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April 27, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
04:15:40
The Truth About Plato
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Hi everybody, my name is Stephan Molyneux, I'm the host of Freedom Aid, the largest and most popular philosophy show in the world, and today...
We are going to talk about one of the great monuments of Western philosophy, if not worldwide philosophy, one Plato.
And you're going to understand by the end of this exactly why he's so important and how Plato versus Aristotle divides humanity between those who believe that the group is more important than the individual, collectivists, and those who believe that the individual is more important than the group, or individualists.
But let's get started with a little bit of background.
Let's put him in his place in time 429 to 347 BC and of course he was preceded and inspired by Socrates and succeeded by Aristotle who was a student at Plato's famous academy.
Now the amazing thing about Plato is that he was not just a philosophical genius but he was also a literary genius and Aristotle was considered a fine writer but we've only got lecture notes from Aristotle.
We only have about a third of Aristotle's work and unfortunately the literary power of Plato has overwhelmed some of the more common sense aspects of Aristotle and it's one of the reasons why Plato is so influential is his writing is absolutely glorious.
It's artistic, it's literary, it's dramatic, it's engaging and his platonic method of deploying dialogues to inform people of philosophical ideas creates a playfulness and a space for you to think about the problems that Aristotle, who mostly shotguns conclusions into the mind of his readers, doesn't quite provide.
The literary beauty of dialogues, Plato's dialogues, has had great influence.
And of course, most of what we know about Socrates, who himself wrote nothing, we get from Plato, and in particular, the incredibly moving and powerful trial and death of Socrates.
I actually did a, I think, a six-part series, a three-part series on the Trial and Death in Socrates.
I can link to it below.
Now Plato was an Athenian citizen.
He was a high status guy and he was consumed of course by the politics of his time but the works that he presented extrapolated from his time alone to all time.
It's relevant today in many ways as it was back in the day.
Plato is regularly ranked at the highest level of philosophical thought along with Aristotle, Kant and Aquinas.
It has been said, and I actually believe this, I made the case for this when doing my master's degree, oh, just a few years ago, when I was arguing that every person is either a Platonist or an Aristotelian, and I'll get into why that's so important.
And if you think these are ancient debates with no relevance to the modern world, I'm going to tie it in in ways that you will never, ever forget.
So Platonism versus Aristotelianism – and I have of course the truth about Aristotle, you can look for it, I'll link to it below as well – Platonism is fundamentally about the challenge of concept Formation.
No, no.
Wake, wake up.
It's important.
Stay with me.
Very, very important.
You'll need to maybe maximize this window from minimizing it while playing your video games.
I know.
I see.
But it is really, really important.
So we have these ideas in our mind that are aggregations of physical properties in the world.
Like trees have a particularly common characteristic.
So does water and clouds and air and tables and so on.
So we have these concepts in our mind that are supposed to accurately describe things in the world.
Where do these ideas in our mind come from?
Hmm.
Very, very interesting.
So think about the phrase, the common good of mankind, the common good of the country, the common good of whatever, right?
Is there such a thing as a common good?
Does the idea of a forest Is it more important than the individual trees in the forest?
Or, is the idea of forest, or society, or the common good, or whatever, is that just a way of describing things in the world?
And the things in the world are much more important than the concepts we use to describe them.
If the concepts are more important, then you sacrifice individuals to the group, to the collective.
If the concept is less important than the individual, then you have individualism and there's no such thing as the common good and if individuals choose to sacrifice they can do so but they're not morally commanded to do so.
Is there such a thing?
You remember this old JFK quote?
Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
Well that is the idea that the country is more important than the individual and something we should sacrifice ourselves to.
And this idea that the individual is much less important than the collective, than the concept of society has been used by some thinkers, I won't give you my judgment yet, some thinkers all throughout history.
So some people have said the race is more important than the individual, that would be National Socialism.
Some people have said that the class is more important than the individual, that would be Marxism, Socialism, Communism and so on.
And so some people say that the nation is more important than the individual, and those would be nationalists, and some people say... I mean there's a variety of ways in which we can have our rights stripped away in kowtowing, bow-dowing service of these concepts.
Are the concepts more important than that which they describe?
It's a very fundamental question, and when you really mull about it, you're going to come down on one side or the other.
You're either going to say, society is more important than the individual, in which you're saying the concept is more real than the individual.
The concept has a higher moral status.
than the individual, or you're going to say, well, the concept is a useful tag, but there's no such thing as the forest apart from the trees.
There's no such thing as society apart from the individuals.
And of course, if you are a politician and so on, then what you'll do is you'll say, well, there's this concept called society, the country, the national good, the common good, humanity's good, but you see, it can't really speak for itself, so don't worry, I'll speak for it and tell you what you have to do.
Now, that's dangerous stuff.
All round.
So is the whole greater than the sum of its parts?
It's a very, very important question.
If you have a bunch of bananas, is it just a bunch of bananas?
Or do you have a bunch of bananas plus a very important concept that is more important than the individual bananas?
It sounds silly.
It really is very, very important.
And when you get involved in political disputes and debates, or even moral disputes and debates, whether they're about current events or abstract principles, it always comes down to this.
Is there such a thing?
Can you take a picture of a family without any one individual in the picture?
Can you take a picture of the concept called the family?
If I say to you, let's say you're a logger, right, and you want to go and cut down some trees, and I say to you, I own the trees, and I say, well, listen, I won't sell you the trees, but I will sell you the concept of the forest.
How much would you pay?
I'm not going to sell you a house, but I'm going to sell you the idea of a house.
It's like, anyway.
The challenge of concept formation, what is the source of our universal abstractions?
So if forest describes an aggregation of trees and undergrowth or whatever it is, then nothing in the concept can oppose the trees.
Like you can't say the forest includes the opposite of trees any more than you can say the concept of reptiles includes the opposite of cold-blooded and give birth to eggs or whatever it is, right?
So what is the source of our universal abstractions and can universal abstractions contradict that which they describe?
Can you have a concept of table that includes the opposite of a table or something that clearly isn't a table, right?
So can you have a concept of society that denies the rights of any particular individual or group of individuals?
It's very powerful stuff.
Literally hundreds of millions of lives have been burned to death on either side of this equation.
This is the most fundamental fight in human society.
Does the concept trump the instance?
Does the group or the collective trump the individual?
Very, very important question.
So we'll dig into that.
Now for Aristotle, where do our concepts come from?
Well, they come from repeated exposure to matter and energy.
Why do we have concepts?
Because atoms have identical properties, right?
A carbon atom is a carbon atom.
A hydrogen atom is a hydrogen atom.
H2O aggregations is water everywhere you go, right?
So, you repeatedly expose yourself to things in the world, and then you get an idea that they're similar, either because of their properties, like a tree, or their use, like a table.
You know, people sit and it's designed to make your food a kind of nipple height, or whatever it is.
Except in Japan.
Gotta put in the exceptions.
So, for Aristotle, it's like, well, we get our concepts from repeated exposure to individuals, and the individuals, as the drivers of our concept formation, means the individuals are more important than the concept.
But for Plato, It's a totally different, not just idea, not just epistemology like the study of knowledge.
It's a whole different metaphysics.
Like for Plato, there's this whole other world, other dimension out there called the world of the forms.
And these perfect, beautiful concepts remain in our mind after our soul floats among them before we're born.
They remain in our mind.
And when we look at a table, we have a dim recollection of the perfect table we saw floating in the world of the forms.
And that's how we know what a table is.
Aristotle disagrees.
But it's a very, very powerful argument and we'll talk more about it as we go forward.
So for Platonism, this idea of this other world, and lots of philosophers have had this other world, right?
Kant called it the new aminal realm.
There is, of course, Nirvana.
There is other worlds that are much more important than this world, which is where our morals and our concepts and our ideas come from.
There was a world spirit for some philosophers, and so on.
But for Platonism, it would be the empiricism of what Aristotle would call unreality.
Like, there's no other world of forms But Plato thinks he's describing the truth when he's describing this world of forms, this universe of forms.
So it's empirical for Plato.
But for Aristotle he said, well they don't exist, they're not real, so this empiricism is not valid.
So let's talk a little bit about where Plato came from.
So both of Plato's parents came from high up in the Greek aristocracy.
Plato's father, Aristotle, was descended from the kings of Athens and Mycenae.
His mother was reported to be related to the 6th century B.C.
Greek statesman, Solon.
Very interesting guy, well worth looking up.
His nickname... Plato's not his real name.
His nickname was called Plato.
According to Diotonese Laertes, it was given to Plato by his wrestling coach.
Because Plato, in ancient Greek, meant broad, because he was, you know, built like, well, something that the Commodores might sing about.
But he had very, very broad shoulders, was a good wrestler, and so Plato is his nickname.
At least that's the story, according to his broad physical build.
Now, we don't know much, of course, about his early life.
This is pre-selfies, or the selfies were... They took quite a while and a lot of sculpting.
But Plato was most likely taught by some of Athens' finest educators.
And his father died when he was quite young.
His mother, I know, it's all kind of Hamletian, but his mother, Plato's mother, remarried to her uncle, Pyrrha Lampis, a Greek politician and ambassador to Persia.
So I think this guy's movement is pretty rarefied, highfalutin stuff.
It is believed that Plato had two full brothers, one sister and a half brother.
And in his dialogues, Plato often includes his family members.
Remember, well, Plato was operating under... Socrates was put to death for two things, for apparently not believing in the gods of the city, for being an atheist, at least to the gods of the city, and for corrupting the young, which basically meant encouraging the young to question their elders about virtue and truth and justice and all these things.
So we have to remember when we're talking about Plato and also about Aristotle that they were operating under a potential death penalty for their ideas and their arguments, right?
So hate speech law is pretty bad and just and immoral but not associated with the death penalty but because Plato loved Socrates so much and was a witness at the trial and wrote about it and was heartbroken when Socrates was put to death as Socrates himself seems to have been somewhat relieved to have been put to death and so Plato was operating under
The shadow of the death penalty for offending.
So there's a number of reasons why I think he chose the dialogue form and we'll talk about that but he put his family lineage in there both because he was proud of his family lineage and to remind people that he had powerful friends and not to mess with him.
So, we of course can't talk about Plato without first talking about Socrates.
So, Socrates was very famous in Athens at the time, so Plato must have known Socrates at least by reputation, although there's indications of more since youth.
An Athenian politician by the name of Critias was Plato's mother's cousin and studied with Socrates in his youth.
Contemporary writers report that Socrates was a regular visitor to Plato's family.
Diogenes Laertes writes that Plato was about to compete for the prize in tragedies in the theater of Bacchus.
Right, so Plato was aiming to be a playwright like Aristophanes, the Shakespeare of his time.
I think, I mean it's really really a shame that he destroyed his poems because a young Plato's poetry and drama must have been something incredible because the dialogues are so vivid and so powerful.
So Plato is about to compete for the prize in tragedies in the theater of Bacchus when – this is the quote from Diogenes Laertes – he heard the discourse of Socrates and burnt his poems, saying, Vulcan, come here, for Plato wants your aid, and from henceforth, as they say, being now twenty years old, he became a pupil of Socrates.
So that's a pretty powerful course change in your life.
And it sort of reminds me of when I was about the age of 16 or so when I first started really encountering philosophy.
And well, let's just say a bit of a fork in the old road for me as well.
So an incredible dramatic change.
He was so impressed with what Socrates was talking about.
So, his family was full of politicians and lawmakers and, I dare say, a couple of sophists.
So in keeping with his family heritage, Plato was aimed and destined and expected to fulfill a life in politics.
So he engaged in various forms of poetry and then turned to philosophy.
As far as what influenced the young Plato, and this is foundational for how his writing and his thought developed, there were two major events that influenced him.
So first, of course, as we said, coming under the influence of Socrates was, well, a very big deal.
So Socrates's methods of dialogue and debate so impressed Plato.
That he became a close associate of Socrates and dedicated his life to the question of virtue and how to form a noble character.
And Socrates, the Socratic method is one of the, you might mean, Aristotle's three laws of logic and the Socratic method are two of the greatest gifts, I think, that came out of Greek philosophy or philosophy as a whole at the time.
