What’s Wrong With Our Society, 2.9: It’s Anarchy, Baby!

In past episodes of MTV’s “Jersey Shore,” of course, we’ve seen J-WOWW and Sammi come to blows, Ronnie and Vinny get into a shoving match, Ronnie behave badly while away from Sammi, Pauly D’s hair defy logic, and — of course — Vinny share his bed with both Angelina and Snooki.

But, perhaps worst of all, this week we have a dust-up between Angelina and “The Situation.” I say this might be the worst thing, of course, because I argued — last week — that “The Situation” wasn’t a misogynist and that he might be the only cast member with a moral center. This week, determinded to prove me wrong, “The Situation” takes a break from his routine of Gym, Tanning, and Laundry in order to start a fight with Angelina over her habit of leaving a mess all over the house.

The break that “The Situation” takes from his routine is important in itself, of course, because he is clearly in over his head with the GTL routine: in this episode he attempts to pick up his laundry twice and, in the process, managed to learn some Spanish: “No ropa para ‘Situation.’”

We should note, first of all, that “The Situation” is something of a den mother to the gang and has been since the very beginning of their time together at the Jersey Shore. He cooks for everyone, he regularly cleans the house, and he generally doesn’t make too big of an issue of the fact that his roommates don’t know how to light a grill without almost setting themselves on fire. For whatever reason, though, “The Situation” loses his mind when cleaning the house in preparation for a visit from Samantha, a woman he met (and then lost) at a club the previous evening. In particular, he discovers that one of Angelina’s hygiene products have been disposed of improperly and, rather than dispose of it properly, he hides it under her pillow.

Angelina finds it, initially believes it to be a prank of the type ordinarily played by “The Situation,” is embarrassed about it, and then learns that “The Situation” finds her to be a filthy animal. The animal he chooses is a hamster.

What’s the upshot of all this?

The gang operates in an amoral universe where there aren’t any rules or overarching authority. This leads to serious problems, as outlined above. According to Thomas Hobbes, in their natural state, human beings would be at one another’s throats. And “Jersey Shore” demonstrates this with the characteristic joie de vivre that we’ve come to expect: if life is truly “nasty, brutish, and short” — and with Snooki at 4’9” and Ronnie standing about 5’4” they seem to have “short” covered — then why not make the best of things and really embrace those aspects of humanity that are nasty and brutish?

In other words, we ought to expect them to go out every night, drink excessively, sleep with one another, pick fights, and — at some point, perhaps before the end of Season Three — die young. Their world resembles Hobbes’ state of nature more than it resembles any sort of society we would recognize.

Hobbes’ solution, if we want to see the gang live a little bit longer and stop punching one another in the face, is to institute a strong central authority — a single, powerful sovereign — that will keep them all in line. But to this point, I thought that central authority was “The Situation.” He kept them fed, he kept the house tidy, and he kept an eye out for grenades. But if he can’t keep straight whether or not he’s already picked up his laundry — and if he’s fighting with members of the gang himself (even though Hobbes tells us that the rules the sovereign makes for the gang don’t apply to him) — how can he be trusted with absolute power?

For Hobbes, it really doesn’t much matter whether the sovereign occasionally acts against the interests of some members of the gang: the alternative — not having “The Situation” there to keep things more or less on track — is far, far worse. But for us, skeptics when it comes to handing over so many of our natural rights in exchange for food and a clean house, this behavior from “The Situation” might be a sign that John Locke was right about the myriad dangers associated with absolute authority.