History reveals recurring patterns. Civilizations rise and decline, peace gives way to conflict, and political systems often fail to fulfill their promises. These patterns raise a fundamental question: can civilization overcome the limits of human nature, or will it always be shaped by them?

Thomas Hobbes argued that political authority is necessary to escape insecurity. Without government, life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Yet Hobbes’s solution creates a further challenge: political authorities are themselves composed of the same imperfect beings they seek to regulate. Political institutions are shaped by the ambitions, fears, and self-interest of their members. Civilization can manage these impulses, but it cannot eliminate them.

Philosophers weave systems, believers raise cathedrals, and politicians draft programs; each is an attempt to find or create meaning in a universe whose ultimate meaning remains uncertain. Yet at the center of it all remains a bewildered and often irrational human being, struggling to........

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