They're still in use today.
The forms is, well, it's used by Sarphis.
But yeah, I'm getting ahead of myself.
We'll get to that.
Don't show your hand!
Don't show your hand!
Close the kimono!
Close the kimono!
But the Socratic method is, you know, somebody says, well, this is true, right?
So somebody said to me the other day on Twitter, you're not a philosopher!
It's like, that's an interesting question.
What is a philosopher in your mind?
And of course people were proposing, a philosopher is this, a philosopher is that.
And if you can find a single exception, then you know that the definition Has to be refined, right?
So somebody said, well, a philosopher is someone who's wise.
And it's like, yeah, well, you can be wise without being a philosopher.
So that can't be it, right?
In one of the dialogues of Plato, somebody says to Socrates that the life of pleasure is the best life.
And Socrates, look, I'm talking about this, it makes me itchy.
Socrates said, well, you know when you got an itch, you can't quite reach it, and you get that itch, and it's like, oh, your body floods with pleasure, that's so great.
And he's like, oh yeah, everybody loves that feeling.
It's like, so basically what you're saying is the life where you're continually scratching an itch is the best possible life.
Now that can't be quite correct.
And of course, all pleasures, all physical pleasures come with downfalls, right?
The joys of drunkenness give way to the hangover.
If you run and sprint and exercise and enjoy that, sometimes you can be stiff and sore later.
If you overeat, you have discomfort later on.
If you indulge in, if you don't like to exercise, you get fat and your joints hurt later on.
It's a great way of slicing and dicing people's propositions to find exceptions so that you can refine the definition and get closer to the truth.
And it's really annoying to the people who are both wrong and certain.
It's fine to be certain if you're right.
And it's okay to be uncertain if you're wrong.
It's bad to be uncertain if you're right, because you're not defending the truth.
But to be both certain and wrong is a bad combination.
And Socrates, the Socratic method, chips away at that and produces a lot of anger, which we'll sort of see how that played out.
So the Peloponnesian War.
So the Peloponnesian War, this is a war between Athens and Sparta, in which Plato served briefly between 409 and 404 BC.
Athens and Sparta, well, you know, maybe you've seen this in the movies that seem to have an enormous amount of abs.
And Athens is like the intellectual, the refined, the abstract, the philosophical, and Sparta is...
Throw your babies in the cold and see if they survive and train relentlessly for war and be very pragmatic and cold and hierarchical and dictatorial.
And there were these two mindsets, right?
Athens more individualistic, right?
And Sparta more collectivist.
And you can see again this kind of division, right?
So Athens was defeated.
I mean, maybe I'll do something on the Peloponnesian War at some point.
But ah, I'm sure Dan Carlin's done something.
The defeat of Athens ended its democracy.
The Spartans replaced it with an oligarchy.
So the Peloponnesian War, I mean, gosh, I guess it would be like if you were born in 2001.
No, if you were born in 2003 or 2004 it would be like the Afghanistan war, the longest war America's been involved in, but a little bit more kind of in your face for the Greeks.
So the Peloponnesian War began a few years before Plato was born and continued until well after he was 20 and it led to the decline of the Athenian Empire.
And the war, I guess in Athens, the defeat after the war was followed by a strong conservative religious movement that led to the execution of Plato's mentor Socrates.
And it actually struck me as well because, I mean, not that I'm particularly interesting, but one of the reasons I have been so tangled up in the thoughts and minds of Plato for many decades is because I started out as a writer of poetry.
I had self-published some books of poetry back in my teens.
I went to the National Theatre School.
I studied acting.
I studied playwriting.
I wrote about 30 plays.
I directed and produced plays that I'd written.
So I really did start out in the world of art.
And then philosophy kind of took me over as... So, I mean, I have in common this particular aspect of starting artistically and then turning more to philosophy, although ended up in very much a different mindset.
So let's move on with influences.
So two of Plato's relatives, Carmedes and Critias, were important members of this new oligarchy, this basically tyranny that was inflicted or imposed by Sparta.
They were called the Thirty Tyrants and it was a relatively brief rule but an extraordinarily brutal one.
It crippled the rights of Athenian citizens.
This tyranny regularly confiscated the estates of wealthy Athenians and residents and put many individuals to death.
And a number of writers separately confirmed that these 30 tyrants executed 1500 people without trial.
And remember, it's not a huge city, so it was terrible.
And Critias was not only a relative of Plato, but was a former pupil of Socrates.
And Critias has been described as the first Robespierre.
Now, of course, if you know anything about the bloodthirsty horror show of the French Revolution, you can get an idea of just what kind of reputation he had.
And he just wanted to scour democracy out of Athens, no matter what the human horror and cost that would have occurred.
Now what happened was the thirty tyrants wanted to implicate Socrates in their dictatorship so they ordered him to arrest Leon of Salamis.
Now this is a pretty common tactic of new regimes of new dictators.
They order you to perform morally compromised or downright evil acts and then you're kind of bound to defend the regime because if a new regime comes along you could be tried as a war criminal and and so on the whole post second world war trial of the Germans and so on that could all occur.
So that's what they tried to do.
Socrates resisted this command, and he only escaped punishment due to a civil war that eventually replaced the 30 tyrants with a radical democracy.
Now, there's some indications that Critias and Socrates were not getting along that well.
So what happened was Socrates was also summoned before the 30 tyrants, and he was ordered, he was ordered, Socrates was, to not instruct anyone, not to speak to anyone.
And then, of course, Socrates, in his inimitable fashion, says, well, does this mean that I'm not allowed to go and buy food in the marketplace?
Because that would involve talking to people.
And this shows just how badly the relationship between the philosopher and his former pupil Critias had decayed unto.
And, of course, what happened was, and this was also the case, of course, with the French Revolution, was that the real...
rich wealthy and powerful in Athens they were killed or their property was simply taken from them or they were exiled and then the property was taken so that the 30 tyrants could redistribute the property to their own particular friends and they also hired about 300 lash bearers or whip beating men to intimidate Athenian citizens I guess shades of the Nazi Julius Streicher and so on so it was a
Pretty terrible time and the more they tried to tighten their grip on the Athenian population the more the resistance occurred until there was a civil war that replaced them.
Now Socrates did benefit from a general amnesty that was decreed pardoning all of those Athenians who had participated in this reign of terror as well as other political crimes that had been committed during the war.
This was actually the first general amnesty in history at least in the west that had been decreed but his reputation had taken one hell of a blow So due to the fact that many of Socrates' associates were involved with these 30 tyrants, public opinion turned against him.
Now, of course, he was reputed to be profoundly anti-democratic.
Now that, of course, is always a charge that can be leveled against philosophers.
Why?
Because philosophers, to be a philosopher, means you have to have a standard of value A standard of truth, a standard of virtue, that is something other than just whatever the majority says.
Right?
Because then you're just, you're not a philosopher, you're a weathervane.
You know, you just take a poll.
Hey, that's the truth.
I guess you're a postmodernist, which ain't any kind of philosophy at all.
Postmodernism is a revolution against rationality and empiricism because both of those deny Marxist theories.
So he had a pretty bad reputation at this point, Socrates did.
His student had participated in horrible tyrannies and it just didn't look pretty good.
For Socrates, and again, to call him anti-democratic, well of course, he's a philosopher, he can't just say whatever the majority says is the truth, that's not the job, that's not the gig.
Now after this restoration of democracy, Plato briefly considered a career in politics However, after the execution of Socrates in 399 BC, Plato retreated to a life of study and philosophy.
And it's, you know, interesting, of course, he would have been pretty probably a great politician, I assume he was a great speaker, he was a wonderful writer, and he had an artistic flourish with his language that is a great way of connecting abstract ideas in a visceral way to the hearts and minds of non-philosophers, so he would have been pretty great at it, but
It's pretty tough and pretty risky to get involved in politics if you're a highly moral person or have very abstract ideals.
Now after the execution of Socrates, Plato, it was a pretty good time to get out of Dodge.
The splash damage of the execution and unpopularity of Socrates would certainly have hit Plato, so he traveled away out of Athens, throughout the Mediterranean region for about 12 years.
He studied mathematics with the Pythagoreans in Italy and geometry, geology, astronomy, and theology in Egypt.
Now, this is very interesting because of his wide travel and his studying of other modes of thought, other entire ways of thought.
There is something about a well-rounded education that can be wonderfully expansive to your thinking.
How can you do that?
However, unless you go in with a strict methodology for separating truth from falsehood, it can very easily dissolve your standards into a kind of relativism.
If you look at the sort of chaos and multiplicity of thought systems throughout the world, it's easy to just throw up your hands and say, well, you know, truth is cultural, ethics are just relative, it's whatever the society decides, and That can be a great, a great danger.
Now, it was during this time, or shortly after that Plato began his extensive writing.
Now, his writing phases or periods are divided, according to most scholars at least, into three distinct periods.
The first occurs during the travels that I was just talking about, which is 399 BC to 387 BC.
The Apology of Socrates, the Defense of Socrates, was likely written shortly after the execution of Socrates.
It is a masterpiece, as has been said, of human literature, but it also serves a very practical purpose for Plato, in that Plato had been instructed by Socrates, Socrates had been put to death for corrupting the young and not believing the gods of the cities, for being unpopular, and we'll see, because Aristophanes, a playwright, wrote a play called The Clouds that was quite critical and mocking of Socrates that did not help
the reputation of Socrates, and this is one of the reasons why Plato had the relationship with the arts that we'll explore a little bit later on.
But he needed to reform the image of Socrates because he was forever intertwined and associated with Socrates in the minds of Athenians, Stratus, So if he couldn't find a way to rescue the reputation of Socrates, it would be pretty likely that he might end up with a similar, if not the same fate.
I mean, come on, Plato had given up his literary career.
He'd given up a life in politics to follow Socrates.
And it was kind of reform Socrates or bust as far as Plato was concerned, I think.
So, of course, it wasn't just the apology of Socrates.
There was Protagoras, Euthyphro, Hippias Major and Minor, and Aeon.
Plato strives hard in these dialogues to convey Socrates' philosophy and teachings.
And, of course, because he had as his primary character somebody who'd been put to death, It was a pretty good mouthpiece for some ideas which of course could be Plato's as well.
Now in the second or middle period of Plato's writings he writes on justice and courage, wisdom and the ideal relationship between the individual and society.
Always very powerful and fertile ground for thinkers.
Now in the third or late period Socrates doesn't really show up that much.
He's obviously, Socrates is central to the earlier and middle periods but later on he's downgraded to a minor role and Plato also re-examines his own early metaphysical ideas as Plato was wrestling with this idea of the forms throughout his career which was lengthy.
He died according to some at a wedding at the age of 80.
So in the late period Plato also examines the role of art Dance, music, drama, and architecture, as well as ethics and morality of course.
Detailing the theory of forms, Plato suggests that the universe of forms is the only constant.
The perceived world is mere deception and change.
Now this may sound kind of odd, but it actually is a very challenging idea.
Out of the chaos and blur of sense data, you know, we have this concept called clouds, But clouds are constantly changing.
Sometimes they're present, sometimes they're absent.
They take many, many different forms from cirrus to cumulus to whatever in between.
And if you've ever sort of had an afternoon, I remember studying the Second World War for a novel I was writing.
I was listening to an audiobook and I was lying on a field looking at the clouds all afternoon.
It's really quite magical.
And this chaos and flux of the world.
Ah, that's a forest!
Well, you know, trees are being born, they're dying, there's a fire, there's an ice storm, trees fall down, trees are chopped down.
When is a forest not a forest?
It sounds like, well, easy or obvious, but it's actually quite complicated, and it's well worth examining, because you need to have clear delineations of your definitions, otherwise people use the fuzzy boundaries to dissolve concepts as a whole.
He needed to find constancy and of course if you look at Socrates is related to Friedrich Nietzsche in many ways in that he's kind of like an acid to your certainties.
He dissolves like a termite going into the base of your mental structures.
