Dr. Seuss and Philosophy - Jacob M. Held [107]
It does not end well for King Yertle. He ignores the pleas of his subjects, and a revolt—a revolting burp anyway—brings down the great throne of unhappy turtles with a violent shake. Revolting against a government is a serious thing, so how might we justify the overthrow of King Yertle?
A Turtle’s Life: Poor, Nasty, Brutish, and Short
If a covenant be made wherein neither of the parties perform presently, but trust one another . . . it is void: but if there be a common power set over them both, with right and force sufficient to compel performance, it is not void.
—Thomas Hobbes1
So why is Yertle king and Mack his subject? One of the oldest and most popular explanations for how we came together in civil society is called “the social contract.” While social contract theory varies as much as social contract theorists do, at its heart the social contract claims that for a government to legitimately rule requires that it have the consent of those who are to be governed. This consent is codified by their entering into literal or implicit contracts with one another to create that civil society.
Imagine a time lost in the mists of history before turtles lived together in little turtle tribes or big turtle nations—a time of not quite enough food and too few livable ponds, a time with not enough resources for all turtles to thrive. Since the turtles are all more-or-less equal in needs and abilities—for instance, they all need the same sorts of things to eat and have the same sort of capacity to find food—there is conflict; as philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) puts it, “They are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man [or turtle] against every man [or turtle].”2 Despite living in this state of war—what Hobbes calls “the state of nature”—like us all proper turtles desire to live well and to avoid death, servitude, and things similarly unpleasant. As reasoning and reasonable creatures, each of the turtles recognizes that avoidance of death—a distinct possibility in the war of all against all—and a chance at thriving—which is impossible due to this struggle—may be accomplished by making an agreement with one’s neighbors: a contract in which they agree to treat each other in certain ways, say, to share access to the delicious cattail roots at the north end of the pond, and not in others, say, to not raid one another’s earthworm supply.
Having an agreement among the parties is fine and good so far as it goes in expressing our desires, but given Hobbes’s assumption that all turtles are and can only be self-interested, such agreements will hold only so long as each of the turtle contractors benefits satisfactorily from the arrangement—after all, trust can only get a turtle so far. Without some sort of mechanism that can punish a turtle who fails to keep to her agreements, the combination of scarcity and the turtle’s self-interested nature will lead to conflict over resources and so a return to the state of nature. In this time before government, “there is no place for industry . . . no arts, no letters, no society, and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man [or turtle] is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”3
Yet each individual recognizes that a state of war with her neighbors is undesirable and puts her own life at risk; and so, she comes together with those neighbors to form a social contract—an agreement regarding how each is to treat the other contractors and the creation of a “sovereign,” an entity that can enforce the agreement. Basically, the contractors grant the sovereign permission to punish them if they violate the agreement. With the ability to trust that your neighbor will not kill you in your sleep or steal your earthworm stash, the contractors can direct their energies toward living well and accumulating goods. In this way, our rational self-interest requires acceptance of the social contract; and, with this decision to submit to the authority of a sovereign, civil society is born.
For Hobbes, this sovereign