the other, like two scared armed men prowling through a dark forest, ready to shoot at anything that so much as snaps a twig.[10]
Avoidance[edit]
The Hobbesian trap can be avoided by influences that increase the trust between the two parties.[1] In Hobbes' case, the hobbesian trap would be present in the state of nature where, in the absence of law and law enforcement, the credible threat of violence from others may justify pre-emptive attacks. For Hobbes, we avoid this problem by naming a ruler who pledges to punish violence with violence.[11][12] In the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example, Kennedy and Khrushchev realized that they were caught in a Hobbesian trap which helped them to make concessions that reduced distrust and fear.[7]
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Interview excerpts continued:
How do you define populism and where do you see it in British politics?Well I define them as being into hyper-liberalism or neoliberalism, which can have more or less extreme forms, as being interrelated, or complimentary, or some people used to say "dialectically [intertwined]". So what what liberals call popularism is the political backlash against the social disruption produced by their policies, which liberals don't understand or deny. That's what popularism is the I'm see it. Why did this
happen this populism, where did it come from? Where did it come from this devil? Was it just solely whipped up by a few demagogues? I mean there have been demagogues throughout the last 50, 30 40 50 years, forever! So why won't, why did they start attracting popular support? Why did the voter does and start supporting them?
The reason, I thin,k was that the type of liberalism that prevailed after the end of the Cold War was a kind of narrow, shallow type of Market liberalism which hadn't learned the lessons that liberals and social Democrats of earlier Generations learned after the second world war. After the second world war all of Western Europe including Britain adopted forms of social democracy and government intervention with the aim of preventing another Great Depression. The people who were around there then had either lived themselves directly through those, that depression. They knew that capitalism was a fragile system and prone to booms and busts. So they thought that a whole range of measures, welfare measures, Financial measures, fiscal, all kinds of policies needed to be implemented by governments to prevent that happening again. And so in Western Europe at least, you had 30 years of peace and stability. That lesson was forgotten at the end of the Cold War, or repressed at the end of the Cold War. The idea then was that, you could set up a system of rules. Central banks would be given Independence so they would apply these rules, and the system would be self-stabilizing. And if there were losers in this and it would become of course by then, from the globalization that was advancing. It was a much more open system than the the post second world war system would be, so there was a global competition forsome kinds of wage labor, and wages of particular parts, manual workers and others, and particular regions, suffered badly in this. And in America, a large parts of the middle class experienced no growth in incomes, or hardly any, or even Falls in incomes during 30 years in which the whole society got richer taken you made all, or some people were getting that, but not parts of the middle classes. And other parts of the population were completely abandoned because production was offshored. So if you're working in a a factory and and the facility, the production facilities of the factory were offshored into China or somewhere, or the Philippines, or somewhere then, of course the wages there would be much lower for a long time, and you would just become unemployed and you become more less permanently unemployed. So it was from THAT that what liberals called "populism" emerged.
Liberals think of populism as a sort of mixture of malevolence and stupidity. The malevolent are these Wicked Politicians. I don't deny that Trump is like this. For one, there are many examples in Europe where there are politicians hanging about in the background, always there, who will um exploit this. But what they're exploiting is something that they did not, themselves, create. That's why they didn't have any influence, or hardly any influence in the 1960s, say for example now in Germany. To take, I'll come back to Britain in a moment, an example, the AFD, which is a far right party has 20% of the vote. For many years the right-wing parties in far right parties in Germany were kept beneath the level, I think it was 4%, there was a level below which there were, couldn't go without trigging various responses. There were 2%, 3. Why did that happen? Was it that the demagogues got clever, more demagogic, more wicked, more evil? No, they remained exactly as they've been all along. It means that various problems, various "real life situations" to do with economic and other kinds of security, became more grave as a result of liberal overreach. As a result of that kind of the liberalism, of that. I mean in this country I did a broadcast on BBC Radio, and even before that I did an early podcast kind of thing in America saying that there would be a referendum on Britain's membership of the European Union, and I believed then that it would the result would be "leave". And that was a very off the wall kind of view at that time. But the reason I believed that was that the policies that had been pursued up to that point had left large parts of the country, and large parts of the population, in stagnant or even declining, and or even despairing conditions. So I thought that that would be taken. I thought that the Brexit opportunity, which from Cameron's and the Conner point of view, and the point of view Rania should never have happened. I mean if that was a mistake on his part
would result in the result that it did do. But not because, and this is one feature of that debate that I very much disliked, not because masses of the population were stupid, or racist, or had been misled by Nigel Farage, no doubt all or the all because the Russian had intervened in some sinister way, and no doubt they did, but it wasn't for any of those reasons. It was because large sections of the population which, who, were not doing well, or even doing badly, were, believed correctly, that they weren't being listened to, that no one was listening, and that no one would listen unless there was a big upheaval. The upheaval in Britain was brexit, in America it was Trump. So I wasn't surprised by either of those debates, either of those results. In fact I expected both of them for a kind of simple intuition there were large enough sections of society that did not want, and even feared, and dreaded, a continuation of the status quo. So they were willing to take a gamble on brexit, on Trump, even if they didn't trust Trump, even if they disliked or even hated him. It was, and in Britain, even if they didn't know what brexit really meant, or it was a sufficiently radical upheaval, they felt, to let their voices be heard, and for something or other to happen. So I wasn't surprised in either case, So the kind of Revival of centrism, now kind of one of the more entertaining absurdities of back in the age of absurdity now. Which is that there are now podcasts, there are newspaper columns, with everything was sort of, was going swimmingly in the 1990s. Everything was going wonderful while I lived, to "it wasn't that wonderful." The Golden Age, golden wasn't The Golden Age. And from from that period, lots of other things emerged. um
The Blair government which, then the Brown governments, which did do some good things and did expand welfare spending, they also had an obsession with house prices. And for them, that was almost the cause of economy. And that led, I think directly, indirectly, to a situation now, in which a whole generation of young people can't find any way to live affordably. So the problems of that period were problems that we suffer now were rooted in that period. So the idea that you can unwind, if only we could have avoided. Avoided what? We avoided, we've had to avoid the financial crisis of 2008. Where did that come from? Was that from the Glorious 90s? I mean, who did that? Who actually was responsible for that? If we only avoided that. If we'd only avoided the pandemic. You might say nobody anticipated it. If we, what about the disastrous Wars that the West got involved in? If all of that had been avoided, we could actually have an indefinite continuation of the '90s.
Things have moved on since then. It's completely empty nostalgiaism revealing the complete paucity of political thinking, whether it be of right or the new center, or the left. I mean these sort of withered, shriveled castoffs from that period and now returning, zombie like, as it were to tell us that everything would be would be fine if we could only get back to the center ground. See, the key thing about the center ground is that the center that THEY represented, first of all, excluded huge parts of the population, parts of the north and coastal towns, and others.
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