[Borodog]

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The war of all against all, where everyone engages in predation, were it to actually happen, has to be worse than any government, which at its very worst (I hope you'll agree) is of the form of war of a small ruling class against everyone else.

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It doesn't appear to me that this is necessarily so, because the predation of all against all could be of a more restrained type: partially deterred, and significantly mitigated, by the power of all to resist; whereas the predation of a ruling class with a near-monopoly on weapons, money and force could result in wholesale slaughter, devastation and/or enslavement of the victimized and powerless group.

In the animal kingdom, predators generally choose their victims quite selectively, because if they are injured while attacking (even if they win that individual struggle), they may be crippled or infirmed by injuries incurred during their attack when the victim fights tooth and nail for its very life. This may later even cause the death of the injured predator (perhaps due to starvation).

So: a scenario compried of of all predators, does not necessarily imply that all will engage in predation recklessly, haphazardly or even very broadly.

Therefore, a scenario of all predators is not necessarily worse than a scenario of a certain predatory group endowed with unstoppable power preying at will upon other defenseless groups.

I would guess you may have merely overlooked this possibility in coming to your conclusion above.

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Predators must predate to survive. When all are predators, as Hobbes would have it, to not predate is to die. To predate leads to conflict and hence to death. Inevitably such a situation leads to a bloodbath. Hobbes understood this, which is why he was so obsessively afraid of anarchy, which he equates with the war of all against all. If you take his premise at face value, then the consequences are inevitable, and he would be correct; any government at all would be better than that, no matter how tyrannical and genocidal.