Cooperation as Attractor: A Multi-Level Formal Refutation of Hobbes's Bellum Omnium Contra Omnes

This paper presents a formal six-level refutation of Thomas Hobbes's foundational claim that the natural state of humanity is a war of all against all (bellum omnium contra omnes), resolvable only through submission to an absolute sovereign (Leviathan). Integrating results from evolutionary biology, game theory, dynamical systems theory, motivation crowding theory, and organizational selection theory, the paper demonstrates that: (I) cooperation is a neurochemically grounded biological default shaped by natural selection; (II) cooperation constitutes a stable Nash equilibrium in iterated games via the Folk Theorem, requiring no external enforcer; (III) cooperation functions as a dynamical attractor to which social systems return after perturbation; (IV) coercive authority acts as a perturbation that destabilizes the cooperative attractor by modifying the effective payoff matrix and triggering neurochemical stress responses; (V) hierarchical power structures exhibit negative selection, disproportionately elevating individuals with impaired cooperative mechanisms; and (VI) these individuals project their atypical psychology onto the general population, producing self-fulfilling prophecies of conflict. The paper introduces the Leviathan Paradox: the coercive sovereign does not prevent the war of all against all but induces it — through a self-reinforcing causal chain of perturbation, neurochemical degradation, negative selection, and projection. Three novel mechanisms are identified: the self-referential paradox of the state (the institution exists to constrain its own operators), the autoimmune analogy (the Leviathan as an immune system that attacks its own organism), and the inverse survivorship bias (Hobbes generalized from a filtered sample of power-seekers to all of humanity). An alternative architectural model — the state as platform — is proposed, which protects the cooperative attractor without concentrating coercive power, by providing infrastructure without authority, transparent rules without rulers, and sublimation channels for dominance motivation. The paper builds on and extends: the Unified Theory of Self-Organizing Systems (Kriger, 2017), which established four formal laws governing cooperation in peer systems; the formal model of mutual aid as a dynamical stability principle (Kriger, 2026); the analysis of voluntary communal formation versus revolutionary imposition (Kriger, 2026); and the decoherence framework showing how ideological constructs function as structural neoplasms (Kriger, 2026). Empirical grounding is provided by Axelrod's tournament results, motivation crowding experiments (Frey, Gneezy & Rustichini, Mellström & Johannesson), Ostrom's commons governance research, post-disaster self-organization studies (Solnit), the lost wallet experiment (Cohn et al.), and a nine-year self-organizing shelter community operated by the author without formal rules. Keywords: Hobbes; Leviathan; cooperation; game theory; iterated prisoner's dilemma; Nash equilibrium; Folk Theorem; attractor; dynamical systems; perturbation; motivation crowding; negative selection; dark triad; social contract; political philosophy; self-organization; platform governance; neurochemical duality; oxytocin; Axelrod tournament; Kropotkin; mutual aid; commons governance; Ostrom Resource type: Preprint License: CC BY 4.0