He goes in and he burrows and he digs and to try and stand before the gales.
of skepticism that come out of Socrates and people like Nietzsche is really tough.
I mean he sandblasts you pretty clean of illusion and what's left standing afterwards is pretty tough to figure out for a lot of people.
It's why they kind of shy away from philosophy.
That the idea that these winds of reason and skepticism and cross-examination are going to dissolve you into nothingness.
That you're going to have nothing left over.
You'll be scoured clean of certainty, of truth, of virtue, of value, of identity, of loyalty, of love.
So, in the face of this kind of skepticism and these cross-examinations that dissolve certainties, What is left standing?
Well, for Plato, it was the forms.
Because remember, he'd seen eternal war, he'd seen the overthrow of Athenian politics and life, this tyrant, these 30 tyrants, the mass murder of a lot of his friends, the driving out of his friends, theft, blood in the streets, guys with whips going around beating the hell out of people being dragged off and executed in the middle of the night, a real reign of terror.
And then a restoration, oh good, democracy's back and then democracy turns and kills his beloved mentor.
I mean, it's a chaotic time.
He's looking for certainty.
He can't find it in politics.
He can't find it in philosophy because what was left standing as far as certainty went after the necrotic, acidic gales of Socratic skepticism for Plato, where he found his certainty, was in the forms.
So around 385 BC, Plato founded the Academy, which he managed and was in charge of, and I assume the head educator until his death.
The Academy was the first university in Western history.
So...
And I want to sort of mention too, having some decent administrative ability is kind of underappreciated in philosophy.
So the fact that he was able to found and sustain and keep going this academy is pretty impressive.
I mean, if you look at John Milton, that's a great poet and a great defense of, he wrote the greatest defense of free speech in the history of the world called Areopagitica, but he was also competent in a wide variety of other realms as well.
So it's, it's not a bad thing to have.
Now, the Academy is incredible.
I mean, look at this time stretch.
Around 385 BC until 529 AD.
So, 385 or so before Christ, 529 after Christ.
That's amazing.
And the Academy was eventually closed by the Roman Emperor Justinian I, who feared it as a source of paganism and a threat to Christianity.
Now, we'll get into that.
Plato, of course, taught... well, I guess we don't know exactly how many people, but one of his more promising students was Aristotle.
And Aristotle is fantastic to read.
Oh, I wish we still had his works!
Library of Alexandria.
Oh, wretched!
So, in the academy you could learn astronomy and biology and mathematics, political theory and philosophy.
Now, it's really quite interesting in a way.
It's a fundamental question that is really, really important to understand, or at least to sort of chew back and forth in your mind.
It's two questions about the ancient world.
Number one, why no scientific revolution?
Why no scientific revolution?
Why did that have to wait till Francis Bacon and others, sort of 17th century in Western Europe and particularly in England?
Why no scientific revolution?
And number two, why no industrial revolution?
It's a fascinating question.
Why?
Now, the industry, you could say, well, because Aristotle was great at science.
I mean, he dissected, he had theories, and he said that experiments should always trump theory and so, but why did it not gather momentum and break through?
to a scientific revolution.
And similarly, why was there no industrial revolution?
I mean, the ancient Romans knew about the steam engine, they knew lots of cool tricks, and they had these wonderful aqueducts, and they built these amazing roads, fantastic at engineering.
Why no industrial revolution?
Now, the answer that I got when I was reading a history book, sitting in a tent in northern Ontario, when I was 19, doing gold panning and prospecting, The answer was basically slavery, right?
If you have slavery, you don't have an incentive to reduce the labor of things because you've already bought your slaves, right?
It's like buying a fleet of cars and then trying to eliminate the value of cars, so it doesn't really work that way.
So it's an interesting question.
And something to mull over and we can perhaps talk about it another time.
I find it fascinating.
And the reason being that if we know why something didn't come to pass, we can know the factors that might cause regression.
Like why might we lose the scientific revolution?
Why might we lose the industrial revolution over time?
If we know why it didn't occur, we can also know how it might not occur again.
Which we really don't want to be losing those things.
Now Plato's goal was for the Academy to teach future leaders how to build better governments in the Greek city-states.
Remember, he'd seen this endless war, he'd seen the thirty tyrants, the overthrow of existing rights of Athenian citizens, the murder and theft from rich Athenians, followed by a radical democracy, followed by the murder of Socrates.
It was chaos!
Kind of madness.
We have, of course, some instability, but nothing like this.
And so trying to figure out how to tame the beast of the state and tame the will of the majority who had put his beloved mentor to death, well, it was pretty central to his issues.
his issues.
In 367 BC, Plato was invited by a friend and student named Dion to become the personal tutor of his nephew, Dion's nephew Dionysus II, the new ruler of Syracuse, and I know, I know.
It's Sicily.
So Dion said, hey man, this Dionysus II guy could be an ideal leader.
So let's see if we can take your ideas out of books, out of the abstractions, out of the academy, and put them into the mind, heart, and soul of someone who has real political power, who can implement your wonderful ideas.
So, how did that go?
Well, he accepted, right?
Obviously it's tempting, it's exciting, I can influence if not dictate someone who has real political power.
He wanted to produce the first philosopher king.
And we'll sort of get into the definition of that in a bit.
But the philosopher king, you know, Plato said the world will never know peace until either the kings become philosophers or the philosophers become kings.
So what happened?
Well he went and he instructed Dionysus, but Dionysus, it's politics man, you succumb to power lust and paranoia, and then he suspected Dion, and later Plato, of plotting against him, right?
Dionysus II was afraid.
Now If you can play this out in your mind, it's pretty easy to see what happened.
So Dionysus had respect for Plato, otherwise he wouldn't have said come and come and teach me.
But what happened was Plato was instructing Dionysus on how to rule wisely, on how to rule better, and this of course would interfere with the entire... the deep state, right?
The entire structure.
Like no matter who you vote for, the government always gets in.
The bureaucratic structure, the permanent government, the military-industrial complex, it's common throughout All human societies, it's the state beneath the state, you know, like you're voting in new leaders and sometimes it just feels like you're changing the hood ornament on a car thinking it's somehow going to go in a different direction thereby.
And so there was a perpetual state that Dionysus was trying to wrestle with who had preceded him and hoped to succeed him.
And so what would happen is if Plato and Dion were giving Dionysus II ideas and advice that would go against the interests of the existing substructure of the state, well then you get all of these worm tongues, right, all of these
Advisors, Jafars, who will come along and say, ah, you know, those guys there, you know, you think they're trying to help you, but they're plotting to kill you and take your crown and overthrow you, and you just, you drip this poison into the ear of the king and you drive him mad.
It's like Iago and Othello, right?
I mean, you just keep dripping poison into the ear, corporate media style, and what happens is They say you gotta arrest this guy he's coming in the morning you're gonna lose everything and then he succumbs and it goes badly from there.
So Dion was exiled and Plato was placed under some kind of house arrest.
So this is according to Laertes.
The interest of the ruler alone is not the best end of political power, right?
So you can't just fulfill your own desires, you have to think about what is best for the group.
Best for the country, best for, in this case.
Sicily.
Now, according to Laertes, Plato angered Dionysus, who was a tyrant, because he tried to restrain his willpower.
I think it was more like... I mean, Dionysus would have known what he was getting into.
You don't just have a very famous philosopher come by and become your mentor.
without reading what he says.
So I don't think it was Dionysus, I think it was others around him who whispered into his ear and drove it all that, right?
So originally Dionysus was gonna just kill Plato, right?
Just execute him.
But he was convinced to spare his life and Dion said, don't kill him, just sell him into slavery.
I don't mean to laugh, but it's like, the philosopher gets involved with politics, he's placed under house arrest, he's within a hair's breadth of being executed, but instead, the sentence is merely commuted to being sold into slavery.
You missing the academy yet?
Dion prevailed upon Dionysus and Plato was instead taken to the island of Aegina to be sold.
And then, I assume somewhere in the slave market or maybe even on the slave block itself, can you imagine picking up Plato for a handful of silver?
Boy, can you imagine if he hadn't just been recognized by someone?
So there was a fellow named Anicerus.
who recognized Plato and bought him for 20 minus.
Not a huge amount of money.
No one's actually exactly sure who Anasiris was.
There was a Cyrenaic philosopher named that, could have been the same guy.
And Laertes also says that Dion may have provided the money for the ransom to Anasiris to buy Plato.
So, I mean, just imagine if Plato had not been recognized and liberated from this.
I mean he would have just been someone's, I guess, tutor to their kids or something like that but...
Yeah, that's what happens when you you put your toe in politics.
It can get pretty, pretty explosive.
And so just keep that in mind.
So Plato eventually returned to Athens and his academy.
And so it's a frankly, it's a hell of a story.
And I wish it had been dramatized more.
It'd be a great movie.
But I guess people would have to know what Mr. Broad Shoulders actually meant to really care.
Oh, well, at least we know what happened on the Titanic.
All right.
So Plato, let's talk to his body of work.
So Plato was likely the first philosopher whose complete works are still available to the world and that's kind of a big deal.
Now Aristotle wrote systematic treatises and I mean they're well worth plowing through.
I took an entire year course on Aristotle and I, I don't know, I both annoyed and engaged my professor by writing extra essays and sitting down to really try and work things out and it's well worth just you do your logic tree and your syllogisms just figure out what Aristotle is arguing for but Plato didn't take that approach so Plato taught Aristotle.
Aristotle wrote these systematic treatises and kind of discovered slash invented modern logic but Plato wrote of course these dialogues and there are about 35 of them although Nobody's sure that all of them are authentic and, you know, I'm not sure that it hugely matters.
If the dialogues are interesting, they could have been written by Plato's scullery maid for all I care.
I mean, it's interesting from a biographical standpoint, but for as far as philosophy goes, it doesn't really matter.
The arguments are the arguments regardless.
So I can certainly understand why Plato would start off with the Socratic method of question and answer that's most vividly displayed in the dialogue.
So it makes perfect sense.
He wanted to rehabilitate Socrates.
Socrates was his primary influence.
He wanted to share what Socrates was doing because Socrates had been lied about.
Lying about philosophers, I have some experience of this myself, lying about philosophers is Well, it's the job of the corporate media.
It's the job of the mainstream media.
It's the job of this office.
It's the job of politicians in many ways.
And so he wanted to rehabilitate.
And you can't really say the question and answer format is really powerful while writing a treatise.
You have to show the question and answer format in action.
And that's what he did with the dialogues.
Plato's characters discussed almost every aspect of philosophy.
So they, of course, big on ethics, the nature of virtue.
Metaphysics, what is reality?
Is there such a thing as immortality?
What is the definition of man and mind and nature?
You name it, right?
They were deep into political philosophy.
Is there a role for censorship?
What's the best exercise of political power?
What is the structure of the ideal state and who is it populated by?
Dove deep into religiosity and theology.
Is there Are there valid arguments for atheism, the dualism and pantheism?
Are there many gods, more than gods?
What is the relationship between the body and the soul, the mind and the spirit, and so on?
Epistemology, one of my favorite topics by the way, is the study of knowledge.
How do we know something is true?
Do we have knowledge before we have empirical evidence, right?
So the theory of the forms is that we have a vision of these perfect concepts before we're born, and knowledge is more remembering than it is empirical exploration of the world.
And rationalism and so on.
What's the relationship between reason and truth?
Is there space for inspiration?
Is there space for instinct?
Is there space for faith?
What is the relationship between rationality and truth?
Also went deep into mathematics and, in particular, aesthetics and art theories.
Now Aristotle did this as well.
So he wrote about dance and music and poetry, architecture and drama, and you sort of might say, well, why would philosophers be so interested in art?
Well, that's because most people get their moral certainties from propaganda, and propaganda often involves art.
So I'll sort of give you an example from my youth.
So when I was a teenager, a whole bunch of movies came out about the terrible effects of nuclear war, right?
There was The Day After, which was really short, like what happened right afterwards, there was Threads and so on.
And some of these movies were funded by communists and it's because they wanted to scare the West into not using nuclear weapons, into denuclearizing, into not putting nuclear weapons in places in Europe and so on.
