"The charter of the Plymouth Colony reflected the most up-to-date economic, philosophical and religious thinking of the early 17th century."

"Plato was in vogue then, and Plato believed in central planning by intellectuals in the context of communal property, centralized state education, state centralized cultural offerings and communal family structure."

ADDED: Sorry I had the wrong link before. It's corrected now, but let me keep the wrong link too, which went to a second article in Forbes "A Guide To Talking Politics At The Thanksgiving Table." Maybe you've already started talking about politics at the Thanksgiving table, and, if so, I hope you're doing it the right way... or close enough.

"Plato.... in one of his more exotic myths, imagined that 'the penis and the womb introduced the mindlessness and the beastly nature...'"

"'... of the appetitive part of the soul into human anatomy,' men having previously had neither a penis nor a woman to put a penis in, a state that is conducive (according to Plato) to natural bliss. The penis was to prove a tyrannical and recalcitrant beast, impervious to reason. (Augustine, eagerly picking up on Plato centuries later, thought an erection was the mark of Original Sin.) After all this, Aristotle's biological common sense — his view of the sexual drive as guarantee of natural procreation, with the penis a kind of spontaneous ideal slave — comes as welcome relief. Moralists, alas, preferred Plato."

Thought you'd like some hoity-toity philosophy to start the week.