Professional Documents
Culture Documents
THOMAS HOBBES
John Locke
Baron de Montesquieu
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Robert Owen
Karl Marx
and
Friedrich Engels
CHARLES DARWIN
PETER KROPOTKIN
Mutual Aid
Competition doesnt exist all the time. You can create better conditions through cooperation and the elimination of competition. You want to get the most with the least waste of energy. Nature rewards this through natural selection. Animals hibernate, migrate, build up stores of food or eat different foods to avoid competition. Competition is bad for the species and there are plenty of resources to avoid it. So cooperate! Its the best way to get the most/best for all. Nature teaches us that! Although war does happen between different classes/species/tribes of animals there is cooperation within the tribes and species and they survive the best. It makes no sense that men (being so naturally defenseless) should be the one exception to the rule of nature: that man would have succeeded or advanced through reckless competition. Yet there are always people who have supported that idea! They draw those conclusions by looking at the history of men, which focuses on wars, cruelty and oppression. Hobbes said this, despite many of his contemporaries who said it didnt make much sense. Since then, science has made many discoveries about the evolution of mankind. Many people, though, take Hobbes views and steal the phrase survival of the fittest to support that idea that the state of nature is a state of war with everybody fighting and the biggest surviving through violence. Using Darwins words doesnt make it any more true. One of the biggest mistakes has been to assume that the earliest societies lived in small families rather than in larger societies. If we look at native tribes and at the evidence of historical people, we find that this is not true. We find that people started out in societies that then evolved into smaller clans, then evolved further into families. Even Darwin believes that we evolved from chimpanzees that live in societies, rather than from gorillas, who live in families (and who are dying out as a species because of that). 9