And it was a very, very big deal.
And the whole concept of nuclear winter, right?
Like you have nuclear bombs, they go off, they throw so much dust in the air that you get a permanent winter, an ice age that never ends, and so on.
And that was run by the KGB, right?
The Communist secret police, and it was PSYOP and so on.
These things are very, very powerful.
Think of all the movies you saw as a kid where, you know, the fun young farmland animals, the animals of the woods and so on, are having their beautiful environment ripped up by some evil capitalist land developer who wants to build a strip mall, you know, and it's like, oh, the poor bunnies, they have no place to go and, you know, so this is... I'm not saying that, I mean, environmentalism is important, but it's not an argument.
It's not an argument.
Think about People say, oh, well, monopolies are terrible, and corporations become monopolies and they're just terrible.
And you're told this in government schools.
Government schools are a virtual monopoly.
Government itself is a monopoly, but it tells you to be worried about voluntary private free market monopolies, not, say, monolithic government monopolies which exercise coercive political power over you so the reason why philosophers have to talk a lot about art is the reason I do movie reviews and and and book reviews and and play reviews because it's very powerful the effect that art has on the mind of the masses.
What is the Overton window is largely dictated by by artists and artists doesn't necessarily mean that it's A poet, I mean, the art is also, propaganda is a form of art and so art is very powerful in the realm of philosophy and art conditions people's, quote, thinking or at least their emotional reactions far more, far more than philosophy does.
So philosophers do have to wrestle with the challenge of art.
So Plato, it's really really fascinating, Plato does not show up in any of his dialogues as a character.
So here's the challenge.
What does Plato argue for?
What does Plato think?
It's tough.
It's tough.
So he doesn't declare that anything in the conversations necessarily conform to his own views.
So in my book Essential Philosophy, I do a number of dialogues at the end.
And in fact, when I was first studying playwriting at the National Theatre School, my writing teacher, knowing my love of philosophy, had me do a dramatic, had me write a dramatic script, a play script for the trial and death of Socrates.
And so it's very interesting.
And this again, this is just plausible deniability.
Hey, they're just characters making arguments.
Can't blame me.
Now, Plato's characters are generally historical.
They would be people that the educated elite in Athens and other places would know.
And Socrates is usually the protagonist, right?
He's the one who drives the conversation, particularly in the early dialogues.
Now, Plato, again, literary genius, incredible writer, Plato's dialogues did slowly improve the bad image of Socrates after his execution, right?
So there are a number of people, and I won't hesitate to guess, but it's More than three.
There's a number of people who say, well, where there's smoke, there's fire.
If Socrates was put to death, if this person was charged with a crime, they gotta have done something wrong.
And this is part of the splash damage that even unjust accusations can have on the reputation of a good man or a good woman.
So, yeah, people were not big fans of Socrates, so... But when you read the charm and good humor, and particularly read the trial and death of Socrates, I mean, it's a...
It's an amazing, amazing document.
You can't read it without, I mean I'm moved even just thinking, you can't read it without being enormously moved by his reason and his courage, Socrates that is.
Now it's an interesting question which we'll just dip into here as to whether Plato accurately portrayed Socrates.
Now it's kind of an open question and, no, it's not that relevant as far as the content of the dialogues which is philosophically relevant regardless of whether they're accurate With regards to Socrates, or whether they're accurate with regards to Plato's true views, which we don't know.
But it is kind of an interesting question.
Now, Plato had a contemporary named Phaedo, who was also a student of Socrates.
Plato actually named a dialogue after him.
And Plato said that Plato used Socrates as a platform for his own ideas.
And it's not that uncommon.
And people will say, oh, I have a good idea.
I'm going to hook it into something that Plato said, right?
So, or something that Aristotle said.
And you have to kind of look these things up to find, because, you know, it's like, well, Plato and Aristotle and Socrates, they are considered to be such a holy trinity of Western thought that if you're going to hook in one of your statements to something that they purportedly said, it gains legitimacy and so on.
And you can see a number of these, right?
But we don't know whether the Socrates portrayed in Plato was accurate.
Plato himself I mean certainly had his critics and he has since.
He was respected as a great philosopher during his lifetime and he was considered so important that at least twice he was kidnapped and ransomed for actually quite a lot of money but there were certainly critics.
Now there was a cynic philosopher named Diogenes of Sinope And he considered Plato an elitist snob and a phony.
Now, those aren't arguments, but, you know, he's a cynic, so he doesn't really believe in truth.
It's, I assume, somewhat will-to-power related.
And with regards to this sort of Socratic definition, so Plato wants to find a human being as a biped without feathers.
And then Diogenes plucked an entire chicken, held it up in Plato's classroom, and said, Behold!
Plato's human being!
That's, you know, a chicken is a biped.
They've only got two legs.
And it would be without feathers if you pluck it.
And so this, you know, sort of an argument.
Now Plato, according to the story, Plato said, well, yes, I guess that definition does need to be revised just a little bit.
And so he did make a concession to Diogenes that Diogenes had found a flaw in his definition.
But frankly, that seems to be rather the exception than the rule when it comes to Plato facing down his critics.
So Plato's dialogues of the Euthyphro, Apology, Crito and Phaedo are usually collected as the last days of Socrates.
And I can't encourage you enough to read it.
It's available for free.
I'll put a link to it below.
And I.F.
Stone praises Plato's Apology, all of this stuff, as, and I quote, a masterpiece of world literature, a model of courtroom pleading, and the greatest single piece of Greek prose that has come down to us.
It rises to a climax which never fails to touch one deeply.
And I've always been struck, I think Socrates' last statement was to instruct one of his followers to to sacrifice a chicken to a particular God and that's what you do when you've received a great gift so I think that he viewed death as a gift at this point in his life and I make the argument in my series on the last days of Socrates that
Socrates was actually very angry and Plato portrays him as calm but Socrates in saying that we must always obey the state even though he in no way associated virtue with the will of the state or the will of the people was putting a curse on mankind that lasts to this day about obedience to the state the apology is considered the beginning of Western philosophy at the end of Socrates the beginning of Western philosophy
Now what's fascinating, and this is something that explains a confusion that I had for some years about why Plato, who would seem to have a lot in common with Christian theology, right, the higher realm of perfection and this is where you can place divinity and angels and so on, why Aristotle was enormously popular during the Middle Ages.
So, in medieval times, I mean, sorry, the epoch, not the greasy chicken place, but Plato's reputation was almost completely absent during the medieval times.
And his most famous student, Aristotle, was simply called THE philosopher.
Not A philosopher, THE philosopher.
So what happened was Plato's original writings were largely lost to Western civilization until they arrived from Constantinople in the century before its fall.
So remember the Roman Empire, you had the eastern part and you had the western part.
The western part fell long before the eastern part.
The medieval scholastic philosophers had neither access to the works of Plato nor the knowledge of ancient Greek to read them.
And Aristotle did this to some degree but Plato helped as well Medieval scholasticism was very esoteric and very very concerned with attempting to unite theology with reason and evidence.
So I mean a big question of the scholastics was, I mean it sounds silly but it's very very important, did Adam have a belly button?
Right?
Because we are made in the image of God.
God himself can't have a belly button because God was not born of woman.
So if Adam was made in the image of God and we are descended from Adam, where does the belly button come in?
If Adam has a belly button and God doesn't, then Adam wasn't made in the image of God.
I mean this sounds silly but I mean it's a very very important questions when it comes to figuring out theology.
So the Renaissance revived great interest in classical civilization and knowledge of Plato's philosophy became widespread again in the West.
And it's funny, many years ago when I was in university, I think it was in my master's degree, there is a famous and wealthy philanthropist in Toronto who has a magnificent collection of medieval art and in particular art from the time of the Black Death.
and it is just amazing stuff terrifying it's a obviously a horror show to a large degree although this I remember seeing a wonderful flat pendant where you couldn't see a face except at a particular angle and it was a sad child and during a time where a third or more of the population was dying around everyone It was very very powerful stuff.
I actually got in to go and see this art.
It's a private collection and it was amazing.
And if you see the difference between the gargoyles and the twisted and fairly horrendous nature of a lot of early to Quattrocento art and then you see the Renaissance and Michelangelo and David and that this is this commitment to the beauty of the human form and you can see
The Virgin Mary and Jesus that the progression of correct proportions and babies that look like babies rather than little men and the coming from reality rather than from some internal state is really quite astounding and the fall of reason in the West was presaged by the anti-visual artists, the Dadaist movement and the Impressionists and Picasso and
In particular, I mean, good heavens, I mean, the spatterfests that showed up in Jackson Pollock's work and other, this anti-empiricism.
When I was a kid growing up, my mother had hung a very odd picture of a, I think it's a boy with two square, two black squares for his mouth, Paul Klee art.
I mean, it's You can really tell where the mindset of the species is of the culture of the communities by looking at the art and the unreality that we have in art now and the CGI and the...
Abstraction of courage, of moral courage and its uniting with superpowers and other galaxies and forces and lasers and so on is a way of detaching the moral courage necessary to sustain our civilization and putting it to an abstract realm where courage requires magic and since you don't have magic you can't be courageous in the world.
So by the 19th century Plato's reputation had generally emerged to be on par with Aristotle's And Plato was enormously, if not downright terrifyingly, influential.
So, we go back to Diogenes Laertes.
He wrote, quote, he was the first author who wrote treatises in the form of dialogues, as Fevirinus tells us in the eighth book of his Universal History, and he, Plato, was also the first person who introduced the analytical method of investigation, which he taught to Laertes of Thassos.
He was also the first person in philosophy who spoke of antipodes and elements and dialectics and actions.
Poimata, and oblong numbers, and plain surfaces, and the providence of God.
He was likewise the first of the philosophers who contradicted the assertion of Lysias, the son of Cephalus, setting it out word for word in his Phaedrus, and he was also the first person who examined the subject of grammatical knowledge scientifically.
The 20th century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead stated, The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
And Jean-Jacques Rousseau, of course highly influential in France and a terrifying man who abandoned his children to orphanages to almost certain death while claiming how wonderful it was to educate children, he said, Jean-Jacques Rousseau said, to get a good idea of public education read Plato's Republic.
It is not a political treatise as those who merely judge books by their title think, but it is the finest most beautiful work on education ever written.
And we'll see why when we get to that section, why he would think that.
Professor Forrest E. Baird writes, there are few books in Western civilization that have had the impact of Plato's Republic, aside from the Bible, perhaps none.
So, what is he in pursuit of?
What is the end goal of Plato's philosophy?
So the dialogues of Plato focus on the pursuit of truth, and the understanding of what is good.
Now, you'll notice that I've capitalized truth and good here.
It's kind of like C.A.P.S.
philosophy.
Like, you know, in... Gosh, what did it happen?
It happened in The Matrix.
It also happened when Oprah was talking about Obama.
He is the one.
The one.
Not just, he is one.
He's the one.
Yeah, he's the one.
He's the one.
He's the one, officer.
He is the one.
Right?
It is the one C.A.P.S.
and it's like we're not in pursuit of... I'd like to know what the truth is.
I know we are in pursuit of the truth and it's C.A.P.S.
philosophy.
You put C.A.P.S.
on And that way you know it's something more than empiricism.
So Plato's dialogues argue that there is one universal truth, which humanity needs to learn and strive to live in harmony with.
I mean, I hate to sort of say it's woo-woo, but it's a little woo-woo.
So for concept formation you need to see my presentation on Aristotle.
I also did an introduction to concept formation more recently.
It was also my very first video on YouTube.
I've been chewing over this one for, well, decade after decade after decade, publicly for about fifteen years.
Or so.
And so concept formation is key.
How do we get an idea of a table, of good, of virtue, of truth, of beauty, of society?
What is the relationship between these ideas and things in the world?
Now according to Plato, the mere sense perceptions of individual entities are these imperfect shadows of these eternal and material and otherworldly forms.
And I'm trying, I'm really streaming, I want to present this straight.
I mean it's not no secret what I think of this idea but it is very seductive and it is very compelling for an enormous number of people.
