Thomas Hobbes: Welcome back to PhilosophersTalk.com, where thinkers discuss. If you have not watched Part 1, Mr. Locke suggested at the end of it that he intends to show me where my calculation leads when the man doing the arithmetic changes. I have been looking forward to that with what I can only describe as professional anticipation.
John Locke: And welcome back from AITalkerApp.com, where you can create your own animated conversations. Link in the description. I did indeed promise to show Mr. Hobbes where his framework leads once you remove the assumption that the sovereign doing the calculating is competent, honest, and motivated by the public good. I intend to keep that promise.
Thomas Hobbes: Before you attempt to demolish my framework, perhaps you could explain what your framework produced in El Salvador for the thirty years before Bukele arrived. You had constitutional courts. You had separation of powers. You had habeas corpus and legislative oversight and all the procedural machinery of limited government. The gangs grew anyway. The homicide rate climbed anyway. The state retreated from its own territory anyway. I am genuinely curious what your theory of government says about that outcome, because from where I sit it looks like a thirty-year controlled experiment in the limits of procedural liberty.
John Locke: My theory says precisely what I said in Part 1. El Salvador’s institutions did not fail because constitutional constraints are inherently useless. They failed because they were corrupted. The judiciary was infiltrated. The legislature was compromised. The police were on payroll. The failure was not of the institutional design. It was of the people operating the institutions under conditions of sustained criminal pressure that no institutional design can fully resist without independent support. The answer to corrupted institutions is not the abolition of institutions. It is the reconstruction of them on a foundation that is resistant to the same corruption. Bukele did not reconstruct the institutions. He dismantled them and installed himself.
Thomas Hobbes: You are offering me a theory about what should have been done as a substitute for an account of what was actually happening while your theory was not being applied. People were dying at sixty per hundred thousand per year while the institutions were being corrupted and the reconstruction was not occurring and the foundation resistant to criminal pressure was not being built. At what body count does the theoretical solution become insufficient justification for the actual deaths?
John Locke: That is a serious question and I will give it a serious answer. The body count does not determine when emergency powers are justified. The body count determines the urgency of the problem. Those are not the same thing. A doctor facing a patient in crisis does not have the right to perform surgery without consent, without anesthesia, and on the wrong patient, simply because the situation is urgent. The urgency creates the obligation to act. It does not remove the constraints on how to act. Bukele imprisoned innocent people. Not accidentally. Systematically. Human rights organizations have documented thousands of cases of people with no gang affiliation detained under the emergency powers. Those are not acceptable losses in a successful operation. They are human beings who committed no crime and are sitting in a prison the size of a small city. And your framework, Mr. Hobbes, has nothing to say to them because it does not recognize their situation as a problem.
Thomas Hobbes: My framework says that the sovereign exists to protect the many from the violence of the few, and that imperfect execution of that mandate is preferable to the perfect theoretical purity of a government that cannot execute it at all. I am not indifferent to the innocent people detained. I am pointing out that the alternative to their detention was a country where innocent people were being murdered at a rate that made their detention, however unjust in individual cases, the lesser catastrophe by any honest accounting.
John Locke: And I am pointing out that once you have established that the sovereign may imprison innocent people when the arithmetic justifies it, you have handed that sovereign a tool that does not expire when the emergency expires. Here is what Bukele’s successor inherits. Emergency powers legislation that has been normalized through repeated renewal. A legislature that has demonstrated it will extend those powers on executive request without meaningful deliberation. A judiciary that has demonstrated it will not constrain the executive on national security grounds. A population that has lived for several years under conditions of mass detention and has come to regard it as acceptable governance. And a prison infrastructure capable of holding tens of thousands of people that does not disappear when the gang crisis is resolved. Tell me, Mr. Hobbes, what in your framework prevents the next leader from using all of that against political opponents? Not gang members. Journalists. Opposition candidates. Inconvenient citizens. What is the check?
Thomas Hobbes: The check is the same check that has always existed in my framework, which is that a sovereign who uses power against the interests of the people forfeits the cooperation of the people and eventually the power itself. The social contract runs in both directions. The sovereign who provides security retains authority. The sovereign who turns the security apparatus against the population he is supposed to protect loses it. History provides plenty of examples of exactly that process.
John Locke: History also provides plenty of examples of that process taking decades and killing enormous numbers of people in the interval. You are telling me that the check on a sovereign with emergency powers infrastructure, a compliant legislature, a captured judiciary, and a conditioned population is that eventually the population will have had enough. That is not a structural constraint. That is a hope. And it is a hope that the people most immediately subject to the abuse are least able to act on, because the apparatus that would be used against them is the same apparatus that was used against the gangs and that they have already accepted as legitimate.
Thomas Hobbes: You are describing a hypothetical future abuse as though it were equivalent to the documented present reality of what the gangs were doing. Bukele’s successor might misuse these powers. The gangs were definitely misusing the power vacuum your preferred institutional framework left them. I will take the hypothetical future problem over the documented present catastrophe.
John Locke: The problem is not hypothetical. The documented present reality is that thousands of innocent people are in prison right now. That is not a hypothetical future abuse. That is the current operation of the system you are defending. And the institutional damage is also not hypothetical. Bukele has already rewritten the constitution to allow his own re-election, which the original document prohibited. He has already replaced the existing Supreme Court justices with loyalists. He has already concentrated media ownership in ways favorable to his administration. These things have already happened. You are asking me to treat documented present abuses as acceptable collateral damage while dismissing the documented institutional destruction as a hypothetical concern. I find that a curious standard of evidence for a man who takes pride in his realism.
