Safety as the Bedrock of Civilization

Reihan Salam is a native of Brooklyn, New York. His parents are from what is now Bangladesh. He never thought of himself as a conservative growing up, or in high school, but the way Democrats are running NYC, and the rest of the Blue Cities, that changed.

When you have violence people retreat; they look on their neighbors with suspicion. They don't look on them as potential friends or business partners. That's the terrible irony of this. If you care about civic harmony, if you care about integration, if care about people building relationships, if you care about diversity and inclusion, the bedrock of that has to be people feeling safe.

This is the PragerU video Reihan Salam: The Issue of Crime Made Me a Conservative.

This is where I mention Hobbes' Leviathan, because not one of these ideas is new. Hobbes published Leviathan in 1651. In that book he describes the State of War that ensues when law and order break down.

Western Civilization is built on a foundation of law and order. Without law and order, you can't have nice things. You can't have anything really. Or as Hobbes stated it, when there is no force-of-law to keep people in check, things break down.

In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently 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, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.