But basically what this means is if you have a concept of table and you put something in the category of table it can't contradict the general definition.
Right?
You can't have, you can't just throw a lizard in and say well this is just a table.
And so If you think of the concept of public ownership, of collective property.
So if you say property is a right of the individual, like we own ourselves, we own our bodies, we own our emotions, which is why we're responsible for crimes or things that we create.
So we own our bodies, we own the effects of our actions, therefore we own what we create.
Now if that is a characteristic of the individual, then you can't have a collective concept that contradicts the rights of the individual.
Right?
It's like saying, mammals are warm-blooded, but if you get enough mammals together, they can be silicon-based and cold-blooded.
That wouldn't make any sense.
You couldn't do that in a biological conference, right?
And so if human beings have property rights, you can't have an aggregation of human beings that then has the opposite of each individual's property rights.
This is the fundamental idea behind taxation, right?
That there's a collective concept called the state, which is in buildings and may have uniforms and has written down things like spells, and the concept of the state is based upon its capacity and willingness and the action of violating individual property rights.
Like I can't go and tax you because that's called theft, but the state can tax us because you see this collective concept has a right that is the direct opposite of the right of the individuals.
The individuals have the right to property and to be free of theft, but the state, you see, has not only the right but the obligation to violate the property rights of the individual.
So here you have a collective concept that can't be populated by people.
There's no state without people.
So you have a group of people that have rights specifically the opposite.
of the individuals they rule over, right?
And this is what I mean, this is very, very serious stuff!
I can't, and wouldn't, but I can't just go say, well this group of people, they're bothering me, they're dead, they're dangerous, so I'm gonna force people to be part of my army, gonna force other people to pay it, and we're gonna go away to war.
I can't do that.
That would be completely illegal.
I can't create my own money and use it to pay bills.
I can't borrow on behalf of other people, like the national debt.
I can't sign a contract for a car and then force you to pay for it.
The government buys things all the time and forces people, right?
So this is very, very important.
Because if the concept can contradict the individual characteristics of that which it describes, if there's such a thing as the social good that contradicts the good of particular individuals, if there's such a thing as social ownership that contradicts the property rights of individuals, Well, you have a very dangerous situation on your hands.
You have a very dangerous situation on your hands.
If you look at something like communism, communism killed like a hundred million people plus in the 20th century alone.
Communism is predicated on this.
There's something called the class, which supersedes the individual rights of the individuals.
Right?
Then the government can take ownership of the means of production and the government, individuals can't.
And the government can order prices, the government can order people, the government can set production quotas and goals, the individuals can't.
So you have this concept that has rights in direct opposition to the individuals within that society.
If the concept can contradict the instance, if the idea can contradict the individual thing it describes, then you have a state at war with the rights of the people, which is the state.
So, to sort of take it back down a notch or two, that's pretty high-stakes stuff there, right?
So, if you have Aristotelian base, you have a concept called chair, right?
It's a four-legged thing, usually with a back, otherwise it's a stool or something, and it allows you to take weight off your feet and sit comfortably.
Do you have a concept called chair that can contradict any individual chair that you come across?
The properties of any individual chair, right?
Right?
So could you have a concept of chair that includes a chair on fire?
That that's just a chair.
Well, no, it's a chair on fire, which is why you need to add the additional conditional of on fire.
But if you have a concept called chair that can contradict the properties of any individual chair, you need some place where that is valid, right?
Because empirically that's not valid.
Right?
If all mammals are warm-blooded, you can't just throw in a rock and a leaf and a lizard.
Unless your concept comes from some otherworldly source, then it can contain contradictions that go against the empiricism of individual instances.
I'm sorry for all this technical language, but it's really, really important.
This concept formation is absolutely essential as to whether we have a free society or not.
So let's look at Plato's theory of forms.
So there's a higher realm of truth and our perceived world of the senses is just an imperfect reflection of this superior realm.
So there's lots of different ways that you can think of this.
So you can think of standing on the edge of a lake and looking across the lake.
and it's not that wide and it's choppy right so you you can see a tree straight across the lake right and it's it's not raining it's just windy right so you can see the tree and then in the water you can see the choppy wobbly reflection of the tree right so he would say that the sense data like the the lake is constantly changing the The waves are constantly changing, and so you'll never get a certain knowledge of the shape of that tree.
Maybe, you know, you could after a certain amount of time, but if you look at the reflection, it's no good, right?
If you look at the tree itself, then you see the thing.
So he would say that, well, the sense data is like the reflection of the water, and the forms are like seeing the actual thing, not reflected, right?
So, because what we see with our senses is imperfect and inconstant and constantly changing, then you can have these forms that contradict the individual instances that we see.
So, when you look at some individual object and you say, oh that's beautiful, what is it that makes you say this is beautiful?
Well the one argument is the beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
There's no such thing as objective beauty.
There is only what people find beautiful.
What people think of as beautiful.
Some people look at a particular art like they look at a Jackson Pollock painting and they say that's beautiful.
I look at a Jackson Pollock painting and say that looks like somebody's just taken a shotgun to their artistic sensibilities and put a canvas behind their head.
But Plato would say that when you look at an individual thing, and it could be like a sunset or it could be a statue or a person, and you call it beautiful, you are intuitively responding to how closely that particular object matches the platonic ideal or form of beauty which we knew before we were born.
Which we knew before we were born.
So the purpose of philosophy, according to Plato, is to harangue you and disorient you and convince you.
That what you see and hear in the material world is just a degraded illusion.
It is not the truth.
It is not reality.
Reality is the perfect world of the forms.
And you can kind of see them in the things around you, but the things around you are as much of a distraction as they are an illustration of the perfect form.
If you tried to figure out the mathematics of a circle by only looking at the reflection of the moon on the ocean, you'd have a really tough time figuring out what a circle was.
To look at the moon directly, you're like, oh, that's round.
Assuming it's a full moon.
So he's there to try and pry you away from senses, from sense data, from empiricism, and have you look inward, look outward, look to another world of perfection.
And that is the purpose of philosophy, to detach you from the material world.
And this is why I say it has some things in common with theology, right?
Which, in general, the purpose of a lot of religious belief is to pry you away from the sensuality and the material meatbag of our bodies and turn you to the higher spiritual purpose and the will of a deity and so on.
And that's why it was always kind of confusing to me until I figured it out, or learned about it, why Plato was less popular than Aristotle.
So, if you call an object beautiful, it's not because the object is beautiful in and of itself, right?
It's because the beauty of an individual object is imperfectly derived from this form of beauty, right?
There's no... I mean, and this is true, right?
I mean, this... and not the form of beauty stuff, but there's no concept called beautiful In something that we see, right?
So every now and then, if I'm hiking, I'll look at a tree and be like, it's one of these perfectly shaped or like kind of curled with the wind in a very sort of evocative manner and so on.
Say, wow, that's a beautiful tree.
Or if it's got fall foliage, which I loved, oh, that's beautiful.
Now that's a concept in my head.
Beauty is a concept in my head.
It's not embedded in the tree.
I mean, you can saw that tree into atoms and you'll never find the word beauty, the concept beauty, the idea of beauty, right?
So what is the relationship?
And it is a tricky thing to think about.
It kind of can trip you up for quite a while.
Okay, well, what does it mean to say something is beautiful?
How do we know?
And there is some commonality, right?
I mean, it's not like the Mona Lisa is considered by most of the world's population to be ugly.
I mean, everyone recognizes a great piece of art.
Michelangelo's David and so on, right?
So what does it mean when we say something is beautiful?
It doesn't exist in the material object.
Where does it exist?
Well, Plato would say that you see the beautiful things relationship to this abstract form of beauty that objectively exists in some other realm.
So beauty, therefore, is not subjective.
It's not subjective.
Ooh, do I ever want to talk about my theory of art, but I won't.
All right.
So if Bob claims a woman is beautiful and Doug claims that she is ugly, they can't both be correct.
So this is in opposition to what I mentioned earlier, this relativistic assertion of Protagoras that man is the measure of all things.
It's like Henry Ford's statement, if you think you can or you think you can't, you're right.
If you think it's beautiful, it's beautiful.
If you think it's ugly, it's ugly.
There's subjectivism, right?
There's no objective truth, there's no objective good, there's no objective morality, it's just what you think and habits and what you inherited and so on, right?
Now the correct perception of beauty requires deep knowledge of the form of beauty.
It's a revelation, you see.
It cannot be expressed in language in objective, syllogistical form.
This is really, really important.
The realm of the forms, you meditate, you think deeply, you're in conversation, and you get this ZOMG, right?
You get this revelation about the form of beauty, but you can't communicate it to other people.
That's one thing when you're talking about beauty, it's quite another thing when you're talking about virtue.
The good cannot be objectively defined and communicated.
Now I've worked on this, I've got a whole book out there, well it's in Essential Philosophy, it's a book called Universally Preferable Behavior, a Rational Proof of Secular Ethics, where I work on the good in a logistical format and succeed.
But if virtue cannot be communicated, Because it's revelatory.
It's inspiration.
It's a magic moment.
It's faith in a sense.
If the good cannot be communicated then humanity to be good must be ruled.
This is the tyrannical aspect of the theory of the forms.
If the good cannot be communicated Then humanity must be ruled, because humanity must be good.
And if you can't tell people why they should be good, or you can't objectively define what virtue is, but you know it, this is why you have to have philosopher kings.
So think about this.
If you have a dog and the dog needs a medicine, you can't reason with the dog as to why the dog should take that medicine.
So what do you have to do?
You have to force the medicine into the dog's body, right?
You've got to give him an injection, you've got to mix it in his food, you've got to put it in pill form down his throat, you've got to... You can't reason with him, so you've got to rule him.
Because you know the purpose of the medicine is to make your dog healthy, but your dog doesn't know that.
Your dog can't understand the concept of abstract health and medicine and illness and so on, right?
This is why dogs Don't like going to the vet, right?
Like little kids don't like going to the dentist.
I like going to the dentist because I like having clean teeth and I know what the option is.
If I don't, it's really, really bad!
You can swallow all this bacteria and have a heart attack or some god-awful thing, right?
So, if you can't communicate the purpose, you have to rule the individual.
And if the forms can't be objectively defined and shared, then humanity must be ruled by those in full apprehension of the forms, which they can't communicate.
And therefore, the only way that human beings can be good, since the vast majority of human beings cannot understand and appreciate the forms, the only way that humanity can be good is to damn well do what those who understand the forms say, or else!
Or else.
You see?
It's a really dangerous idea.
It's one thing to say, well there's this abstract realm and blah blah blah, but you stop putting that into political practice!
And this is my master's thesis.
I examined the works of major philosophers throughout Western history.
Every single time they believed in a higher realm, they believed that dictatorship was the ideal political form.
And every time they were empiricists, Aristotelians, they believed that limited democracy, constitutional democracy, republic, some form of that, was the ideal political form.
That if you believe in a higher realm, you are tyrannical in your essence.
If you believe in empiricism, then every human being has the reason, right capacity, and material processing ability to get to the truth, to understand the truth.
It can be explained.
Therefore, human beings do not have to be ruled.
Now most of Plato's life was devoted to striving to prove the reality of the realm of forms.
Even down to the laws, kind of a terrifying document, which is the last dialogue that he wrote.
And it was a tough, it's a tough, it's a tough road to hoe, so to speak.
It's a tough mountain to climb.
So Plato said, well, we know forms through a remembrance of our souls past lives.
And you can see Aristotle's arguments against the forms, which to me are conclusive, but So for Plato, like these individual things, like individual chairs, they somehow don't really exist in any foundational way.
Because remember, the reality, the sense reality, is all just imperfect and changing and ephemeral and ethereal and so on.
So particulars don't really have any existence relative to the forms, which are eternal and changeless and pure and blah, all caps, right?
And it's no proof.
Capitalizing stuff is not a proof!
And so for Aristotle, what exists is what we can empirically verify through our senses in the world, right?
And so what we can verification is sense data, is rational consistency and sense data.
So here's an example, right?
So you're standing in the desert.
