The Social Contract Stinks

Something stinks about 'social contract theory'. They way we live - the philosophers say - has the form of some contract where we relinquish the complete freedom to do just anything our bodies might do, and in return we acquire peace.

This thing, where it's all chilled, and we have an understanding, is very much like a business arrangement, though I recall no papers being signed upon my birth.

It stinks when you stare into the wrong end of the arrangement. The arrangement, in fact, began before paper or words. People chill. All animals chill. And humans have sat about, polishing bones and fishing, and we knew not to hit each other or take too much fish from someone who didn't catch as many as they wanted. Humans knew it all before the contracts.

With larger societies, strained social ties, lots of deals, and a couple of fuck-heads asking 'yea, but how much fish is too much fish? Is it three? Twelve? Where is the line?'. So we formalized the understanding, and drew lines around the chilled chit-chat.

And I'm not here to complain about cities and paperwork. But to explain the stars as a large clock-work apparatus, or to explain a house as a big jacket, doesn't explain anything. And in the complete absence of a question (who really sits in a pub wondering why there's not more stabbing?) it just sounds like begging for more formalization.

Despite the link above, to Wikipedia, I have no beef with Thomas Hobbes, for two reasons. Firstly, the point he makes in the Leviathan concerns countries being mostly-chilled, but also having no cops, so they will occasionally turn all Lord of the Flies on each other. And secondly, he never had to rest on some 'state of nature', which existed before contracts came along to fix everyone. Because, despite what that Wikipedia link says, Hobbes never mentioned the 'state of nature'.