Perhaps the best known misquote of Hobbes is that life is "nasty, brutish and short". People usually fail however to take into account the context surrounding the quote. Hobbes was after all making a statement that without political community (we would refer to it as civil society) "the life of man, [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short".
All these things make great sense when looking at Cromwell's England in the late 1600s. One can even (with ample empirical evidence) extend the validity of Hobbes idea of social contract as far as the 1950s, for his philosophy on society was truly revolutionary.
I challenge the notion however that his theory holds in 21st century Australia.
I suggest that there are many people who live solitary, poor, nasty and brutish lives. I need only look to my own existence for evidence of it, despite living within a nation with the mechanical functions of a political community.
I live a hand to mouth existence, unable to escape my lowly station of base wage jobs and persue higher levels of Maslow's heirarchy despite my education and faux intellectualism. This has gone on now for a decade. 10 years on I am worse off than I was, for now I am no longer "graduate material" but a meaningless replaceable cog within a social heirarcy based on nepotism and networking. As I get older, it gets harder to escape this artifical limit that my political community has imposed on me.
So my hand to mouth existence dicatated by the civic society I live in forces me to live the very notions Hobbes was stating it freed me from.
The true horror of course is that Hobbes summation that life is short no longer holds validity. By this loss should I follow the neo-catholic schema placed within my society I will be bound to a solitary, poor, nasty and brutish existence for another 50 years, an idea that horrifies me as I slowly lose the ability to be viewed as anything but a drain on my political community as every year passes.
I don't want to be a prisoner anymore.
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