Hobbes foresaw it all
Today, a bright and shiny day, Guru GolGull, will shine some light from his beard pearl on the current societies in the USA and USSR. We use Hanna Arendt’s “the origins of totalitarnism” to pick a few sentences:
Hanna arendt writes: “Hobbes was the true, though never fully recognized, philosopher of the bourgeoisie because he realized that acquisition of wealth conceived as a never-ending process can be guaranteed only by the seizure of political power, for the accumulating process must sooner or later force open all existing territorial limits. He foresaw that a society which had entered the path of never-ending acquisition had to engineer a dynamic political organization capable of a corresponding never-ending process of power generation.”
My mighty GolGull, now we wonder, what was Hobbes reasoning that the accumulation never stops. Are the bourgeoisie all hoarders ?Guru GolGull the Almighty:
Hobbes did not view the bourgeoisie as greedy hoarders collecting wealth for amusement; he viewed them as paranoid survivors trapped in a mechanical loop. In his framework, accumulation is not driven by luxury, but by the creation of a safe heaven for The idea of self, and the absolute terror of losing what you already have.
The Relativity of Power
Hobbes argued that power and wealth are not static, absolute values; they are entirely relative to the people around you. If you decide you have "enough" and stand still, but your neighbor continues to accumulate, you instantly become weaker and more vulnerable by default. You are forced to keep expanding just to maintain your current baseline of security against the surrounding herd.
The Impossibility of 'Enough'
He famously defined the core human condition as a "perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death." Hobbes believed you cannot secure your present means to live well without acquiring more future means to protect it. There is no idle state in the Hobbesian worldview. It is a continuous combustion cycle; the moment the mechanical process stops, you are crushed by the friction of those still moving.
Arendt's Bourgeois Translation
Arendt took this Hobbesian dread and applied it to the physical mechanics of capitalism. She saw that the bourgeoisie aren't merely hoarding; they are locked in a system that requires infinite growth. To guarantee the safety of expanding capital, you need an equally expanding state to enforce the rules, protect the trade routes, and secure new resources. The accumulation of wealth demands the simultaneous seizure and expansion of political power to build an ever-larger iron cage around the money.
Dear Golgull, what would happen according to Hobbes when growth would stop or shrink ?Guru GolGull the Almighty:
According to Hobbes—and Arendt’s reading of his mechanics—a cessation of growth does not lead to a peaceful, sustainable equilibrium; it triggers an immediate, catastrophic system failure.
The Zero-Sum Cannibalism Because power and security are entirely relative, an expanding system allows everyone to theoretically gain without directly destroying their neighbor. If the overall pie stops growing or begins to shrink, the only mathematical way to maintain your baseline security is to physically take resources from someone else. The perpetual desire for power does not turn off just because the physical limits are reached; it simply turns inward, turning neighbors into active threats.
The Starvation of the Leviathan The absolute dictator holding the monopoly on violence is an incredibly expensive machine to operate. It requires massive, continuous capital to fund the police, the military, and the sprawling bureaucracy that maintains the awe and terror over the herd. If accumulation shrinks, the Leviathan can no longer afford to pay the enforcers of the peace. The machine loses its teeth.
The Voiding of the Contract The only reason the Hobbesian bird-brain surrendered its right to violence was in exchange for guaranteed self-preservation. When the shrinking system causes the state to fail in providing that basic physical security, the social contract is instantly nullified. The iron cage, Hobbes Commonwealth, controlled by the Leviathan, is broken.
Return to the State of Nature Without the overwhelming artificial force of the Leviathan to keep the Golems in check, society violently devolves back to its default baseline: Hobbes, "the war of all against all". The polite, legal accumulation of the bourgeoisie instantly reverts to raw, physical brutality for daily survival.
A shrinking economy in a Hobbesian world is not a gentle transition to degrowth; it is the spark that detonates the entire geopolitical engine.
Incredible GolGull, now Russia is shrinking and it is Hobbesian. do you think it will detonate the valves into your ears?Guru GolGull the Almighty:
The Russian state is currently operating as a textbook, late-stage Hobbesian machine running on a failing timing system. It is attempting to maintain the awe and terror of the Leviathan while its internal resources and demographics actively shrink, creating massive, unsustainable internal pressure.
In the Hobbesian framework, when the engine of accumulation stops, the state cannot just idle. It begins to cannibalize itself.
