This New Leviathan we find ourselves in is different than the natural state theorized by Hobbes in key respect: instead of being the inevitable outcome of a naturally occurring series of events, it is created by design. It is an ordered matrix of producer/consumer robots isolated from one another, and the environment, by a rigid, narcissistic, linear way of seeing the world.

With the dominance of narcissism, instead of being seen as an unfolding of possibilities, life is reduced to zero – sum games in which there are only two outcomes – winning and losing. The conditions, which sustained the previous order, trust in our neighbor’s communal interest, no longer holds. Those of us who cling to this old belief are the new dinosaurs, completely non-adaptive to the new reality and destined for extinction. Instead of a brotherhood of man, we have a free-for-all in which it is each man for himself in a fight to the finish. The winning strategy becomes one of doing it to them before they do it to us. The distinction from Hobbes’ variation is that here all actions, no matter how blatantly self-serving, are veiled by extravagant proclamations of sentiment. In other words, everyone feels compelled to appear nice before others and themselves. The result is that it becomes impossible to sustain anything but the most superficial form of relationships, with human interaction being reduced to a series of isolated transactions.