In a state of nature we have.... no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continued fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Name	Thomas Hobbes
Life	1588 - 1679
Country	England
Category	Realism
Wikipedia	>>

A life in violence is a life in suffering. What is the remedy? If Mirandola's prayers, Machiavelli's cynicism and Erasmus's laughs don't help us, what else might give us a better life with less suffering? Hobbes is famous because he has given us a most undemocratic answer to that question: we need a truly strong and dictatorial government! We need a Prince who realizes that human evil, like Leviathan in the 40th chapter of Job, is also a creation of God. Human evil is similar to that enormous crocodile whom you cannot catch like a fish and with whom you can make no treaties. If you are a Prince, you simply have to accept Evil's existence and act, like the omnipotent Almighty, with ruthless force to control him. Only out of such an enforced order might a better life for all grow. Any government is better than anarchy. The state is an unavoidable necessity. Under the pressure of growing human needs, thought Hobbes, it is created by human reason, by human intelligence. Living in a most violent age, he also realized that human animal passions, creating ever-recurring civil strife, are bound to destroy the state once in a while and make anarchy reappear. This is the same problem with which the United States struggled in front of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1999. The answer from the U.S. Senate is the Hobbesian one: let us in the United States try to create a world government, a global policeman, keeping some order, thus helping all the world's people to become rich. A deeper question: is there a line from Hobbes in 1651 to the U.S. Senate

in 1999? Indeed, there might be a much longer line. The number of the world's adrenalinomaniac Alfa-rulers, of As, may have been shrinking for much longer. History over the last five, or even ten, millennia is the history of many small social units being united, normally by war, into ever bigger ones. Small family kingdoms have been joined into tribes, villages, city states, nations and federations. Out of tens of thousands of family kings, each one with a territory of his own, only some 200 remain. Thousands and tens of thousands have disappeared. Only some 200 have been "selected" as now being heads of states in formally sovereign nations, all in one way or another dependent upon the United States. For most of history, in most of temporarily existing societies, a dictator with a tyrannically strong state has ruled, trying to keep some order inside his own territory, but almost always threatening or being threatened by his closest neighbor. Don't for a second think that we have left that reality! We love to forget it. Media infotainment helps us to do so and to pre-empt our serious thinking. But we must face the fact that the 20th century is so far the most bloody. In the past century, more people than ever have, as Hobbes, had reason to state that life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. In a globalized world, still full of violence, don't we need a world cop? Without one, is it at all possible to make life better for the most unlucky ones ?