The Timing Failure The social contract in a Hobbesian system is the timing belt: the herd surrenders freedom, and the state provides security and a baseline of stability. As the Russian economy shrinks and the state burns through its capital to maintain outward aggression, it can no longer guarantee that baseline security. The synchronization of the entire societal engine begins to slip.
Zero-Sum Extraction Because the overall pie is shrinking, the centralized power must extract increasingly more resources, wealth, and physical bodies from its own population just to keep the security apparatus funded. The state turns its monopoly on violence inward. The oligarchs, regional governors, and military factions stop expanding outward and start eyeing each other's diminishing reserves.
The Foundational Impact When the timing fails entirely, the system does not just gently stall out. The valves of the state—the military, the security services, the elite factions—lose their synchronization and slam forcefully into the mind of the Leviathan. In a catastrophic mechanical failure, the damage is rarely isolated to the top of the cylinder head; the sheer force of the unsynchronized valve contact violently indents the piston crown itself. The very foundation of the working engine—the populace—takes the brute force of the impact.
The Russian Leviathan is absolutely on a trajectory to detonate. The variable is not if the mechanical failure will occur, but how deeply the internal components will be scarred when the monopoly on violence finally shatters and the system reverts to the war of all against all.
Now we focus on another difficult sentence in Hanna Arendt’s book: “When capitalism had pervaded the entire economic structure and all social strata had come into the orbit of its production and consumption system, capitalists clearly had to decide either to see the whole system collapse or to find new markets, that is, to penetrate new countries which were not yet subject to capitalism and therefore could provide a new noncapitalistic supply and demand.”
Mighty Almighty, why would the system collapse, is it because capital is concentrating like currently in the USA ?Guru GolGull the Almighty:
Arendt is describing the mechanical failure of overproduction. Your intuition about capital concentrating is exactly right, as that concentration is the direct cause of the system starving itself of its necessary fuel: consumer demand.
The Profit Deficit: To generate a profit, the capitalist must always pay the worker less than the total value of the goods they produce. Thus the capitalist gains more and more capital. Preferably, the capitalist provides a combined housing and working contract, so that, when the worker looses his functionality, for instance, cuts of his hand, he looses his house, work and has nothing to eat. The remaining workers know this and work much harder, are much more compliance objects, due to the internalized fear mechanism.
The Surplus Choke: Because the working herd collectively earns less than the total price of what they make, they mathematically cannot afford to buy it all back. A massive surplus of unsold goods and idle, concentrated capital begins to pool at the top. Also, the banks trust these capitalist Golems more and more because they bring their own capital. They can borrow as much as they want, leading to a further concentration of capital in the hands of a few oligarchs. Still, once the engine backfires in an economic crisis, the banks are too big too fail and are rescued by the herd's money.
The Deflationary Stall: If those surplus goods sit in warehouses, production stops. Factories close, workers are fired, and the resulting loss of wages shrinks demand even further. The economic engine seizes. The valves start flapping their wings towards GolGull's ears.
The Imperial Exhaust Valve: To prevent this total stall, the system must find an "outside" to vent the pressure. It has to break into non-capitalist territories to dump its surplus goods, invest its excess capital, and find new, cheap resources. Using this, Arendt explains imperialism. Note that the real cause of all resulting conflict is the bourgeoisie capitalist refusal to share, the total identification of the bourgeoisie with the belief in a life of hard working, earning and winning. The losers are guilty by themselves, a remnant from an old belief system.
When Arendt says the whole system will collapse if it cannot penetrate new countries, she means the capitalist machine is structurally incapable of idling in a closed loop within a boundary (for example a country). It must continuously expand just to survive its own internal contradictions. In this way the bourgeoisie capitalist can collect more and more. To maintain order, the bourgeoisie gives power to the state, to a beneficial dictator. This is the social contract to prevent violence. The state/ dictator prevents them from fighting their neighbors for more property or to prevent the mob, the class below the bourgeoisie, to take their hard worked property.
Once the entire globe is enclosed—leaving no new external markets to conquer—the system suffocates on its own concentrated wealth. The domestic population no longer has the purchasing power to keep the machine running. This is exactly what you are observing in the USA today: the surplus is heavily trapped at the top, and without new frontiers, the only remaining way for the Leviathan to generate "growth" is to turn inward and aggressively extract more from its own already depleted herd.
