A Local Reimagination of the State of Nature

A reimagination of Manipur in moments of amusement and earnest with reference to the concepts of the State of Nature, which explain the evolution of complex human societies and political structures

  

STATE OF NATURE in political theory, refers to a real or hypothetical condition of human beings before or without political association. The notion of a state of nature was an essential element of the social-contract theories of the English philosophers Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and John Locke (1632–1704) and the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78). Visions of the state of nature differed sharply between social-contract theorists, though most associated it with the absence of state sovereignty. (Definition from Encyclopædia Britannica)

CONTENTS

• Introduction
• The Hobbesian Section
• The Lockean Matter    
• The Rousseau Rule
• The Context of Groupthink and Beyond
• Postscript

Introduction

Imagining a State—as a political entity with a specific territory, population, a government and the power to enter into relations with others—in a state of nature might seem contradictory because it is against Nature and names only exist in an organised society. The state of nature applies to the entire human race. For example, Manipur has had many names throughout history, such as Poireilam, Meitrabak, Sannaleipak, Tillikoktong, and Kangleipak, with the latter still used today. However we're not onto names now. According to modern State theory, imagining a physical boundary is pointless because boundaries and territories didn't exist before society.

For convenience, we are referencing broadly to Manipur, which has a recorded history from 33CE as an independent State and forcefully became a constituent of the Union of India in 1949 till now, albeit as we will see at the abstract level, the idea as a society has remained unchanged from its birth. We will re-conceive this part of the world within the concepts of the state of nature, as described by: 

1. Thomas Hobbes (in Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, 1651) 
2. John Locke (Two Treatises of Government, 1690)  
3. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, 1755) 

Anarchists will find a problem here because these theories on the state of nature, despite the conceptual differences, work on the simple principle that it depicts the human society in the absence of any form of political hierarchy. Yet, that gives rise to the succeeding concepts of social contract—and eventually how such establishments have had existed unhappily ever after. For today, let us start with Hobbes, and see how the Manipuris have endorsed the ideas of the state of nature in this age.

The Hobbesian Section

[T]here is no place for Industry; ....no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.

Proponents of the chingmi-tammi-amattani ideology—a majority of whom reside in the Imphal valley in a corner of Zomia*—will not be very glad to hear that human beings are still in their primitive self. It is beyond one’s imagination that the problem is still going to persist even after 8–10,000 years of territorial pissing and evolution. On the ground, it is bellum omnium contra omnes, or a war of every man against every man, regardless of the upcoming myths, beliefs and artificial identities to justify the conflicts between the people themselves, between the people and the State, and between the people and the government. To promote self-preservation, which is incidentally the only known rule, all the people who are going to grow up as Meiteis, Nagas and Kukis are fully aware of the dictum that life is solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short, as Hobbes would put it. Still, on any given day, the more politically correct term, humans, will be all for peace as much as they will also do everything in a war so they can reap maximum benefits.

* Zomia is a new name for virtually all the lands at altitudes above roughly three hundred meters all the way from the Central Highlands of Vietnam to northeastern India and traversing five Southeast Asian nations (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Burma) and four provinces of China (Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi, and parts of Sichuan). It is an expanse of 2.5 million square kilometers containing about one hundred million minority peoples of truly bewildering ethnic and linguistic variety. Geographically, it is also known as the Southeast Asian mainland massif.
—James C Scott, Weapons of the Weak. Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1985). New Haven: Yale University Press

Since there is no authority in such a State, and in a truly Hobbesian way, people do not trust each other and resort to every kind of extreme means to realise the end of self-interest. People might say the Manipuris in the new millennium could give them a run for their money! It is equally possible that they are not going to change the stance even when there is an authority as in this state. But any way, justice is a lady with her eyes covered because she cannot simply make a decision in the state of nature. Simultaneously, one group of people will be terrified of other groups, and if not, just making fun of the other. Then, after decades and centuries of existence, which is not necessarily reasonable or productive, they have started internalising the ideas of social contract but apparently it is still a long way from the present milieu when things have not gotten better but slightly more intelligent. Centuries after centuries, many people are not going to understand what it means to sacrifice certain natural rights for both personal and collective benefits. If there were any compromise on these rights, then those are the personal, but strictly nothing beyond, as people have seen there can be no other aspirations can be higher than that of an ethnic group.

