It feels more accurate in most cases when I'm arguing, and in many ways is. The violence we use to "make a peaceful society" is not something that is controllable and we fool ourselves believing we can chain state violence and guide it wisely. It is in fact like calling on leviathan to do the work we don't want to do personally. I think Hobbs catalogs this concept perfectly.
Posted Jul 16, 2015, 2:27 AM UTC
Has someone been reading R.A. Wilson?
No but maybe I should :)
Do it! Illuminatus! is, by a wide margin, probably the strangest and slightly incomprehensible book I've ever read. Well worth it, though, even if you have to read the same page a few times to figure out what the fuck is going on.
Leviathan is good, but I feel like hydra is more suitable. Obviously leviathan is more catchy, though.
combine them, the multi-headed hydra leviathan state.
A good Swedish song exists called Leviathan, great lyrics although in Swedish...
Warming up? I use that term a lot.
I think you turned me on to the word.
Pretty cool. You should watch the Russian movie leviathan released last year I think. Truly shows you how leviathan can and will destroy your life.
I think it's important to distinguish between the social contract, leviathan and the state. To me these are not all one in the same. The social contract and the leviathan form from society and the state is just a deception, like an illusion of what is meant by the leviathan. I think this is revealed when governments collapse, since a leviathan can't collapse. The thing causing the government to collapse is the leviathan.
I distinguish between them but many times they're truly interchangeable.
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I like "Leviathan" because it has four syllables.
Way more fun to pronounce than "hydra" - two syllables always sounds infantile to me.
Also it conjures up deep, dark and ancient ideas. The kinds of things one would rather not see or hear or experience. Sea monsters were frequently substitutions or metaphors for very deep psychological issues in ancient lore. Frequently psychological trauma.
Yes, "Leviathan" has a lot of associations that work for me.
Hail Hydra!
Cthullu