Off in the distance you see a mirage.
Well, you think it's a lake, right?
Let's say you see what looks like a lake and then you run towards it and it disappears.
Okay, so the lake is not there.
It's not real, right?
It's just light waves bouncing between differently heated layers of air or something, right?
So, on the other hand, if you go forward in the desert and you see what you think is a lake and then you drink it and you bathe in it and you fish in it and you Whatever, right?
You shower in it, you wash yourself, and it conforms to all of your five senses, and it exists throughout time.
Now, that's real!
If you go to the place where you see the lake and there's no lake, it wasn't a lake.
Now, that's not an error in reality, that's an error in your mind.
Your eyes were processing light waves correctly, it's just that your other senses didn't verify it when you got to the position.
You couldn't touch the water.
Water wasn't there.
What was there was sand.
So, for empiricists, of which I count myself one, what exists is that which can be verified according to sense data and rational consistency.
And so, if something is non-existent, you can't say anything about it, other than it doesn't exist.
So for Plato, sense data is not the standard of existence.
These ethereal, unreal, abstract forms, that's the real standard of existence.
But Aristotle, that which is non-existent, cannot be known.
So, you know, I don't mean to... I'm not trying to quote him to ill effect, but, you know, here's a quote, right?
In the Republic, Socrates explains the form of the good as, quote, what gives truth to the things known and the power to know the knower.
I really dislike that kind of stuff.
I really, really dislike this fortune cookie stuff.
So Aristotle doubted whether there could be any such thing as a form distinct from matter.
Right?
So, again, back to the forest.
We've got trees aggregated in a particular geographical area.
It's a forest, right?
I mean, let's not haggle over the definition, right?
A crowd, or whatever it is, right?
Some collective.
Can there be a form or a reality or something that exists that is distinct from matter?
Can you say something exists when there's no material evidence of it whatsoever, right?
So you walk into a door and it hurts, right?
If the door is open you walk through the doorway.
Can you say that there's a door in the doorway if you can walk through it?
No?
You can say it.
You say anything you want.
Can there be such a thing as a form distinct from matter?
Can something exist where there's no material evidence of either it or its effects, right?
I mean, what's real?
Matter and its effects, right?
Energy, gravity, whatever, right?
There is no such thing as a house apart from the material objects, the bricks or whatever, right?
So, it also becomes increasingly complicated when you try to apply the forms to the real world, right?
So, think of a beautiful ocean, you know, whatever it is, like that turquoise... I love that everybody does, right?
This turquoise water where the boat looks like it's floating, it's so clean, right?
The palm trees, there's a sunset, a sandy beach, whatever it is, right?
So, there's something beautiful, right?
So, well, that's beautiful.
OK, well, that's the essence of beauty, right?
But it gets increasingly complicated because if you look at an ocean that's brown, it really doesn't look beautiful.
Like I remember going from England to Ireland when I was a kid on these sort of rickety boats.
And I remember this boiling green angry sea, you know, that was splashing over the deck and so on.
I was really little.
I had like four or five.
I really remember that vividly.
It's not a pretty sea.
It's like, well, green I guess you could find.
But if it's brown, if it's oily and on fire... But you see, brown can be beautiful too, right?
And fire can be beautiful as well.
Sitting there staring into a fire, spacing out, and it's wonderful.
So fire can be beautiful.
And brown can be beautiful, but a brown ocean on fire is not beautiful, right?
So here's the problem, right?
You have three things that are beautiful.
An ocean, brown, and fire.
I mean, brown can be a wonderful color, right?
When you put these things together, and so all of these beautiful things combine to make... So what happens is then you have to say, well, this beautiful view of the turquoise ocean requires that the ocean be this color, and requires that it not be on fire, and requires that it be a sunny day, and requires... whatever, right?
I mean, if there's a giant tsunami in the horizon, probably not thinking it's kind of beautiful, but rather imminent death approaches, right?
So it becomes really A challenge to actually apply these concepts to actual things in the world.
And you end up, it becomes so individualized that I'm not really sure it adds anything to anything.
And this is the big challenge with Plato.
He spent his life devoted to striving to prove the reality of the realm of forms and failed.
And failed.
Because the only way that he could prove the reality of the realm of the forms was if they showed up in some material way.
But the moment they show up in some material way, they're not part of the realm of the forms.
They're part of the realm of this churning sea of empirical sensation we pretend to call reality, according to Plato.
So, it's kind of tough for me.
Because he was wrong.
They've never been proven.
They can't be proven, because proof is reason and evidence in the material realm.
And since the forms are anti-rational, and they're anti-empirical, they can never be proven.
Never, ever, ever will they be proven.
So the entire foundation, like if you get the metaphysics wrong, the actual nature of reality, Because there's two realms, right?
The mere pathetic empirical realm and then this perfect ideal realm of forms.
You get your metaphysics wrong, then your epistemology is going to be wrong.
Because now it's not about learning about the material world and developing science and reason and evidence and all of that.
It's about exploring in your mind this ideal perfect realm that you can never prove.
So if you get your metaphysics wrong, nature of reality, you get your epistemology wrong, which is nature of the study of truth, of accuracy.
Now if you get your epistemology wrong, you're going to get your politics wrong.
Because if every reasonable sane person is capable of apprehending the truth, you can have individualism and you don't need an all-powerful state to order people around because people can perceive the good on their own.
But if you have a state of revelation, that can't be communicated or proven, then you need a dictatorial philosopher king to order human beings around.
And we'll see the consequences of this in Plato's ideal society, which is completely terrifying.
Sorry, don't mean to poison the well.
It's interesting to explore intellectually.
It's terrible.
You get your metaphysics wrong, you get your epistemology wrong, means you get your ethics wrong.
What is the good?
The good is revelatory, can't be communicated, therefore it must be imposed, therefore your political system has to be tyranny.
It is, uh, not double-plus-ungood, I guess I'd have to say.
So, what did, what, what arguments did Plato deploy to try and establish the forms, right?
So sense data, right, what you're listening to and seeing and whatever, it's defective.
Error and change, it's, you know, the clouds change, the weather changes, you age, your skin changes, your voice breaks, your boobs pop out, you know, male or female it seems sometimes.
And so your society changes, your political structures change, you get these tyrants coming in from replacing a democracy, then you get an even more radical democracy that kills your mentor and it's like, right?
You go help some guy become a better king, he threatens to kill you, then sells you into slavery, but hey, you get bought out by some guy, you get... Change crazy, right?
Instability.
So sense data is defective.
The world of the senses is erroneous, change-prone, and so on, right?
But there's this more real and perfect realm, which is these forms, eternal and changeless.
And this is why I talk about Capp's philosophy.
So goodness and beauty, virtue, truth, blah blah blah, they're often capitalized by those who write about Plato.
In other words, the forms are uppercase at the beginning, right?
So, there are abstract ideas, goodness, beauty, equality, bigness, likeness, unity, being, sameness, difference, change, and changelessness.
So, Plato's philosophy distinguishes between the many observable objects that appear beautiful, good, just, unified, equal, big, and the one platonic object That is what beauty, goodness, justice, unity really is.
From which those many beautiful, good, just, unified, equal, big things receive their names and their corresponding characteristics, right?
So, I mean, it's sort of like this, um, think of the spoke of a bicycle wheel, right?
So you've got the hub and then all these spikes radiating out.
So the hub is And then it shows up in these various things that some of which are concepts and some of which may show up in sense data.
So most of Plato's major works are in many ways devoted to or dependent upon this distinction.
And if you forget about this distinction, he starts to become incomprehensible pretty quickly.
On the other hand, if you remember this distinction and hold it in your mind, he starts to become incomprehensible fairly quickly.
So it's important, we touched on this, like what are the ethical and practical consequences of dividing reality in this manner?
Well, again, if you get reality wrong, you're going to get knowledge wrong.
If you get knowledge wrong, you're going to get ethics wrong.
If you get ethics wrong, you're going to get politics wrong.
And wrong in politics is piling bodies up to the sky.
Collectivism versus individualism.
That's how it plays out.
So, as mentioned in a few of Plato's works, the eternal memory of the soul, as well as punishments through reincarnation, figure prominently.
And again, reincarnation not proved empirically, the eternal memory of the immortal soul, not Proved empirically, now, if you accept, say, the immortality and the memory of the soul, if you accept that there are punishments through reincarnation, these are beliefs, and they are appropriate to various religious mindsets, they are appropriate to various theological perspectives, but they remain squarely in the realm of faith.
And as they remain squarely in the realm of faith, they are not the province of philosophy any more than they are the province of science.
So this is always the question I have with someone like Plato.
Why is he classified in the realm of philosophy?
Because his propositions, his arguments, his perspectives are not empirically provable.
They are anti-rational.
They are anti-empirical.
They are anti-scientific.
And I know this is a startling thing to say but a brilliant man, a brilliant writer but if you're talking about we know a table because our immortal soul floated in a higher realm of perfect tables and we have a memory of that that persists after we're born I have a tough time viewing that as philosophy that is a statement but it is not a statement that can be tested empirically
And if you make statements that are contradictory to reason and evidence, if you say things exist and then it turns out that you've invented another realm where non-existence equals existence, I can't really see how you sit in the realm of philosophy.
Let me give you another example.
So let's say that you say that two and two make five.
And your math teacher says, well, you're incorrect.
And you say, no, no, no.
2 and 2 make 5 in an alternate realm of higher math that is superior to our merely sensible realm of mathematics.
What are you getting?
No, no, sorry, two and two make four, not five.
Inventing a higher realm where non-existence equals existence.
Inventing a higher realm where falsehood equals truth.
Creating a higher realm where the complete absence of evidence and rationality is certain proof that something exists.
You're just taking philosophy, creating a realm that is the absolute opposite of philosophy, and claiming that you've added something substantial to the discipline.
So, I know this guy out there on the internet says he doesn't even think Plato's a philosopher.
I mean, I know that that's going to be hung around my neck, albatross style, but I'm making a case and I'm happy to hear pushback.
All the sources will be below.
I'll look at the comments and love to engage in a discussion about this.
Thought-provoking?
Absolutely!
Plato is thought-provoking, but this dedication to anti-rationality and anti-empiricism, the very opposite of what philosophy is supposed to do, ah well.
Now, so sometimes the reader is told that the soul recollects what it once grasped of the forms when it floated in a disembodied state prior to birth.
You can see Mino for this.
And also the lives we lead are to some extent either a punishment or reward for choices we made in a previous incarnation.
And you can see this in the final pages of the Republic.
Plato, this is the dangerous part, as I was talking about earlier, Plato also asserts that true philosophers, those with deep, incommunicable knowledge of the forms, the essence of, say, justice rather than individual acts of courage or justice, are morally superior to mere unenlightened people, right?
So it's the unenlightened the incommunicable knowledge of the philosophers that results in the dictatorships that we see, I mean, more so in the Republic and certainly in the laws.
Now, here's the challenge, right?
So, you get hints, you get suggestions, you get a statement here and a statement there, and you've got to try and knit this all together.
If you have a mind to, and I'll give you a quote here, a source again will be on the slide, notes, although these propositions are often identified by Plato's readers as forming a large part of the core of his philosophy, many of his greatest admirers and most careful students point out that few, if any, of his writings can accurately be described as mere advocacy of a cut-and-dried group of propositions.
Often Plato's works exhibit a certain degree of dissatisfaction and puzzlement with even those doctrines that are being recommended for our consideration.
For example, the forms are sometimes described as hypotheses.
See, for example, Phaedo.
The form of good, in particular, is described as something of a mystery, whose real nature is elusive and as yet unknown to anyone at all.
That's from the Republic.
Puzzles are raised and not overtly answered about how any of the forms can be known and how we are to talk about them without falling into contradiction, that's Parmenides, or about what it is to know anything, Thetis, or to name anything, Cratylus.
So there's a certain amount of, you know, when a proposition is Incorrect, right?
There's this perfect realm of the forms.
Plato struggled his whole life to prove it.
And what popped into my mind was Einstein's pursuit of the unified field theory, something which ties together strong and weak atomic forces, electricity, magnetism, whatever it is, right?
