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one's political view--of the proper form of government----shapes one's construction of the fiction "human nature"---one is derived from the other, and the sequence is analytically political form-view of the subject and not the other way around.... for the most part we consume "political philosophy"--we match existing frameworks to scattered observation and use that framework to codify what we are saying--such arguments as exist about "human nature" and "the state of nature" are functions of forgetting that "political philosophy" consists in a series of fictions elaborated to justify a given political position in the present of the author: hobbes (who is obviously at some level closest to the position outlined at the start of the thread) is no exception.
i do not think that there is a set of stable non-empty predicates that one can all "human nature" in general. maybe something really basic--avoidance of pain--but i would argue that these tendencies are in themselves empty, and that they are given contents only through socialization, as are nearly all other aspects of human being-in-the-world--think about someone like piaget, for example, rather than hobbes in your considerations of how to frame this kind of question.
so when you talk about "human nature" you are using images from the genre of political philosophy to legitimate projections concerning basic subjective orientations toward the world, or toward the self, and to avoid having to take on the ways in which particular social-historical formations produce particular types of subjects. making "human nature" eternal, filling this fiction in with your intellectual or affective investments, is a way of throwing up your hands, nothing to be done.
anther type of circular relation between observations in the present and images that organize those observations is a kind of western religious thinking, which pushes these matters (what is "human nature"?) back onto questions of the soul and original sin---categories like "the soul" have the advantage precisely of evacuating any relation to the present (by shoving the meaningful discussion back into mythical time) and enabling the depoliticization of the world (the limits of which are a function of how interventionist you imagine the god-term to be in the world).
but i do not think that you are operating in this framework, art: i think the problem is the first one.
in short, then: i do not think you can make arguments about"human nature" without running into lots of problems about your own ability to seperate what you see from the ways of bundling information particular to someone like hobbes.
had you argued that in america, today, the long-term tendency politically is toward authoritarian forms of rule--and had you based this argument on an analysis of how you see subjectivities to be shaped by--say--consumer culture or contemporary capitalism (the prompts to reflexive thought are systematically redirected to thought about the world as reflected in objects one accumulates...) then, art, i might have agreed with you.
but even if i did, i would not endorse the tendency.
rather, i would actively fight against it.
no matter how hopeless it might seem to fight against something like that in the states, i would rather exist in a mode of permanent conflict than submit to an american-style fascism.
and the conflict would center on linking a particular socio-economic system to particular outcomes in the world and working out arguments for the intolerable consequences of that system as they exhibit themselves in those outcomes.
the bottom line is that if what you see is accurate about america, then it is a function of discrete, deliberate choices made across the history of this place, instituted and maintained by human beings, that could be otherwise.
any historical project is a gamble--america was and is one, anyplace was and is one.
nothing anywhere ever is worked out in advance.
this is probably already too long, so i'll hold off on saying more for the moment.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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