[albntomat0]

I have a somewhat modified view, in that articles like this (and ones regarding income inequality) need to be specific in exactly what they mean by comments like "nasty, brutish, and short", or inequal wealth distribution.

Do they mean decreases in life expectancy? Student debt? Homeownership? Disease prevalence? Violent crime?

It's continually stated as an axiom, but poor writing such as that really weakens their argument.

[pcstl]

That's pretty much the same view I hold, I just couldn't stop myself being a bit less polite about it.

When Hobbes coined the idiom "nasty, brutish and short" he was thinking of a lifestyle with next to no guarantees. You might be dead at any moment.

Compared to that, I can't really see how first worlders being a bit less comfortable than previous generations is a valid use of the phrase.

[filoeleven]

I agree with your opinion of the phrase’s use here. Hobbes was talking about more than “no guarantees” though; he was referring to a life outside of society. The rest of this comment is about that, and tangential to the topic at hand.

He was working from the axiom that laws are what create societies, that “nature” without laws makes the life of man “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” It’s interesting how the first two are almost always dropped, isn’t it?

Anyway, this is a false premise. Nature abounds with examples of cooperation at the same rate as those of competition, from communal species banding together to mutualistic interspecies relationships. We keep finding more and more of them. My own suspicion is that what we find in nature broadly reflects our own ideals, because those are simply what we are most likely to look for, and so Hobbes’ society reflected more nastiness than ours does today.

[pcstl]

Even if nature has about as much cooperation as competition, society seems to put a damper on the nastier effects of competition. While we can find amazing examples of cooperation in the record of human history and prehistory, we also find a lot of brutal behavior which seems to have become almost monotonically less frequent ever since we started organizing into complex societies.

(Also, as predicted by complex systems theory, when brutal behavior does erupt, it is much more catastrophic - the 2 world wars are good examples)

[Dracophoenix]

Such as what? All civilization has done is systematize humanity's best and worst tendencies. It hasn't actively changed them. If anything, one could argue that it's much easier to cause harm and destruction than it has been at any time history.

[pcstl]

Well, we are in the least violent period of human history, and we have a lot of evidence that violence has been decreasing almost continually for all of history. https://slides.ourworldindata.org/war-and-violence/#/title-s...