In 1651, Thomas Hobbes declared that without a powerful ruler to keep them in line, human beings would tear each other apart. Life without government, he wrote, would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. For nearly four centuries, this bleak vision has served as the philosophical foundation for coercive authority everywhere. Hobbes gave the world a reason to accept the cage—and we have been living in it ever since.

Boris Kriger argues that Hobbes was not merely wrong—he had it exactly backwards.

Drawing on game theory, evolutionary biology, neurochemistry, and dynamical systems, this book demonstrates that cooperation—not conflict—is humanity’s natural state. It is the attractor toward which every human society gravitates when left alone. The war of all against all is not the disease; it is the side effect of the supposed cure. The Leviathan does not prevent chaos. It creates it—by suppressing the neurochemical rewards of voluntary cooperation, by selecting for leaders with impaired empathy, and by convincing us that without chains, we would devour each other.

Through vivid thought experiments—three groups of shipwreck survivors on the same island, each with a different fate—Kriger shows that the difference between destruction, survival-through-tyranny, and genuine flourishing is not human nature but the architecture of power. He introduces the Leviathan Paradox: the coercive state induces the very war it claims to prevent. And he proposes an alternative—the state as platform—that protects cooperation without poisoning it.

This is not a book about abolishing government. It is a book about understanding why every government tends to become the enemy of the people it serves—and what a different architecture might look like.