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Hobbes' "state of nature" honestly bothers me, particularly from the perhaps simplistic lens of its name. As a toy game-theoretic model of a multi-polar trap, it is interesting, but in reality it's too reductive. This isn't a new criticism; I just want to talk about it.
I dislike many things about the concept, but I will illustrate two: his assumption of a "war of all against all", and his assumption that this state of nature has ended.
The war of all against all is an oversimplification; humans are fundamentally collaborative animals. For example, an easy conclusion of modern anthropology is that humans evolved for relevant cooperation. Our reasoning clearly emerged out of social problem solving, and although we are tribally competitive, it can be seen as a remnant of the interspecies competitive state that our niche relies on evolving out of. It was out of the forge of the EEA that our prosocial instincts emerged.
The social contract is a useful idea; I just find his application of it, particularly as the solution to the state of nature, to be another oversimplification. What the social contract fundamentally does is abstract the violence; it effectively just moves or concentrates it. The social contract creates Moloch. Instead of allowing violence to exist in physicality, it creates a background violence that takes form in the many invisible hands of structural power asymmetry. It also creates a much more obvious concentrated foreground violence, one that bubbles up in the conflicts between leviathans. It creates war on a scale much larger than simple tribal conflicts. We have not moved out of the state of nature; we have simply abstracted it, just as you abstract a data type.
In reality, the individual was never the unit - it was the tribe. Like wild dogs, hyenas and lions on the savannah: singletons are doomed. In humans, the scale of tribal identity turns out to be plastic, and those that master subjugation and incorporation push the boundary of violence to an ever-larger periphery. We can and do dream of a global tribe, even one extending its umbrella of inclusion and protection to animals. Leviathan was written in the context of the English civil war. A brutal 9-year bloodbath, and my reading of Leviathan is primarily "even a bad Sovereign (it was Parliament in 1651) is better than chaos; cling to your principle of order, however flawed."
Although the wars of nation-states are large in scale, they are far less proportionally lethal than the norms of tribal times. Lawrence Keeley found tribal death rates to be 20 times higher. A 95% reduction is pretty good.
I do agree the wars are less in scale, I was not making any claim that they weren't. The claim is about the sum of all structural violence that occurs, the sum of Moloch. War, disease, poverty, starvation and death are all caused by unnatural concentrations of resources outside immediate access on the land. Those resources include the information and skill required to survive. In hunter-gatherer life, the knowledge and skills needed to survive were distributed across the community and accessible to everyone. Finally, even if you gained the skills to go off the grid as an individual you'd still need a clan to survive long term.
Society has abstracted the violence of nature into a threat of violence when trying to avoid the leviathan, and that threat is frequently acted on.
The war of all against all is an oversimplification; humans are fundamentally collaborative animals.
To me it seem like a combination of both. We often collaborate against a common enemy. Sometimes that common enemy is nature, but often it is other humans. (And I suspect that people on the autistic spectrum are more likely to choose nature for the enemy, but normies are more likely to choose humans.)
So the natural state of humanity seems like groups fighting against other groups, but even within each group the alpha male is oppressing the rest of the group, the alpha female is helping her children oppress other females' children, and so on. A fractal of competition, with the tension where you kinda hate your chieftain, but you are also happy that he is on your side fighting against the strangers. Where you want unity, until there is a good opportunity to stab someone in the back and take their place, and then you want the unity again (and sometimes someone stabs you in the back and turns the unity against you, and that feels truly horrible, it's called bullying and you want to die).
I agree that the social contract just moves the violence to a more sophisticated level. But the original state is already quite bad.
it creates a background violence that takes form in the many invisible hands of structural power asymmetry.
responds to:
So the natural state of humanity seems like groups fighting against other groups, but even within each group the alpha male is oppressing the rest of the group, the alpha female is helping her children oppress other females' children, and so on. A fractal of competition...
The argument is that this social contract violence abstraction is the attempt at meeting our fundamentally collaborative evolutionary niche in the context of large societies. The fractal power structure you describe is the full and complex solution that Hobbes' simplifies.
We as a social species have evolved to this point because it is the most amount of collaboration our social technologies have gotten to.
Within each group the alpha male is oppressing the rest of the group, the alpha female is helping her children oppress other females' children, and so on.
Alphas in human society is a Randian myth. Early hunter-gatherers were notoriously fiercely egalitarian and maintained "reverse dominance hierarchies" (where the tribe teams up to bully, exile, or kill anyone who tries to act like an "alpha").
Early hunter-gatherers were notoriously fiercely egalitarian and maintained "reverse dominance hierarchies" (where the tribe teams up to bully, exile, or kill anyone who tries to act like an "alpha").
I agree that a human alpha cannot rule alone, he is typically a leader of a clique. But if egalitarianism is our nature, why is there so much bullying at schools, reinvented independently?
My alternative explanation is that it is simply the dominant clique maintaining order.
I am not just making a claim, this egalitarianism you refer to is the conclusion of modern anthropology. You're right that the inference from 'people suppress bragging' to 'egalitarian society' deserves scrutiny in isolation. The logical point is sound, but you're applying it to a straw version of the claim. The anthropological case isn't built on the thin inference 'people suppress bragging, therefore egalitarianism'.
You are doing a few things here; one is conflating egalitarianism with lack of violence, drama or conflict, another is a misunderstanding of what our social skills actually evolved to do and in what context.
Our social skills evolved for groups of at most Dunbar's number (~150 people). When hunter-gatherers exist in such small groups, there is no need to specialize. Classes (such as a warrior class in your post) don't exist yet, as specialization only occurs after farming was invented. With a good balance of information (skill) symmetry between peoples, power mostly concentrates along social lines (who has respect) and not violent ones. This is because most people know how to fight and are themselves strong, making it difficult to truly physically resist the group.
Hunter-gatherer reverse dominance hierarchies work because the group is small, everyone knows everyone, and there are constant interactions. Schools are large, semi-anonymous institutions where those accountability mechanisms are weak or absent. The persistence and reinvention of bullying cliques in schools is precisely what you'd predict if the egalitarian mechanisms of small-band life don't transfer to large modern institutions. Robin Hanson's own framework predicts that in small bands where dominance is hard to achieve physically, prestige-based status dominates.