Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was an English philosopher friend of Galileo who took the mechanical theories of physics to devise a system of thought that has a lot of metaphysics, psychology, epistemology, sociology, politics and ethics without being fully any of these disciplines in isolation. Although it is difficult to pigeonhole, erratically not saying it is logical empiricist, mechanistic, and a continuation of rationalism inaugurated by Descartes in the wake of modernism. In the monumental work “Leviathan” Hobbes wrote that the state, in which sovereignty resides and power, is a necessary evil to quell the natural selfishness of men, left in absolute freedom, will enter into a war of all against all (bellum omnium contra omnes) for man (and woman, lest we forget, that’s what Mrs. Thatcher reconnaissance …) is the “wolf man”, ie, tends to destroy the weaker making it a victim of his ferocity, their greed, wickedness, and that, said Hobbes, people have registered with it three causes of social dispute: the distrust of all others, competition with the rest, and the desire for fame. If you let people follow their natural greed, Hobbes said, would come the general war, anarchy and total destruction of society. Therefore, it is necessary to “transfer” some rights to own a fabulous monster which consists of those captured collective wishes to minimize the evil that could make being loose. This monster is the State (the Leviathan of the Bible: Job evoked by a monster to demonstrate the incommensurable of thought of God and his designs).

When I do this deposit as an individual, the good of all, I give my ability to do justice to the State. Therefore I can not execute a thief stealing even find him in my house, I leave to the State the penalty agreed to in the civil code. Watching the news in newspapers and TV ineffable tempts us to ask: we do not again very close to this war that Mr. Hobbes proclaimed 500 years ago? Does not look like this crossroads of assaults, robberies, murders and crime to the “war of all against all? Do not distrust the common people of the state to administer justice efficiently? The much vaunted neo-liberal proposed reducing the state’s functions to a minimum. Do not forget the endless slogans of Mr. Menem repeating the age-old recipes of Mr. Alsogaray “we have to shrink the state” and extreme privatizing transportation, production, education, private healthcare. While liberalism proposed by the laissez-faire business to free enterprise, never gave up the three obligations of Leviathan: administering justice, providing education on a level playing field and address the public health.

There are many factors that stir up the social war increasingly strident: the chasm between rich and poor, the total marginalization of vast masses of people pushed out to villages and settlements, left to “Hand of God” that never harbored much anyone, bereft of education, without competing for work that increasingly demands more, without vision and plagued by all the diseases of neglect, malnutrition and addiction. It appears that disabled state of neo-liberalism abandoned the weakest, the sheep of the system, in the hands of wolves. But the sheep, it seems, stopped the mildness of the pastures and learned to hunt in the worst way: becoming cannibals.