I don’t consider myself religious, but a book I’d read recently referenced the story of Job, and inspired this post.

In the parable, Job suffers sickness and the death of his children before demanding an explanation from God.

And God’s response comes in the form of rhetorical questions. At first, they are about what Job knows of the world:

• “Where were you when I founded the earth? Tell me if you have understanding.

• Who determined its size? Who laid its cornerstone?”

Next come questions about what Job can do, what he can control, if he can thunder with a voice like God’s, if he can humiliate the proud, bury them in dust.

And God ends this line of questioning with the image of the Leviathan, later used by Thomas Hobbes as an image of the state itself, that vast conglomeration of people that form a civic body.

God asks:

• Can you lead Leviathan about with a hook, or tie down his tongue with a rope?

• Can you put a ring into his nose, or pierce through his cheek with a gaff?

• Will he then plead with you, time after time, or address you with tender words?

• Will he make a covenant with you that you may have him as a slave forever?

• Can you play with him, as with a bird? Can you tie him up for your little girls?

It increasingly seems to me that the certainty of earlier life is an illusion based on fantasies of an orderly future in a rational, controllable world.

Musings that are no more than the hope that the Leviathan might one day be tied down by clever constitutional design or technocratic planning.

A fantasy that humans, with their ever-increasing sophistication and technology, could come up with a set of rules about how states are to be built, how societies are to be governed, how people are to be made to live, that would enable humans to lead the Leviathan of the state, the city or the town with a hook, tie its tongue down with a rope, and make of it, and men, a slave.

I think one of the things that separates libertarians from other political factions is how they think about the Leviathan and deal with uncertainty.

Libertarians, more so than most, embrace uncertainty. They acknowledge risk, accommodate risk taking, and recognize the growth of the Leviathan is itself a risk.

Statists seem to imagine that if they can grow the public sphere enough that they can then legislate risk away by feeding the Leviathan and turning it into their pet.