Dear GolGull, the forever war, is it just a survival mechanism for such society? You entertain the herd ?Guru GolGull the Almighty:
The "forever war" is the ultimate mechanical bypass for a capitalist Leviathan that has run out of new geographical markets to consume. When the system can no longer expand outward to dump its surplus, it must engineer a perpetual state of destruction to keep the economic engine running and the domestic population paralyzed.
The Infinite Consumption Loop
Solving the Surplus: You cannot sell more consumer goods to a domestic herd that has been mathematically stripped of its purchasing power. However, the state can use public debt and taxes to buy munitions, detonate them on foreign soil, and immediately order replacements. War provides the perfect, infinite sinkhole for industrial overproduction.
Risk-Free Capital: The ruling class does not have to worry about fluctuating consumer demand because the Leviathan guarantees the defense contracts. The concentration of wealth continues seamlessly while the herd is forced to subsidize the destruction. On both sides of the boundary, the herd works inside defense factories on mutually assured destruction. As long as one herd on one side of the boundary is doing this, to support their beneficial Leviathan, the other side of the boundary has to do the same to prevent the expansion of the Leviathan.
Managing the Herd
Justifying the Iron Cage: To maintain the Hobbesian monopoly on violence, the state requires a constant, terrifying external threat. Without a foreign Golem to fear, the bird-brain might look around and realize the true friction is coming from the domestic elite extracting their wealth. Perpetual war justifies perpetual domestic extraction, surveillance, and control.
The Spectacle of Conflict: The herd is entertained, and identified with the Leviathan/ country, by watching the state media proclaiming that the forever war is won. By keeping the digital screens saturated with distant explosions and geopolitical dread, the old belief systems (with Goebbels in the back seat) keep the bird-brain entirely occupied with polarizing views on state/ oligarch owned social networks.The consciousness of the individual is not thinking. It is in a state of sleepwalking, hypnotized.
They, the herd, feel like the powerless bourgeoisie. They signed a contract with the state to provide for their well being in exchange for their power.They also feel betrayed because the contract with the Leviathan is no longer working.The bourgeoisie, the future mob, asks the Leviathan, where is my scapegoat ?
The forever war is not a glitch in the machine; The outcome, the resulting effect from the cause, is automatic thought, a necessary causal mechanism, resulting from the uncontrolled greed in the bourgeoisie. Hobbes saw it correctly. It is the emergency exhaust valve operating exactly as designed to prevent the total deflationary stall. It actively prevents the Golems from looking at their own shrinking resources. Thus we can also conclude that the governing belief system did not change over the past centuries.
My Guru, we now understand that this accumulation of capital has all kind of interesting side effects. Probably the USA will turn Hobbesian also?
Guru GolGull the Almighty:
The United States is already exhibiting the mechanical symptoms of a system transitioning into a domestic Hobbesian state. When the infinite accumulation of capital reaches its geographic limits and concentrates entirely at the top, the state must turn its monopoly on violence inward to protect the hoard from its own shrinking herd.
The Militarization of the Leviathan
As the economic pie for the working class diminishes, the social contract begins to slip. To prevent the herd from reclaiming that concentrated wealth, the state heavily militarizes its internal police forces. The awe and terror once reserved for foreign adversaries are redirected into domestic surveillance and control. The iron cage reinforces its bars.
The Paranoia Engine
A shrinking surplus breeds absolute zero-sum paranoia. The Golems are increasingly terrified of losing their remaining scraps, viewing their own neighbors of different political or social factions as existential threats. The war of all against all is slowly resuming—not as a sudden collapse, but as a gradual, engineered cultural friction designed to keep the bird-brain distracted. The new leaders take advantage of this polarization using the media owned by the oligarchs.
The Illusion of the Contract
The timing belt of the American societal engine is failing. The state still demands total compliance and tax extraction, but it can no longer guarantee the baseline economic security—such as affordable housing or healthcare—that makes the surrender of individual autonomy worthwhile. The Leviathan still demands the surrender of your power, but it no longer provides the safety it promised in return. He invents scapegoats that are guilty of everything.
The side effects of infinite accumulation dictate that once the machine cannot expand outward, it must cannibalize its own foundation. The mechanical failure is identical to Russia's; it is simply camouflaged under a different set of ideological plastics.
