Loki and the Leviathan

"Is this not your natural state? It's the unspoken truth of humanity that you crave subjugation. The bright lure of freedom diminishes your life's joy in a mad scramble for power.  For identity.  You were made to be ruled.  In the end, you will always kneel." - Loki, The Avengers

Who should rule over a population? Why do people create societies? How do people behave when there's nobody in charge? Loki alludes to these three questions while he gives the usual "I'm a megalomaniacal villain" speech; he doesn't answer the last two, and his answer to the first one is (of course) "me." His little spiel is a throwaway scene that firmly establishes him as an over-the-top bad guy, in case the audience missed everything he did up to that point.  But let's look closer at what he said in this scene, along with those three questions at the top of this paragraph.

Loki's basically saying, "People are a pack of uncivilized animals who can't be trusted to rule themselves.  Leave them to their own devices, and they'll spend their time fighting each other for a higher rung on the social ladder.  They need someone to control them, and deep down they all know it." He's saying all this because he's the bad guy and wants to be in charge, but he's copying his ideas from a 17th century philosopher named Thomas Hobbes.

One of Hobbes' biggest contributions was Leviathan, the work that most people know him for.  In Leviathan, Hobbes argued that:

1. People were basically warlike and self-interested
2. Because of #1, people were constantly fighting each other (for food, land, resources, etc)
3. People eventually formed societies because they got tired of the constant fighting
4. A sovereign with near-absolute authority was appointed to run society, to keep citizens safe from external threats and to prevent them from reverting to their warlike natures

Sounds a lot like Loki's speech, right? Almost like something Hobbes could have written himself.  This concept comes up a lot in pop culture, especially sci-fi: some entity with extraordinary abilities takes control of society, or tries to, on the premise that people aren't able to rule themselves.  Here are a few other examples: I, Robot, Demolition Man, Equilibrium, and The Hunger Games.  It's also a common plot gimmick in cartoons and comic books: the heroes develop authoritarian attitudes for one reason or another, and make themselves absolute rulers.  Marvel and DC have both made stories about it, and it's even shown up in a Simpsons episode.  

So why does this all matter? Well, honestly, this is something I wrote for fun - to make a classic philosophical idea relatable by linking it to something most people are familiar with, and to get people thinking about deep political questions.  Those three questions mentioned earlier have been at the center of a lot of political writing over the centuries.  Thinking about them is supposed to change how you think about society, government, and the world in general.  Hobbes gave just one perspective; there were political theorists before and after him who had different takes on those questions.  We'll get to them in time.  For now, I want to restate the three questions I raised earlier, to you think about them as you finish this blog post.  I'll be revisiting them in the future.

Who should rule over a population? Why do people create societies? How do people behave when there's nobody in charge?