Robert Kaplan hopes that his pessimism is a foundation for prudence:
History teaches that it is exactly at such prosperous times as these that we need to maintain a sense of the tragic, however unnecessary it may seem. The Greek historian Polybius, of the second century B.C., interpreted what we consider the Golden Age of Athens as the beginning of its decline. To Thucydides, the very security and satisfactory life that the Athenians enjoyed under Pericles blinded them to the bleak forces of human nature that were gradually to be their undoing in the Peloponnesian War.
America’s Founding Fathers were pessimistic about democracy:
James Madison:
“Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”Thomas Paine:
“Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness.”It was the “crude” and “reactionary” philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, which placed security ahead of liberty in a system of enlightened despotism, from which the Founders drew philosophical sustenance. Paul A. Rahe, a professor of history at the University of Tulsa, shows in his superb three-volume Republics Ancient and Modern (1992) how the Founders partly rejected the ancient republics, which were based on virtue, for a utilitarian regime that channeled man’s selfish, materialistic instincts toward benign ends. Man, Benjamin Franklin said in an apparent defense of Hobbesian determinism, is “a tool-making animal.”
From Was Democracy Just a Moment? (1997).