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| Michael Sgan-Cohen, "Leviathan" (1983), Israel Museum Collection, Jerusalem, from Wikimedia Commons. |
Former New York Times columnist David Brooks is shocked-shocked to learn that the intellectuals in the White House have a Hobbesian view of the world ("Donald Trump Poisons the World"):
This week, two of Donald Trump’s top advisers, H. R. McMaster and Gary Cohn, wrote the following passage in The Wall Street Journal: “The president embarked on his first foreign trip with a cleareyed outlook that the world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage.”
That sentence is the epitome of the Trump project. It asserts that selfishness is the sole driver of human affairs. It grows out of a worldview that life is a competitive struggle for gain. It implies that cooperative communities are hypocritical covers for the selfish jockeying underneath....
[This] explains why people in the Trump White House are so savage to one another. Far from being a band of brothers, their world is a vicious arena where staffers compete for advantage.
Indeed. There's something deeply repugnant about people who think this way. People like, ah, New York Times columnist David Brooks ("Human Nature Redux", February 2007):