Leviathan: The Sea-Monster Lurking in the Depths of Our Political Subconscious
Symbols are endlessly fascinating, not least because they are so malleable -- but where we run into trouble is when the symbolic is more “real” to us than material reality. “Hamas” and “Israel” are treated more as symbols than as political realities, especially by the media, where the former represents any and all forms of resistance, to the point where every man, woman and child simply existing constitutes “resistance” and makes all Palestinians a viable target, and where the latter is treated as “the only democracy in the Middle East” even though they are an apartheid state, a religious ethno-state with no equal voting rights for Arab or Muslim people. They are symbolically “LGBT friendly,” but they don’t allow gay marriage (or any nonreligious civil marriage) without someone having the means to travel outside of Israel to be married, and also having the legal right to return, in order to have their marriage recognized. Even things like money and race began as symbols and have come to have inordinate impact in shaping reality because of the power of the ideas and imagery behind them, regardless of material facts about biology and about how value is created.
In the U.S., our elected leaders are treated primarily as symbols, because we have a representative “democracy.” When someone is chosen to represent the will of the people, as they are in electoral democracies (in contrast to direct democracies), the representative is a symbol of the people’s beliefs and desires. Increasingly they are supported more for their image and “branding” than they are for their actions.
U.S. citizens have begun to feel a gulf between their desires and the people they are asked to choose from to represent them. Often when we as radicals say there is “no difference” between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, we are taken as if we are exaggerating to make a nihilistic point. But if we were to look at hard material facts like policy decisions, how money is spent, and voting records on specific issues, I think it would be undeniable that the differences are miniscule. Lately, even the rhetoric between the parties sounds the same: Biden recently referred to immigrants as “illegals” and has been quoted as saying, in reference to protecting Roe v Wade, “I’ve never been supportive of, you know, ‘It’s my body, I can do what I want with it’.” Many more trans people have been murdered under Biden’s yet unfinished presidency than under Trump. Much more money has been taken away from public health and put toward policing under Biden. More restraints against protest and freedom of expression have happened under Biden in the form of silencing pro-Palestine student groups on college campuses and allowing LGBT book bans. And yet people will say that refusing to vote for Biden is being a “single issue voter” and claim they care about Black people, queer and trans people, and body autonomy when they vote for Biden, even though he has been worse on all of these issues. It’s fascinating to see how often people quote Trump saying he’d be a dictator for a day, as if we live in a cartoon reality where the “bad guys” announce their nefarious plans in advance, and anyone not doing that must be a straightforward, honest “good guy.” No real dictator became one by saying they’d be a dictator. People forget that the Nazi party co-opted the language of socialism (which had not been demonized to the degree it is now and was seen as being for the people), calling themselves National Socialists for populist appeal. The Democrats don’t even bother to appeal to our desires but simply paint their opposition as worse.
The power of the symbolic magnifies how each party is “read” by the public, and I think there are plenty of people who truly believe that the image matters just as much, if not more, than the tedious details of their administrations. It appears to me that there is a gridlock in the conversation, between those who want to fight fascism no matter what image it puts on, and those who will die on the hill that an image of comparative progressivism is preferable to an image of fascism, especially if both really are equally bad and the horrors will persist either way.
Something that I think might at least provide food for thought from a different, less-discussed angle, and one that I think will appeal especially to those of us who tend to prefer the realm of symbolic imagery over meticulously tracking legal decisions, money trails, and statistics, is the philosophical substrate of our political system. In a sense, we will cut through the superficially symbolic differences, swim past the minutiae of professional politicians’ records, and go deep into the subconscious of our “democracy” as a whole. Underneath it all at the philosophical level, major and minor differences are blurred; both between parties and between the people and their governments.
At these depths, there are ideological waters we’re all swimming in; and there are monsters lurking. One of the most obvious to me, as someone who has studied political philosophy academically, is the myth of the Leviathan. So much of what I see happening in our national political discourse can be traced back to the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes’ writing on Leviathan, published in 1651. When Hobbes wrote Leviathan, he did something unprecedented in English political theory, which was to use a poetic metaphor, a captivating symbol of political reality that was so effective, it still has a hold on the “Western” imagination with the force of a spell.