The best thing in such a state is the absence of laws. No wonder, today, legislatures or representatives or members of this and that house, this Assembly and that, have been successfully retaining the legacies in the most typical Manipuri ways. Nothing can as well illustrate this better than the sheer delight of the leaders aka career contractors in their pursuit of self-aggrandisement, and if not, the parochial politics shaped by overlapping concepts of identities and ridiculous ideas like those of a unique history and foreign religions. Well, they can reason that that very human nature has existed from the dawns of prehistory and history put together. Just as a tree is a tree, human nature is no different, and thus robbing and looting are merely our innate ability and truly are the lives of humans as is life solitary, 'poore', nasty, brutish, and short.

The Lockean Matter

Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property.

This is harder to reimagine, but it is still a shame that everyone is against everyone, and nobody can politicise it in the name of religions and ethnicities like how things have been in our neighbourhoods all these years. Although there is no government, Locke sees that there is mutual agreement that makes the state of nature a precursor to human civilisations. To quote the English philosopher:

All mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, liberty, or possessions.

At the end of the day, it is plain human nature—that without any sense of groupism, or for that matter, any identity to conceptualise their idea of belonging—to think about their own self or at best, their closest selves like their families. In such a state, there could be no concepts of homelands like how people are demanding in contemporary Manipur for whatever reasons they can think of. When you can form a group based on the logic of might is right, different families would be no less than the primates that indulge in territorial pissing. If that is not enough, tax all the human beings, and not only on the so-called national highways. In this context, the pro-Manipuris who are against India can also increase the amount of tax that they collect from everyone in the name of a political revolution. Such a condition, ideally, can never be lesser than a higher version of the state of nature. 

This could be a real nightmare because in the 21st century you can mobilise people and even convert them from Kukis and Nagas to any faith as much as from Meiteis to Hindus (or Christianity, depending on the possible benefits of the proselytisation). However, in those days, it depends entirely on the partiality of a bigger and stronger group, with which human communities also work. Nobody would have imagined how the articulation of identity politics could sound then and now. It will not be a surprise if the thinkers (or doers?) in those days are so fed up with human evolution. In a nutshell, the people are already satisfied without ever understanding the impending issues of intersectionality and nationality. Of course, these are just too infantile but then who cares?! 

This could be just a hypothesis while in real—which is also completely contrast to ideas constructed with the beliefs of western philosophy—the people in this part of the world are just navigating through swamps and marshes as the Loktak dries up to form the Imphal valley under no state or social contracts. Nobody cares about the differences when we are drowned in a super-sized river of danger together. Is this the reason why one of the major characteristics of human societies is egotism? On the other hand, those people in the state of nature will definitely have different perspectives about this phenomenon. India, by virtue of its Aryan and Dravidian worldviews, will find it hard to understand it, albeit it’s just too natural because the Loktak is just too far away from contemporary New Delhi or ancient Mohenjo-daro. Meanwhile, just as Locke had conceptualised about the law of nature, we have two foreign religions, Hinduism and Christianity that are established so well for the gods to preach their sermons even if individual rights are still not the order of the day.

The Rousseau Rule

I conceive two species of inequality among men; one which I call natural, or physical inequality, because it is established by nature, and consists in the difference of age, health, bodily strength, and the qualities of the mind, or of the soul; the other which may be termed moral, or political inequality, because it depends on a kind of convention, and is established, or at least authorized, by the common consent of mankind.

Not many people in this part of the world would know Jean-Jacques Rousseau but this philosopher was, in a modern sense, a pro-Manipuri. Two factors explain this statement: one, the people in those days were devoid of the sense of redundant pride and greed because they have no possession unlike how it is today; and two, they were also becoming more and more civilised, something which is simply not possible in present-day Manipur albeit people are, by nature, good and considerate. We can say the people have started idealisation then, about the personal, the political and everything in-between and beyond them.  

