Today's soundtrack is Tobin Sprout: Moonflower Plastic, a pleasant album that reminds me in parts of REM, albeit with rhythms that are a bit plodding at times.
This evening, I'm reading the next section of Alain Stephen's This Book Will Make You Think, "Hobbes."
Thomas Hobbes believed that society was best with an absolute monarch in control of the populace. He believed that man, if left to his own devices, would operate in conflict with everyone around him, due to man's nature driving him to selfishly pursue "his own needs" (p. 27). It is Thomas Hobbes who coined the now-famous phrase, "The life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (p. 27). He believed that unless told to, man would not pursue the arts. Thus, he believed that anarchy would be the worst thing possible - it would destroy civilization. Hobbes believed that having the leisure to learn was "the only means by which human beings [could] exercise free will [for] the common good, through the practice of philosophy" (p. 29).