Leviathan is a biblical creature, adapted from the ancient Sumerian beast known as Tiamat: a representation of chaos in the material world, associated with sea serpents, crocodiles, whales and other waterborne monsters. Tiamat was a creative force of chaos, but Leviathan was seen as evil and destined to be slain, especially because Leviathan was used to symbolize the enemies of Israel in the Bible. Leviathan is sometimes interpreted in Christian texts to be the chaos-beast in Revelations that will be slain by God, bringing about everlasting peace.
Hobbes uses the imagery of Leviathan to create fear around social anarchy, describing the “state of nature” being “the war of all against all.” His argument for monarchy was that the fear of a king’s wrath is necessary to keep everyone in line; without it, we would all kill one another because we would succumb to our basic nature, which is chaotic violence. This was the beginning of social contract theory, which proposes that the chaotic, animalistic masses give up some of their decision-making power to a sovereign who has more power to impose violence, and as a result there will be peace and order. For many people, this logic makes perfect sense. We’ve been taught that crime will run rampant without the fear of punishment.
What’s interesting to me about Leviathan, and its adaptation from the creative force of Tiamat, is that it comes from the Hebrew root “lavah,” which means “couple, connect, join.” 17th century interpreters from the Westminster Assembly said that “by his bignesse he seemes not one single creature, but a coupling of divers together.” The chaos of Leviathan is, in fact, diversity in action, held together in the Water element of relationship and spirituality. I believe this togetherness was seen as the real threat, and the belief in a “war of all against all” was at best an unconscious projection on the part of a ruling-class colonizer Englishman, and at worst a coercive lie.
Centuries later, the fear of anarchy has become so much more than symbolic. And for those willing to see, it’s not the people’s violence that the ruling class fears so much as our togetherness, the solidarity and trust between people that renders a supreme leader obsolete. When protesters against Cop City in Atlanta, who are trying to protect the forest for environmental reasons while also resisting the expansion of the racist police state, were charged with racketeering they were accused of being “dangerous” anarchists precisely because of their use of words like “solidarity” and “mutual aid.”
Ironically, the fear of anarchy has led to totalitarian control over people which in itself has produced a real “war of all against all.” When a minority (whether it’s one person in the form of a king, or a wealthy elite ruling class) has absolute power over the diverse masses, that minority has to use divide and conquer strategies because the masses are so much more powerful. They have to introduce competition to stay in power. There will be competition to win the favor of the sovereign – but that competition isn’t our true “state of nature,” it is in response to the monopoly on violence that the sovereign holds under the rules of the social contract. Now that there is belief in this social contract and a cultivated fear of anarchy, the “brutish” nature of people that Hobbes told us to fear seems to be self-explanatory and endemic. But it isn’t.
Leviathan represents the power of the people and the beautiful flourishing of interconnectedness that happens when we’re not under someone’s boot heel. It is immensely powerful, and threatening to anyone who wants to have control, to assimilate everyone to their own desires.
This myth of a demonic beast that we should all fear more than the violence of the sovereign has captured the imagination of the “Western” world for centuries. The myth that we need a social contract where we give up our power to the sovereign for “the common good” is one that we can retire. It’s not just that our “democracy” has been corrupted and we need to return to more fair elections; the whole philosophical underpinning of a republic is wrapped up in Hobbes’ symbol of a Biblical monster meant to scare us into submission. His thesis is that fear is the most necessary element for social order, and we see that belief playing out today with Biden voters calling us evil if we don’t fear Trump enough to vote Democrat.
Symbols meant to instill deep fear in order to convince us to give up our power have become more real to us than the very real material power we hold. The rulers are actually helpless without our labor and without our consent for their rule. So much of their efforts, and fearmongering, is geared toward manufacturing that consent. The social contract was always a raw deal for us, but even on its own terms the leaders are not delivering what they promised to give us in exchange for allowing them to rule over us instead of ruling ourselves. There is no safety in a world where genocide is allowed. There is no peace wherever there is oppression. There is no togetherness when competition tears us from one another to benefit a few. If we want to defeat the real threat to our beautifully “monstrous” chaos of diversity and creativity, and stop the “war of all against all,” it will require breaking the social contract and taking our power back.