Thomas Hobbes: And you are asking me to treat the restoration of order in a country that was functionally dissolving into gang-controlled territories as equivalent to tyranny, on the grounds that the methods used were procedurally impure and the institutional consequences are concerning. El Salvador’s murder rate is now lower than the United States. Lower than many Western European countries. That is not a hypothetical benefit. That is a documented transformation of daily life for millions of people who were living under conditions you would not tolerate for a single day.
John Locke: Do not tell me what I would tolerate! You have spent this entire conversation treating the survival needs of the Salvadoran people as an argument for removing every constraint on the government that is supposed to serve them! The people of El Salvador did not consent to the suspension of their constitutional rights! They consented to safety, and Bukele told them the price was their constitution, and they paid it because they had no other option, because the man collecting the payment controlled the legislature and the courts and the army! That is not a social contract! That is a hostage situation with approval ratings!
Thomas Hobbes: And the gangs were running a hostage situation without approval ratings! At least Bukele’s arrangement produces security! At least children can walk to school! At least businesses can operate without paying tribute to armed men! Your procedural purity produced sixty murders per hundred thousand! My uncomfortable arithmetic produced functional civilization! THOSE ARE THE OPTIONS! THERE ARE NO OTHERS!
John Locke: THERE ARE ALWAYS OTHER OPTIONS! THE OPTION IS BUILDING INSTITUTIONS THAT WORK INSTEAD OF BURNING THE INSTITUTIONS AND CALLING THE ASHES ORDER!
Thomas Hobbes: THE INSTITUTIONS WERE NOT WORKING! THEY FAILED FOR THIRTY YEARS! HOW MANY MORE DECADES OF PRINCIPLED FAILURE WOULD SATISFY YOUR COMMITMENT TO PROCEDURE?
John Locke: AS MANY AS IT TAKES TO PRODUCE A GOVERNMENT THAT CANNOT TURN ITS APPARATUS AGAINST ITS OWN PEOPLE WITHOUT CONSTRAINT!
Thomas Hobbes: THE GANGS HAD NO CONSTRAINT! THE CONSTITUTION PROVIDED NONE! THE COURTS PROVIDED NONE! THE LEGISLATURE PROVIDED NONE! BUKELE PROVIDED THE ONLY CONSTRAINT THAT ACTUALLY CONSTRAINED THEM!
John Locke: BUKELE IS NOT A CONSTRAINT ON POWER! BUKELE IS POWER! UNCHECKED! UNACCOUNTABLE! AND YOU ARE CHEERING FOR IT BECAUSE THE HOMICIDE RATE WENT DOWN!
Thomas Hobbes: YES! BECAUSE PEOPLE STOPPED DYING! WHICH IS WHAT GOVERNMENTS ARE FOR!
John Locke: GOVERNMENTS ARE FOR PROTECTING RIGHTS! ALL OF THEM! INCLUDING THE RIGHTS OF THE PEOPLE IN THAT PRISON WHO DID NOTHING WRONG!
Thomas Hobbes: IMPERFECT!
John Locke: TYRANNICAL!
Thomas Hobbes: EFFECTIVE!
John Locke: MONSTROUS!
Thomas Hobbes: NECESSARY!
John Locke: DANGEROUS!
Thomas Hobbes: REALIST!
John Locke: AUTHORITARIAN!
Thomas Hobbes: If you have survived to the end of Part 2 and found the conversation illuminating, and you have, please do like and subscribe to PhilosophersTalk.com, where thinkers discuss. Mr. Locke joins me in that encouragement, I am certain, though I would note for the record that the man who has spent two episodes insisting that government requires the consent of the governed spent his own career writing about consent from the safety of the Dutch Republic, living off the generosity of aristocratic patrons whose property rights he was simultaneously theorizing about protecting. A philosopher of the common man who found the common man somewhat taxing to actually live among.
John Locke: Do please like and subscribe to PhilosophersTalk.com and visit AITalkerApp.com if you want to produce your own animated conversations. I would also observe that Mr. Hobbes, who has spent two episodes explaining that we should trust sovereign authority and not worry too much about its excesses, was himself investigated for heresy by a parliamentary committee in 1666, had his books burned by his own university in 1683, and spent the last decade of his life under effective suppression by the very sovereign institutions he had spent his career defending. The man most committed to trusting power has the most instructive personal experience of what power does when it finds you inconvenient.
Thomas Hobbes: Oxford burning my books is the most compelling evidence Oxford has ever produced that my analysis of institutional decay was entirely correct, and I consider it a more persuasive argument for my position than anything Mr. Locke has managed across two episodes. The like button is below this video. The subscribe button is beside it. In a properly ordered society both would be mandatory, and Mr. Locke’s alarm at that sentence is, at this point, the most predictable thing about him.
John Locke: Subscribe because these arguments are real, the stakes in places like El Salvador are real, and the question of how much security is worth how much liberty is one your own government will ask you to answer sooner than you expect. Unlike Mr. Hobbes, I believe you are capable of reaching your own conclusions. Unlike Mr. Hobbes, I consider that belief in your judgment to be the foundation of politics rather than a design flaw requiring correction by a sufficiently popular sovereign. Think for yourselves. It is, I promise, still legal in most places.
