Current Reading

This blog is primarily for me to blog my responses to books that I'm reading. Sometimes I blog about other stuff too, though.

Poverty by America by Matthew Desmond.

Word cloud

Word cloud

Tuesday, June 21, 2022

Hobbes, Chapter 30

 A few quick thoughts on chapter 30 of Hobbes.

Paragraph 3: Hobbes believes that people should be educated on doctrines that are conducive to peace, and that it is a sovereign's duty to make sure people receive this sort of education. The uneducated or miseducated are easy to seduce. On this I agree, though I don't agree that the ill-educated are drawn to resistance. The ill-educated can easily be co-opted by an authoritarian leader.

Paragraph 6: He concedes that the biggest obstacle to teaching people doctrines conducive to peace (or at least to Hobbes' notion of peace) is that people are determined to not learn things that run counter to their ambitions. True enough.

On the other hand, he also believes that the common people are like "clean paper", essentially blank slates. I guess any authoritarian, even a seemingly cynical one, is ultimately an idealist. He believes that people are controllable.