Epicurus thought that friendship and conviviality, which require present attention rather than being in an alcoholic stupor, as well as trying to understand and explain things, were the greatest sources of satisfaction in life, so there go most drugs.

For the chemists, who wanted to manufacture new medicines and elixirs and transform base substances into noble ones, the notion that there was no metaphysical barrier to doing so - it was just a matter of getting the particles into new arrangements - was encouraging. That was the Baconian programme.

The higher the coefficient of inequality (Gini coefficient) in a society, the worse things tend to be for those at the bottom.

In the old systems, hierarchies emanate power from above to below through forms of line management and are ideologically supported by cosmologies and theologies featuring celestial rulers and their deputies - the 'rule of the best.'

You can find many philosophy papers on the themes of 'love' and 'friendship,' most of which are cheerful and somewhat anodyne; you don't find many on the loss of friends, relatives, and lovers from death or alienation, though it happens all the time.

In the academic setting, you take (typically) lonely, interesting middle-aged men and beautiful, intelligent young women, and everybody's motivations for display and conquest are engaged to the max. Sublimated, this can be a powerful force for the good - Plato had a lot to say about that - but acted upon it can bring evils without end.

Epicurus was not at all interested in what we would call the problems of mass society, and he thought civic politics was just trouble and to be avoided by the wise.