Epilogue

It is not surprising, given the bloody history of human civilization that philosophers and thinkers have oftentimes resisted the urge to describe human behaviour with positive optimism. Thomas Hobbes, the British philosopher, had provided a dystopian description of human behaviour in his much-acclaimed book Leviathan which was published in the mid-seventeenth century (1651). Hobbes had written, “Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Hobbes, 1651, p. 78). Hobbes’ solution to this violent and nightmarish situation was to apply strict government control to ensure civilized existence wherein people would not kill each at will. Sigmund Freud is reported to have had very similar views on human behaviour and had opined that societies have been created to ensure a rule of law so that humans do not indulge in uncontrolled behaviour in their pursuit of unbridled self-interest (Rifkin, 2009). Bertrand Russell was not positive about the selfless aspect of life either; he had commented, “Every living thing is a sort of imperialist, seeking to transform as much as possible of its environment into itself and its seed” (Russell, 1951, p. 31). Some other philosophers were more positive in their thoughts and had emphasized about the need for collective co-existence and the essence of empathy to such co-existence. In the early twentieth century, the British Sociologist Wilfred Trotter had proposed that human beings exist and thrive in herds and the natural instinct of humans thus is to protect each other in order to ensure individual and group survival (Rifkin, 2009).