Human Nature and Competition

After reading through different responses throughout the blog, I see myself agreeing with Hobbes somewhat less than I had been before. When I first read through "Of Commonwealth" and saw Hobbes' reasoning to his logic that all humans are dangerous and need to be governed because of their human nature, I completely agreed. I saw all of the points that Hobbes made as completely valid and it made sense how all of the characteristics that Hobbes gave, would keep us from functioning in a natural state. However, after reading through everyone else's posts and talking more in class, my opinion has greatly changed. I still partially agree with Hobbes' beliefs, however I do not see all of the human characteristics that he gave as particularly bad, and in fact believe that we need these qualities to succeed in life. Reading through the points that my classmates have made, has further convinced me of this. For example, Maggie gave a great example about her rowing and how her coach always pushes her and her team to do better and compete for what they want, which makes them all do better and reach their potential. I believe that competition although could be viewed as a detrimental factor to forming society, also must be realized as necessary. Without competition, people would never be pushed to do their best, therefore never realizing exactly what they are capable of. Their would be no motivation to do well because you would never be trying to outdo anyone else, or show anyone or yourself what you can do. Similar to Maggie's post, I have been on two swim teams before, one was far less competitive than the other and the other one was extremely competitive. In the first one, no one was really pushed to try and outdo one another and to be the best, so we didn't get very far in competitions because we weren't motivated or taught that we should push ourselves for our best. My other team however, pushed us always to do the very best that we were capable of and there was always comparison between us. Although sometimes it was a lot to handle, always being compared to others, it pushed us all to constantly do better, which in the end benefited us greatly. This could be compared to a society, when people are not pushed to do well and compete to be the best, no one will work hard and achieve their potential. However if taught to always try your hardest and to somewhat outdo each other, success will be accomplished. Overall I do believe that humans need to be somewhat controlled but do not fully agree on Hobbes view on human nature.