Gravity.
But that's not the same as the forms.
So Einstein spent a good deal of his intellectual juice trying to find this unified field theory.
Failed.
But he was still in pursuit of a scientific theory and he accepted that it would have to be objective and provable and reproducible and predict the behavior of matter and energy and so on.
That's different.
So not only did Plato almost 2,500 years ago fail to prove the core aspect of his metaphysics, which is the higher realm of forms, But nobody ever since has been able to do it.
So if you have a foundational error that has lasted for 2,500 years almost, and you're considered still a great philosopher, well, why?
The question is why?
Well, the answer, I believe, and I'll talk about more of this at the end, but the answer is that Plato serves the preferences and power lust of those who wish to rule over us.
Because through Plato you can maintain the fiction of the collective good, of collectivism as a whole, as the tribe over the individual, as the social good, as the common good.
And so what he does is he built a giant abstract scaffold around the superstructure of political power that holds us all in its thrall.
So he's useful to those in power.
And this is probably a lesson that he learned from Socrates, who was profoundly not useful to those in power.
And so he's very helpful To those in power, that's probably one of the main reasons why he's still classed as such.
Because, you see, if you've got a really, really good theory, you don't need a massive amount of reputational buttresses to hold up, oh, Plato's a genius and Plato's so brilliant.
You know, again, literarily speaking, fantastic.
But as far as philosophy goes, I think you should have stayed a dramatist, right?
Anyway, let's move on.
So, this is a good introduction.
I'm going to read this.
It's from Stanford, right?
Now, I did, you know, read a lot of Plato, and I did sort of say, OK, well, man, get these little bits out of Plato, get these little bits out of Plato, and we'll talk about those and so on.
But they're worth reading yourself.
Just dig into the dialogues.
They're worth reading yourself.
And this is when I'm using some of the secondary sources to talk about this.
So, from Stanford, when one compares Plato with some of the other philosophers who are often ranked with him, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Kant, for example, he can be recognized to be far more exploratory, incompletely systematic, elusive, and playful than they.
Mmm.
I do not like this.
Do not want, do not want, do not like.
And I'll tell you why.
Philosophers run the world.
Fundamentally.
Philosophy informs, well, the metaphysics inform, the epistemology inform, the ethics and then the politics, and all of this combines to drive the art.
And the art generally imprints abstract ideas on the population through sophistry and manipulation.
Now, if there was an engineer Or a physicist from 2,500 years ago, or five years ago, who was exploratory, incompletely systematic, elusive and playful, what would we say?
Well, aren't these just all nice ways of saying, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong?
He was wrong.
You know, I mean, you go to a doctor, you want a doctor who can accurately diagnose your ailment and provide you relief.
You don't want an exploratory, elusive, and playful doctor.
Just give me the cure!
So...
And of course people do love some of this woo-woo stuff like the reincarnation and the higher realm of forms and the floating in space before you were born and what you see, 2001 obelisk style and so on.
So they like that stuff because they can continue to explore and not have the rigor of rationality and empiricism and utility.
I just wanted to point that out.
He's recognized as a guy who, you know, he raises some questions, he contradicts himself, he's playful, he's elusive, and again, artistic sensibilities.
So Stanford goes on to say that, along with his gifts as a writer and as a creator of vivid character and dramatic setting, is one of the reasons why he is often thought to be the ideal author from whom one should receive one's introduction to
Philosophy and I mean I remember reading Plato back when I first took philosophy in college and then well throughout my college experience and I remember reading Descartes and so on, I thought they were terrible introductions to philosophy because philosophy needs to have a rigorous methodology for separating truth from falsehood.
What is truth?
Truth is the relationship, well truth is the accurate Factual relationship between the concepts in your mind and things in the world it's the truth is a relationship between things in your mind and Things in the world and if the things in your mind accurately match things in the world, that's true, right?
So you say that's a tree if it's a tree matches what a tree is in the world What do you say?
This is a tree is it's it's truthful.
It's true if you pointed a tree and say that's a rock and Well, what's in your mind doesn't match what's actually in reality.
So truth is the relationship between things in your mind and things in reality.
Now, reality is rational and objective and consistent and comes to us through the empiricism of the senses.
So why we should have this elusive, playful, exploratory, higher realm, inconclusive stuff?
If you come to philosophy through Plato, you think it's basically, you know, just You know, like the sort of cliche of the dawn room thick with marijuana smoke where people are saying like, hey man, wouldn't it be wild if the solar system was like actually an atom in the couch of God's den?
You know, like...
Prove, don't prove.
Wouldn't it be weird if we were all growing at the same time and at the same rate, but we didn't know it because everything, including everything we measured size with, was growing at the same time?
We've been here before, right?
And then everybody has this coincidence story, you know, like, yeah, I dreamed of this elephant falling over.
I went to the zoo and an elephant fell over and, you know, like this, whoo, whoo, you know, it's coincidence and it's, it's not philosophy.
It's not philosophy.
Um, so anyway, just want to point that out.
Stanford goes on to say, his readers are not presented with an elaborate system of doctrines held to be so fully worked out that they are in no need of further exploration or development.
Instead, what we often receive from Plato is a few key ideas together with a series of suggestions and problems about how those ideas are to be interrogated and deployed.
Oh, Stanford, what are you doing?
Oh, you know, this idea, it comes out of, what was it, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure or Bogus Journey, you know, like dust in the wind, like this idea, this Socrates is this ancient guy who doesn't understand anything and just kind of spaced out, which comes more from the clouds.
Flip the play.
But here you can see the bias, right?
His readers, Plato's readers, are not presented with an elaborate system of doctrines so fully worked out then in no need of further exploration.
Well, don't you kind of want doctrines around virtue and truth to be kind of worked out so you can get on with finding out what is virtuous and true and bringing it into practice?
Right?
This is the point I make in essential philosophy.
The whole point of philosophy is fundamentally to get you to change your moral habits.
So, and what's... it's elaborate.
Like, what's wrong with being elaborate?
You know?
There's nothing wrong with being... Is it true?
Is it false?
Is it valid?
Is it logical?
Does it conform with empirical evidence?
You know, the very empirical evidence that you're using to process what it is that I'm saying.
A series of suggestions and problems about how those ideas to be... are to be interrogated and deployed.
I'm sorry, it's just like, what?
What does it even mean?
I must interrogate and deploy these ideas.
Yeah yeah yeah.
And this is kind of what Aristophanes seized upon when he wrote the play that helped really destroy Socrates' reputation.
So I mean there's a little bit in The Clouds which is Socratic questioning and so on, but Aristophanes' Clouds is A sustained attack upon this abstract guy who lives in the clouds and doesn't help the world and doesn't come down and talk to the people and, you know, useless and, you know, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin and all this kind of stuff.
That's terrible.
And again, this is what the Bill and Ted's movie with a young Keanu Reeves kind of made fun of where, you know, he gets that song, you know, dust in the wind, all we are is dust in the wind.
And he says that to Socrates and Socrates picks up the dust.
Whoa.
Yeah.
You know, that's not philosophy, dust in the wind.
It's not even that great a song.
But anyway.
So the dialogue form, this is to go on from Stanford.
Plato never became a writer of philosophical treatises, even though the writing of treatises, for example, on rhetoric, medicine, and geometry was a common practice among his predecessors and contemporaries.
The closest we come to an exception to this generalization is the seventh letter.
So the seventh letter of Plato is an epistle that has been ascribed to Plato and an epistle is a writing that is directed or sent to someone or a group of people, an elegant and formal dialectic letter and so on.
So the closest we come to an exception to this generalization that he doesn't write treatises, is the seventh letter which contains a brief section in which the author, Plato, or someone pretending to be him, commits himself to several philosophical points, while insisting at the same time that no philosopher will write about the deepest matters, but will communicate his thoughts only in private discussion with selected individuals.
As noted above, the authenticity of Plato's letters is a matter of great controversy, and in any case, the author of the seventh letter declares his opposition to the writing of philosophical books, Whether Plato wrote it or not, it cannot be regarded as a philosophical treatise, and its author did not wish it to be so regarded.
And again, maybe he just wants to dance in his imaginary world of forms, or again, it could be.
Like, why would you say, well, you'd be crazy to write down about the deepest matters what you actually believe but you will speak only in private with selected individuals Well, the answer to that is that Socrates was murdered by the mob for his philosophical arguments, and Plato did not want to be murdered by the mob.
I mean, it almost happened to Aristotle as well, who, unlike Socrates, fled, saying he would not allow Athens to sin against philosophy twice.
So, you know, it's like the people who take the batteries out of the cell phones of anyone they're talking to.
It's like, yeah, I'll talk to you, but I won't have a record around.
The writer goes on to say, in all of his writings, except in the letters, if any of them are genuine, Plato never speaks to his audience directly and in his own voice.
Strictly speaking, he does not himself affirm anything in his dialogues.
Rather, it is the interlocutors in his dialogues who are made by Plato to do all of the affirming, doubting, questioning, arguing, and so on.
Whatever he wishes to communicate to us is conveyed indirectly.
Stanford goes on to say, this feature of Plato's work raises important questions about how they are to be read and has led to considerable controversy among those who study his writings.
Since he does not himself affirm anything in any of his dialogues, can we ever be on secure ground in attributing a philosophical doctrine to him as opposed to one of his characters?
The dialogues have certain characteristics that are most easily explained by supposing that Plato is using them as vehicles for inducing his readers to become convinced, or more convinced than they already are, of certain propositions.
For example, that there are forms, that the soul is not corporeal, that knowledge can be acquired only by means of a study of the forms, and so on.
Now that's interesting.
If you have an argument that is clear and communicable, then you should state it, right?
I mean, in my book on ethics, I've got syllogisms, I lay it all out, I put forward the argument, I put it forward in debates, in arguments, in public speaking, in very short form, in a variety of different ways, in PowerPoints.
Because I want people to appreciate it and understand it.
And my theory of ethics, or I think an accurate theory of ethics, should be explainable to somebody reasonably intelligent who is five to seven years old.
Because that's when we start to really think that children have some sort of moral responsibility.
If you can't explain your theory of ethics to a kid, and I've done it with mine and it works just fine, Well, then what are you doing?
If the average person or even a person of say IQ 90 or above if they can't understand your system of ethics How do you expect them to be good?
And of course the answer is for Plato Well, I'm damn well gonna order them to be good or I'm gonna feed them to the wolves so it's Because he can't prove, and not only can he not prove it because he didn't quite get around to it, or he was not smart enough, which he certainly was, the reason he can't prove the theory of the forms is the theory of forms specifically denies proof.
Because it is an alternate dimension, where that which exists is the opposite of that which exists in this dimension.
Now, of course, I have done the allegory of the cave in a number of different formats.
It is one of the greatest stories or analogies of all time, and it shows the creative and literary genius of Plato, and in particular you gotta go and watch the documentary on the media called Hoaxed.
You can get it at hoaxedmovie.com for more on this.
So I'm just gonna read it, and you really should absorb this.
It's a fantastic story.
So Socrates says this.
Imagine this.
People live under the earth in a cave-like dwelling.
Stretching a long way up toward the daylight is its entrance, towards which the entire cave is gathered.
The people have been in this dwelling since childhood, shackled by the legs and neck.
Thus, they stay in the same place, so that there is only one thing for them to look at, whatever they encounter in front of their faces.
But, because they are shackled, they are unable to turn their heads around.
Some light, of course, has allowed them, namely, from a fire that casts its glow toward them from behind them, being above and at some distance.
Between the fire and those who are shackled, i.e.
behind their backs, there runs a walkway at a certain height.
Imagine that a low wall has been built the length of the walkway, like the low curtains that puppeteers put up over which they show their puppets.
So now, imagine that all along this low wall people are carrying all sorts of things that reach up higher than the wall, statues and other carvings made of stone or wood and many other artifacts that people have made.
As you would expect, some are talking to each other as they walk along and some are silent.
Glaucon says, this is an unusual picture that you are presenting here and these are unusual prisoners.
