Thomas Hobbes once wrote that before the Leviathan of government arose, anarchy prevailed and life was “nasty, brutish and short.” Well, when I was a kid, we ate pizza every Friday night and that meal was invariably “nasty, brutish and short.” It certainly wasn’t for lack of a Leviathan, or monstrous authority figure who kept the terrified citizens in line. We had such a Leviathan, my mother, and she wasn’t shy about announcing rules. One such rule was enacted to regulate the distribution of the scarcest of resources, pizza. It was the era of Stagflation and my merely middle class mother could seemingly ill afford to buy an amount of pizza that would even remotely satisfy her, my brother and myself at the same time. The rule was this: You could only take one piece of pizza at a time and you had to eat it all, including the crust, before you could take another piece. The strict enforcement of this one rule led to the following unedifying results.

Nasty

Have you ever inhaled half pieces of pizza per swallow without even trying to properly chew the crust? The sensation in one’s throat during such an exercise is quite nasty, as is the visual you get when watching members of your own family attempting the same trick. People grimaced hideously, clenching their jaws and straining their necks, arteries bulging, without making any efforts to hide these exertions behind so much as a free hand, let alone the shroud that should properly have been placed around such unpleasantness. 

Brutish

 This word is archaic enough to justify defining it here. Webster’s offers three possible definitions:1 resembling, befitting, or typical of a brute or beast.2 a : strongly and grossly sensual b : showing little intelligence or sensibility It pains me to say this, but if I could choose only one word to describe my family then brutish would probably be the one. And the animalistic, gross and ignorant way we used to eat pizza would be one of the reasons for my choice.

Short

Those pizza suppers lasted only five minutes at most. The pizza was casually tossed onto the table and was soon gone. If you showed any hesitation, you were lost. God forbid you really, really had to pee as dinner was being served. You could either go and relieve yourself immediately, or eat dinner, but not both. It was a clear example of the rule, “you snooze, you lose” or, more precisely, “you pee, you lose.”

Conclusions

Through this experience I leaned two things. One, you sometimes have to take what’s yours, setting manners, aesthetic concerns and even common decency aside. Two, you can’t believe everything a philosopher tells you. Because even if a rules are scrupulously enforced, choosing even one manifestly idiotic rule can still provoke a war of all against all.