Unlike the Hobbesian fatalism, in other circumstances, Rousseau reasons that a human society is created well beyond the spirit of social antagonism, implying in our local context, the Meiteis would have been as neutral and peaceful as the Nagas, and so much as they were with the Kukis and vice versa. When there was no ethnic identity, it is no surprise that they could see the world beyond their parochial ethnic fences and can come together for a social contract. In such a reality, there is no sense of a group to explain or understand the sheer unnecessity of rules, formalities and control by a bigger group, or, for belonging to a smaller one. In short, here has been no hegemony. In the 21st century, unfortunately, India still imposes the rules or revoke the rules when it deems them necessary or unnecessary. Hegemony and cultural imperialism tell a different tale altogether.  

Only those people in the state of nature can tell us about their lived experience, and this state of nature is merely a theoretical frame. If we refer back to the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, at the dusk of the world of the state of nature, human beings were becoming more civil, and naturally more political. Being political means people know their decision affects others as much as the others’, theirs. People would only wish there was a learning curve, as things getting better with age and experience, but that is still a distant dream. Still Rousseau believed in them and conceptualised that such a primitive state is a harbinger of the contemporary politics, or in his views, such a state, despite the challenges, was laying the groundwork for political socialisation. In his words, the motivation for human action was led more by the idea of amour propre (self-respect) than amour de soi (self-love). The theorist was as optimist as the people in our region who are dreaming a national dream!

To summarise, one common thread that runs between the ideas of these theorists is, just as they have elaborated several times, that we can gauge the importance of a state only in its absence. It is merely sad but true that we cannot make a distinction in a place like Manipur.  

The Context of Groupthink and Beyond

GROUPTHINK is mode of thinking in which individual members of small cohesive groups tend to accept a viewpoint or conclusion that represents a perceived group consensus, whether or not the group members believe it to be valid, correct, or optimal. Groupthink reduces the efficiency of collective problem solving within such groups. (Encyclopædia Britannica)

Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau have put their theories in black and white. For as many theorists, there are as well three primary ethnic groups of the Kukis, Nagas and the Meiteis in Manipur. The existing reality also demonstrates that it was too much for us to get used to the so-called modern political system shaped by the ethos and principles of democracy. In the zeitgeist of globalisation and pop culture, it will be so naïve for us to consider that we will do better after realising the goals of our non-inclusive, disparate politics that is entirely based on our ethnicity. Meantime, observers maintain that there was no animosity between the different groups throughout history. Then India arrived, powerfully, on the scene 75 years ago and have completely changed the landscape, more so in the last few decades. 

After these three primary theorists in western philosophy, there are also seminal works from two American philosophers, John Rawls (1921–2002) and Robert Nozick (1938–2002). Rawls was critical about the state of nature, arguing that it is only good as imagining its utility only in their absence just as Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau had conceptualised and that only a government can help build a just society. He also wrote extensively on how power can be legitimised even on occasions when we have disagreement about what constitutes a good life.

For a political entity like Manipur, Rawls’ idea of political philosophy for fulfilling a society’s public culture is through: (i) practical means: [with a] philosophy [that] can propose grounds for reasoned agreement when sharp political divisions threaten to lead to violent conflict; (ii) helping citizens to orient themselves within their own social world; (iii) probing the limits of political possibility; and (iv) reconciliation... 

‘...to calm our frustration and rage against our society and its history by showing us the way in which its institutions… are rational and developed over time as they did to attain their present, rational form.’ (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2021)

No wonder then the public culture is as good as nonexistent. At the end of the day, leave alone Manipur, that will be another theory on human beings in a universe we know so little about. Forget about 150 or 1,500 or 15,000 or for that matter 150,000 years ago, there are still legacies of the states of nature, maintained well as in the case of Manipur that has its recorded history from 33CE and is currently a part of the union of India. Meanwhile, Nozick had taken one notch up and said that people are inclined towards a community and contract because this guarantees a life of safety and security though little would they have known about the emergence of a specimen of human beings called politicians. Well, that explains only clearly how humans have different systems of governance and administration while so much differently, Manipur is here in 2022 without much difference with its life in the state of nature.

