Health Care Reform Returns Us To Time Of Hobbes' 'Leviathan'

Investment.com ^ | April 1, 2010 | THOMAS MCARDLE

[Kaslin]

There was a whiff of tyranny in President Obama's dare to Republicans to "go for it" and try to repeal health reform.

At the signing ceremony last month, he used the Alinskyite tactic of ridicule and mocked Republican warnings, looking up to see if the ceiling was falling in with the arrival of ObamaCare.

It just wasn't the same man who two years ago assured Americans: "I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together."

Just what does "together" mean?

To some extent, it means what Thomas Hobbes, the 17th century English political philosopher, believed it to mean.

Saul Alinsky may have described how to bring about big government, but centuries earlier Hobbes made the case for why .

Building on Roman theories of the superiority of the emperor, the author of "Leviathan" argued that nothing should come between the citizen and a powerful, centralized state.

Dreaming, like Rousseau, that the state could establish a paradise fulfilling the needs of all, Hobbes planted the earliest intellectual seeds of the French Revolution that would erupt more than a century later.

Barack Obama reflects Hobbes in two ways: in the concept of Homo Homini Lupus, that without centralized autocracy man wolfishly devours his fellow man (presumably with guns and religion); and in the Hobbesian notion that the power of the people must be embodied in one man.

[6SJ7]

I’ve never understood the notion that a man is unfit to run his own life, but fit to run the lives of others... but I suppose all these philosophers that envisioned a super-state thought that “right thinking” individuals, superior individuals, individuals much like themselves would be the ones pulling the strings. They seem to forget one can just as easily end up with a Caligula rather than a Trajan.

[rockrr]

It seems (to me at least) like it stems from the notion that “No man is an island” - that there are some things that a single individual cannot handle as well as a group. From that tiny foothold they then venture further out onto the ice by saying that “the group moderates the tone” - that whatever highs or lows may be experienced by an individual gets balanced by the “harmonious co-mingling” of several spirits (yes, I know, my eyes are rolling too ;)

So it isn’t so much a measure of an individuals fitness, as it is the arrogant presumption of the superiority of the group dynamic.

Did I mention that most dhimmis exhibit a natural herd mentality?! LOL