the lust of the mind

According to the famous philosopher Thomas Hobbes, "Curiosity is the lust of the mind."
If that's the case, I'm sure to end up in hell.

I rarely find people as tenaciously curious as I am. And I'm most curious about people. Various opinions, ideas, solutions to world concerns. I'm interested in the randomness of their knowledge. I spend less time looking for facts and statistics than looking for minds. Who they are. And finding stories. I love the stories.

The sad part is I'm also burnt out at the moment and jaded. While facinated by tales, I question the possibility of progression in humanity. After Hurricane Katrina, desperate residents committed theft, murder and rape. Ordinary people lost civility.

Then we look at governments. Bush is incesant on the idea of "spreading democracy." Lovely. I've just finished reading 1984, a facinating read on political and social ideas. Erich Fromm created an exploritory essay of George Orwell's themes in the book in its "Afterword" (in my edition). Fromm writes,

... fright and hatred of a possible aggressor will destroy the basic attitdues of a democratic, humanistic society. In other words, the continued arms race, even if it would not lead to the outbreak of a thermonuclear war, would lead to the destruction of any of those qualitities of our society which can be called "deomocratic," "free," or "in the American tradition." Orwell demonstrates the illusion of the assumption that democracy can continue to exist in a world preparing for nuclear war, and he does so imaginatively and brilliantly.

You wouldn't quickly realize that Fromm wrote in 1961.