Three years after the publication of Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971), Nozick published Anarchy, State, and Utopia as a critique, while reasoning the relevance of a state and detailing minarchy (or night-watchman state), which is a model of a limiting and minimalistic state based on libertarian theory. This concept built on Lockean state of nature is apparently too alien for Manipur because—forget about progress and development—people are still reasoning their political arguments either without any consideration for political realities, or just toothlessly though it is not their fault. Their only shortcoming is that they are realising the ideas of a nation and nation-state only now, four hundred years after the Treaty of Westphalia, which is as well one of the precursors of modern nation-states. Besides, the Nagas would never tolerate anything beyond their concepts of village republics and unique history, and the Lim; while the Meiteis, seemingly representing Manipur, would do the same thing but from their own ideas of unity, history and territoriality. No surprise a solution to this problem is as elusive as getting peace from the 25-year-old Indo-Naga peace talks. In the meantime, India which has been a party to the conflict, would often play the role of a negotiator smoothly between the various ethnic groups.    

Postscript

Rousseau’s ideas were in contrast to those Hobbes, nonetheless, such a state of nature is devoid of any government or control, and everyone is still on their devices. Unintentionally it was scheduled to sow many problems in the future because you cannot skip the transformation of monarchy into democracy. Manipur had to learn it the hard way after becoming a part of the Indian union. In such a milieu, the land belongs to you just because it is your custom. Those are so 15th century! However, as people say, common sense is the least common of all the senses. Today people would say this is more than an ideal, that it is more political but again, who will care about this petty politics? India is involved, by the way, not out of any national reason, but for a couple of simple things called geopolitics and its principle of nationalism. Who in the state of nature would imagine about neocolonialism?   

The stronger groups will naturally be greedier because humans are never ever insatiable, and they will always want more. Somehow, such a primordial existence can start emphasizing on life, liberty and property as state-of-nature theorists postulated it, for the simple reason that those are just not enough. Perhaps, in such a world, life, liberty, and property are natural rights, which had as well given birth to the idea of sacrificing these rights to the government for common benefits. 

Centuries and millennia later, even after acknowledging the concept of a modern nation-state—which is characterised by the three factors of sovereignty, territoriality and peoplehood—Manipuris and Indians are still going to argue in the name of race and indigeneity. In such a self-centred world, the farthest thing that the citizens could visualise is seeing things from ethnocentric lens. By people, we do not mean human beings, but the ethnic people in Manipur who have their own senses of history and tradition and politics and culture, despite living merely 10–100 kilometers apart, though with a much-needed help from the Indian State. According to the Global Firepower’s Military Strength Rankings of 2024 that evaluates 145 countries, India ranks fourth with a power index of 0.1023. More than 60 individual factors determine a State's PowerIndex (PwrIndx) and the smaller the value, the more powerful its conventional fighting capability is. India also possesses a total of 2,210 aircraft, 4,614 tanks, and 295 assets in terms of naval forces. 

In a nutshell, Manipur is closely related to the state of nature, back in those eras and equally right here and right now, and today, and further much to the delight of radical Indian nationalists, military and nation-builders. It is not a surprise anymore then that there is a sheer lack of universal political ideas from this part of the world, except for some conceited ideas of nationhood, which the State can ignore so conveniently.  

—Concluded.

Further Reading

• State of nature (Political theory) by André Munro, Encyclopædia Britannica
• Social contract theories, by Celeste Friend, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy  

Read the Seminal Works on the Issue:

• Leviathan, 1651, Thomas Hobbes, Internet Archive  
• Two Treatises of Government, 1690, John Locke, Early Modern Philosophy  
• A Discourse Upon the Origin and the Foundation of the Inequality Among Mankind, 1755, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Project Gutenberg 
• A Theory of Justice, 1971, John Rawls, Jstor
• Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 1974, Robert Nozick, Google Books

An additional title for everyone: Open Secrets: The Explosive Memoirs of an Indian Intelligence Officer by Maloy Krishna Dhar, self-publication 

Lesson of the day: Early to bed and early to rise make a man an early man.