A very on-point aside found among a splurge of interesting musings on queuing from Jo Lindsay Walton:

The Guardian is perhaps the most Hobbesian of the British papers, in its unwavering insistence that any order, however arbitrary, is preferable to disorder, which can only be understood as a war of all against all.

Quoted not just for Truth, but also as a reminder of what, having now finished it, bothered me most (philosophically speaking) about Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota books: the entire future depicted therein is fully predicated on a Hobbesian conception of humanity.

Being fair, it’s a more nuanced reading of Hobbes than most—and that’s to be expected from a respected scholar of Renaissance and early Enlightenment thought. Until recently I counted myself more a member of Team Rousseau, not because I took Rousseau’s noble savagery as historical fact, but more because I recognise the necessity that we think about pre-historical social relations in some way, and that choosing to believe in humans having a more peaceable nature than the Hobbesian alternative is therefore a political choice in itself.

That position has been changed somewhat by reading Graeber & Wengrow’s marvellous The Dawn of Everything, which successfully illustrates the argument that there is actually no substantive proof for either case, and that the evidence points instead to a radical plurality of models for social relations prior to written history. If force to choose a team, then I will always choose Rousseau, but G&W’s message is that this binary is a false one, and the forced choice is perhaps among the (dialectical?) engines of our civilisational discontent.