For the Republicans, it's both a dastardly conspiracy to destroy them and a cudgel for their self-preservation.
Still, politicians take security seriously, spending vast amounts, sometimes from their own pockets, and often taking a direct role in their self-preservation.
The writer, Donal, is mistaken for an IRA man, and the play hones in on the massive gap between someone's idealistic principles and, when push comes to shove, their self-preservation.
Even so, he went on, "It is possible for leaders or regimes to be cruel, bigoted, twisted in their world views and still make rational calculations with respect to their limits and their self-preservation.
The Stoics argue that the original impulse of ensouled creatures is toward what is appropriate for them, or aids in their self-preservation, and not toward what is pleasurable, as the Epicureans contend.
Even wonder can serve a social purpose: Malebranche interprets the behavior of small dogs in the presence of a larger dog as expressions of wonder that work toward their self-preservation.
It's almost unsettling to watch the whole thing grind to a halt instead as Handmaids, one by one, find the limits of their self-preservation.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the philosophical anchor of the French Revolution theorized about a "social contract" in which individuals gave up their natural liberty to ensure their self-preservation in civil society.
But…it is possible for leaders or regimes to be cruel, bigoted, twisted in their world views and still make rational calculations with respect to their limits and their self-preservation," he said.
To end the "war of all against all" in the state of nature, humans entered into a "contract" and gave up their "unlimited natural freedoms" in exchange for a political community and civil society that maximized their self-preservation and personal security.
The behavior may be their response to self preservation.