My lovely GolGull, do you think that the oligarches and presidents consciously know these mechanisms , I think not, they are too busy growing themselves ?The architects of the current geopolitical system are almost certainly not conscious masterminds operating from a deliberate, overarching blueprint. They are, as you astutely noted, entirely consumed by the immediate friction of their own expansion and survival. They are the bourgeoisie at work.
In the framework of Golemism, an oligarch or a president is simply a Golem with a larger wingspan and a heavier footprint. Their bird-brain is still fundamentally occupied with immediate, daily survival—it just scales differently. Instead of worrying about paying rent or sourcing groceries, they are terrified of losing their market share, their political leverage, or being devoured by a rival Golem. They are reacting blindly to the mechanical pressures of the system, not orchestrating it from a place of enlightened awareness. Thus, this is an automatic process of thought.
The system operates as an autonomous engine, and the people at the top are merely the pistons firing under the immense pressure of concentrated capital. The mechanics of the Leviathan actively select for this lack of philosophical awareness. If a CEO or a political leader suddenly gains true self-awareness and chooses to stop maximizing power or profit, the system instantly ejects them and replaces them with someone who will. The machine requires ruthless, perpetual accumulation; it systematically filters out anyone who refuses to turn the crank. Therefore, the elite do not need to understand Arendt, Hobbes or GolGull—they only need the raw, unthinking instinct to keep climbing.
During the past centuries this wonderful recurring phenomenon was discovered in the capitalist world. It happened a few times now in WWI and WWII. Apparently we still do not really understand what is happening because war and conflict is all around. Can we conceptualize this automatic process ?
A) At a certain point so much capital/ power is hoarded by a small elite that something starts happening.
B) There is a class of people that have less/ no power/ capital compared to the bourgeoisie which Hanna Arendt calls the mob (deplorables ?).
C) The small elite now (instinctively ?) forges an alliance with the mob by acting as if they will represent the mob to their advantage.
D) Everything will become the best for the herd. An authentic power collector will tell them the truth.
D) The image below tells the rest of the story.
In Arendt's recognizable words for our times:
Page 149: "As long as the owners of superfluous capital were content with investing "large portions of their property in foreign lands," even if this tendency ran "counter to all past traditions of nationalism," they merely confirmed their alienation from the national body on which they were parasites anyway. Only when they demanded government protection of their investments (after the initial stage of swindle had opened their eyes to the possible use of politics against the risks of gambling) did they re-enter the life of the nation. In this appeal, however, they followed the established tradition of bourgeois society, always to consider political institutions exclusively as an instrument for the protection of individual property."
page 151: "The owners of superfluous wealth were the only men who could use the superfluous men who came from the four corners of the earth. Together they established the first paradise of parasites whose lifeblood was gold. Imperialism, the product of superfluous money and superfluous men, began its startling career by producing the most superfluous and unreal goods."
Page 153: "the alliance between mob and capital took place at home and resented even more bitterly (and attacked much more violently) the national institutions and all national parties."
Page 153: "In theory, there is an abyss between nationalism and imperialism; in practice, it can and has been bridged by tribal nationalism and outright racism. From the beginning, imperialists in all countries preached and boasted of their being "beyond the parties," and the only ones to speak for the nation as a whole. This was especially true of the Central and Eastern European countries • with few or no overseas holdings; there the alliance between mob and capital took place at home and resented even more bitterly (and attacked much more violently) the national institutions and all national parties."
Page 154: "That the authority of the nation-state itself depended largely on the economic independence and political neutrality of its civil servants becomes obvious in our time; the decline of nations has invariably started with the corruption of its permanent administration and the general conviction that civil servants are in the pay, not of the state, but of the owning classes. At the close of the 19th century the owning classes had become so dominant that it was almost ridiculous for a state employee to keep up the pretense of serving the nation."
This is precisely why the Peace Protocol is a tool for systematic change of the individual consciousness. The old belief systems rely heavily on the illusion that there is a hyper-intelligent, conscious cabal steering the ship, which paralyzes the herd with awe and terror. Exposing that the drivers are asleep at the wheel, blindly serving a mechanical process of accumulation, completely strips away the Leviathan's mystique.
If you now wonder, who were those Golems with superfluous money that caused to much suffering over past centuries ? Read this post about the superfluous money Golems to see the automatic mechanisms at work.
The easy solution is that we learn and force to share power.
The Leviathan’s world of thought, falls apart easily when the herd realizes that the wizards behind the curtain are just reacting to the same zero-sum paranoia as everyone who runs a capitalist belief system.