 Hi, good day, May 40 here. So I've been reading this book by Thomas Hobbes. It was published in 1651. It's called Leviathan and You might think, oh, this is old English. You'll be really hard to read Actually, it's really well written. It's it's actually beautiful to read It's the most important book on politics ever written more important than Aristotle's politics more important than the prince by Machiavelli It's Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes and he did all his important writing after the age of 60 So I've got four years left before I kick my writing into high gear. I think he lived to age 92 and His thesis is that the life of man in nature Is short, poor, you know, nasty, British and That's why we need the state to protect us and the state is the Leviathan So we delegate to the state the monopoly on violence The state should have the right to regulate books The state should have the right to enforce and regulate contracts because man on his own in a state of nature his one over writing dictate is to survive and So he's incredibly naturalistic. He's incredibly Realistic, he's like the father of realism. I think he's the the most influential author on Carl Schmitt and on John Mirsheimer and so he notes that Verbal contracts or people's verbal assurances don't tend to hold much weight But people Or tend to cheat when they can get away with it that people will tend to take what they can get away with and So he has a much darker view of human nature than John Locke So recently you read John Locke's two treatises on government And so John Locke sees the state of nature as people making deals with one another That the state of nature is much more cooperative than what Thomas Hobbes presents But in the Hobbesian view presented in Leviathan and underlying all his works is that men will be at each other's throats that But in the state of nature There's one law. There's one natural law that is survival and so whatever you need to do to survive That's what you should do Without the Leviathan of the the state to control you so you probably thinking our book Published in 1651. It's not going to be very sexy. It's not gonna be very easy to read But there are just so many keen insights in this book and there's a there's a pretty good audio version on YouTube of Hobbes is Leviathan and When you listen to it, you can see why Thomas Hobbes is the favorite author of both John Mirsheimer and Carl Schmitt and I was just reading the Hobbes chapter on religion Very notes that religion is the province of man that no other animal is is religious and So 1651 I think that's shortly after the conclusion or near the conclusion of the 30 year war in Germany which rent Germany apart in this massive battle between The Catholics and the Protestants at least a substantively a war of religion and pretty much all liberal democracy in the western world That we've had over the past 300 years. It's been a reaction to the 30 years war that we We developed the neutralization of religion. We sort of taken religion off the stage as a major factor in politics That we no longer burn people at the state We no longer tend to kill each other in the first world over over religion. So This is what Carl Schmitt would refer to as the age of neutralizations where we take more and more of life and remove it from the political so Modern liberal democracy as we know it over the past 300 years Is a reaction to the european religious wars of the 17th century the neutralization of religion taking it off the table And now more and more of life is taken off the table and neutralized and rendered Over to the experts, right? So now the experts Have knowledge that the ordinary man doesn't have And so we we delegate much of politics to expertise such as with god to covet We delegate that to the experts Right and we take religion off the table This should not properly be the matter of politics and You see the origins of this perspective in Hobbes's leviathan So the leviathan, I think that's the Hebrew pronunciation is a mythical sea creature I believe in the book of brashid in the book of genesis And it's this mythical powerful creature from the deep that Hobbes uses As as his image of the all-powerful state so you can call Hobbes the the father of the total state Because from a Hobbesian perspective eventually any state is preferable to the state of nature It's just like in the traditional jewish view Any marriage is preferable to a woman Rather than being alone and unmarried. That's the traditional jewish perspective. Probably not as true today So too From a Hobbesian perspective Virtually any form of government Is better than no government Because without government men will be at each other's throats So there's a a saying in I think perkay others the ethics of the fathers that You should pray for the welfare of the government because without the government men will flee each other alive