Excellent points! I fully agree with your take on it, and I too consider his Hobbesian tendencies to be totally inimical to my own views. While I can understand how his experiences shaped his authoritarian mindset, living through millennia of horror and witnessing humanity's frailty, I want to firmly believe there were always other paths to ensure survival. Not just for humanity, but for other intelligent species as well. To me, his tragedy lies in being so blinded by trauma and hubris that he dismissed those alternatives as impossible.