Socrates says, they are very much like us humans.
What do you think?
From the beginning, people like this have never managed, whether on their own or with the help of others, to see anything besides the shadows that are continually projected on the wall opposite them by the glow of the fire.
Glaucon says, how could it be otherwise since they are forced to keep their heads immobile for their entire lives.
And what do they see of the things that are being carried along behind them?
Do they not simply see these, namely the shadows?
Glaucon says, certainly.
Socrates says, now if they were able to say something about what they saw and to talk it over, do you not think that they would regard that which they saw on the wall As beings, they would have to.
And now, what if this prison also had an echo reverberating off the wall in front of them?
The one that they always and only look at.
Whenever one of the people walking behind those in chains and carrying the things would make a sound, do you think the prisoners would imagine that the speaker were anyone other than the shadow passing in front of them?
Gloggon says nothing else by Zeus.
Socrates says, All in all, those who were chained would consider nothing besides the shadows of the artifacts as the unhidden.
That would absolutely have to be, says Falcon.
Socrates says, so now Watch the process whereby the prisoners are set free from their chains and along with that cured of their lack of insight and likewise consider what lack of insight must be if the following were to happen to those who were chained.
Whenever any of them was unchained and was forced to stand up suddenly to turn around to walk and to look up toward the light.
In each case the person would be able to do this only with pain and because of the flickering brightness would be unable to look at those things whose shadows he previously saw.
If all this were to happen to the prisoner what do you think he would say if someone were to inform him that what he saw before were mere trifles but now
he was much nearer to beings and that as a consequence of now being turned toward what is more in being he also saw more correctly and if someone were then to show him any of the things that were passing by and forced him to answer the question about what it was don't you think that he would be at his wits end and in addition would consider that what he previously saw with his own eyes was more unhidden
than what was now being shown to him by someone else.
Glaucon says, yes, absolutely.
Socrates says, and.
If someone even forced him to look into the glare of the fire, would his eyes not hurt him and would he not then turn away and flee back to that which he is capable of looking at?
And would he not decide that what he could see before him without any help was in fact clearer than what was now being shown to him.
Leon says precisely.
Socrates says, Now, however, if someone, using force, were to pull him, who had been freed from his chains, away from there, and to drag him up the cave's rough and steep ascent, and not let go of him until he had dragged him out into the light of the sun, would not the one who had been dragged like this feel in the process pain and rage, And when he got into the sunlight, wouldn't his eyes be filled with the glare?
And wouldn't he thus be unable to see any of the things that are now revealed to him as the unhidden?
Glaucon says, well, he would not be able to do that at all, at least not right away.
Socrates says it would obviously take some getting accustomed I think if it should be a matter of taking into one's eyes that which is up there outside the cave in the light of the Sun and in this process of acclimatization he would first and most easily be able to look at shadows and after that the images of people and the rest of things as they are reflected in water
Later, however, he would be able to view the things themselves, the beings, instead of the dim reflections.
But within the range of such things, he might well contemplate what there is in the heavenly dome, and this dome itself, more easily during the night by looking at the light of the stars and the moon, more easily, that is to say, than by looking at the sun and its glare during the day.
Certainly.
But I think that, finally, he would be in the condition to look at the sun itself.
Not just at its reflection, whether in water or wherever else it might appear, but at the sun itself, as it is, in and of itself, and in the place proper to it, and to contemplate of what sort it is.
Galkan says it wouldn't necessarily happen this way.
And, having done all that, By this time, he would also be able to gather the following about the sun.
One, that it is that which grants both the seasons and the years.
Two, it is that which governs whatever there is in the now visible region of sunlight.
And three, that it is also the cause of all those things that the people dwelling in the cave have before their eyes in some way or other.
Glaucon says, it is obvious that he would get to these things, the sun and whatever stands in its light, after he had gone out beyond those previous things, the merely reflections and shadows.
And then what?
If he again recalled his first dwelling, and the knowing that passes as the norm there, And the people with whom he once was chained, don't you think he would consider himself lucky because of the transformation that had happened?
And by contrast feel sorry for them?
Very much so.
However, what if among the people in the previous dwelling place, the cave, Certain honors and commendations were established for whomever most clearly catches sight of what passes by, and also best remembers which of them normally is brought by first, which one later, and which ones at the same time, and what if there were honors for whoever could most easily foresee which one might come by next?
Do you think the one who had gotten out of the cave would still envy those within the cave and would want to compete with them who are esteemed and who have power?
Or would not he or she much rather wish for the condition that Homer speaks of, namely, to live on the land above ground as the paid menial of another destitute peasant?
Wouldn't he or she prefer To put up with absolutely anything else rather than associate with those opinions that hold in the cave and be that kind of human being.
Glaucon says, I think that he would prefer to endure everything rather than be that kind of human being.
And now, consider this.
If this person who had gotten out of the cave were to go back down again and sit in the same place as before, Would you not find in that case, coming suddenly out of the sunlight, that his eyes were filled with darkness?
Yes, very much so.
Now if, once again, along with those who had remained shackled there, the freed person had to engage in the business of asserting and maintaining opinions about the shadows while his eyes are still weak and before they have readjusted – an adjustment that would require quite a bit of time – would he not then be exposed to ridicule down there?
And would they not let him know that he had gone up, but only in order to come back down into the cave with his eyes ruined?
and thus it certainly does not pay to go up and if they can get hold of this person who takes it in hand to free them from their chains and to lead them up and if they could not kill him will they not actually kill him?
Glaucon says They certainly will.
So, other aspects of Plato's thought.
In the Timaeus, Plato describes the natural sciences, physics, astronomy, chemistry, and biology, and also the creation of the universe by the Demiurge.
That letter showed up in Stranger Things, I think.
Now, Plato's Demiurge did not create out of a mere void, but rather gave birth to already existing chaotic elemental matter in imitation, you see, of the eternal The four elements, fire, air, water, and earth, which were composed of various combinations of triangles, were turned into compounds into the body of the universe.
And, you know, again, it's a nice story, I guess, and again, this to me, this sort of creation myth without any particular scientific basis, certainly wouldn't be recognizable as science now, again puts him squarely in the camp of theology.
Now Plato also had unwritten teachings given through conversation to his students and not part of his dialogues.
Because Plato said that spoken philosophy was superior to written philosophy.
I actually can't help but agree with him on that.
Of course, the fact that Socrates didn't write anything down and was engaged in a lifelong conversation about philosophy was important.
And the idea that the exploration of ideas is better manifested in verbal rather than written form is very, very important.
And it's something that technology has enabled philosophy to return to the spoken form.
I speak with you, I engage in debates, lots of people are now contributing to the world of philosophy through online media, through spoken form, rather than just the written form.
And I think that's so wonderful.
Some of Plato's spoken arguments were reported by his students, including Aristotle, as well as other sources.
So, Plato argued for a first principle of everything.
The origin of good and of evil and the forms is THE ONE, right?
See here, you can see the caps.
Caps, philosophy, THE ONE.
Not the number one, not one of something, but THE ONE.
Plato's theology has aspects of monotheism, although he also spoke about an indefinite duality, also referred to as large and small.
Divine insight.
So with regards to epistemology, and you know, I've always been guided by the fact that Plato didn't use the word epistemology.
He didn't use all these complicated terms for things that we kind of basically understand.
So his theory of knowledge comes mainly in the Theta Tess.
Through the character of Socrates, Plato considers three different perspectives.
That knowledge is perception.
True judgment or true judgment together with an account, right?
So just sense data.
Is that knowledge?
Well, if it is, then a mouse has knowledge because a mouse runs to cheese and runs away from cats and this all comes through the impression of the senses.
Is it true judgment?
Well, a lion is going to judge the sprinting of a gazelle and try and intersect it and have a meal.
True judgment together with an account means not only do you have accurate information, but you can also explain why.
So he argues against each of them in turn, leaving the reader without any definitive conclusion.
And that's part of the annoying nihilism of this kind of philosophy.
And of course what he's trying to do is he's trying to disassemble your reliance upon sensuality, sense data really, empiricism, rationality, the objectivity of the material world we absorb through the senses.
He's trying to break that down So to crack your certainty so you can go through that crack like up the cave Exit and see the forms, right?
So he's got to crack down like post-modernism, right?
One of the great problems with marxism is marxism claimed to be scientific made a number of predictions those predictions All fail to materialize or in fact the exact opposite Materialized like there was never supposed to be a middle class under capitalism.
The workers were supposed to get poorer The rich was supposed to get richer.
The workers were supposed to get more numerous in number.
The rich were supposed to get fewer in number.
And there was no middle class.
And when the market was relatively free, the exact opposite happened.
So rather than give up on the theory, what the leftists did, the hard leftists, what they did was simply, well, if our theory turns out to be irrational, attack rationality.
That's sort of postmodernism.
And if predictions that were made don't come true, then just say, well, there's no such thing as predictions.
There's no such thing as, as, as a valid social science and all this old deconstructionism and so on.
Right?
If you don't like what's in the mirror, if you're fat, you don't like what you see in the mirror.
You can either lose weight or you can break the mirror.
And I think we know which way the left way.
So Plato, of course, often associates knowledge with a deep intuitive apprehension of these unchanging forms and their relationships with one another.
If one derives a quote truth, right, so there's two ways that this kind of philosophy works, this kind of theology works.
One is the caps, right?
Truth, virtue, goodness, oneness, whatever, the caps, right?
But the other is the scare quotes, right?
So if one derives a quote truth, truth through mere empirical sense data, then it remains a mere conditional opinion since the material world is always changing and That is very interesting because of course it is right.
You know that old David Bowie song.
I've seen the ripples Change the sides, but never leave the stream in any permanent way So yeah that the material world does change of course right and politics changes hairline changes I've heard lots of things change and I have a beard now, but I'm still the same guy, just slightly more itchy.
So yeah, the things change, but the principles by which they change are the universals by which we navigate, right?
So science recognizes that there's entropy, that matter and energy in constant motion, but the principles by which we understand the world remain constant.
Rationality remains constant.
So, the principles that we extract from the material world, objectivity, universality, scientific truths, scientific principles, and reason itself, well, you can get to certainty through the senses, because the world is stable and objective.
So this pure and unchanging truth, none of this sense data which is all garbage because everything changes, this pure and unchanging truth with a capital T can only be derived from contemplation of anti-empirical forms which do not change.
Plato also suggested that real knowledge is recollection and amnesis and not of learning, observation or study, right?
It's sort of like No, I don't know.
Okay, I'll make the reference, because it's kind of old now, but there was a Jennifer Garner show from many years ago called Alias, and at one point she has to remember something, but she can't remember it, so they put her in like a deep hypnotic state, and she's got to go back and remember something, and it's kind of like that.
That real knowledge is Let go your conscious mind!
Real knowledge is falling back through the tunnel of time to before you were born, back up the birth canal, pre-egg, pre-sperm, when your soul was still drifting around like cumulus clouds up in the realm of the forms, that the real knowledge is no longer being distracted by the empirical evidence of your everyday life, of your waking life, and going back to the realm of forms that was around before you were born.
In other words, The entire purpose of this teaching is to unlearn everything that you've learned in the waking world.
But don't worry, it's still philosophy, apparently.
So truth is not empirical, but basically it's indistinguishable from divine insight, because it's not objective, it can't be communicated, you can't draw a picture of the forms, you can't describe them in rational ways, and you certainly can't Prove them rationally or empirically.
You can't.
They're no sense data, right?
So it's absolutely indistinguishable from divine insight, which is why I would put Plato in the realm of theology, not philosophy.
There we go.
More theology than philosophy.
Look at that.
It's all coming together very nicely.
So with regards to ethics, Plato had a goal-oriented approach.
Well, you see, he couldn't go on principles, right?
So the way that ethics should work is you have your abstract principles, the non-aggression principle, do not initiate force, you have property rights, you have keep your word, honesty, contract law, and so on.
You have principles.
And because you have principles, everything kind of unrolls from there.
But of course, if the true, one, good, virtue, all caps, or beginning caps universe is incommunicable to others, you can't have a principled approach.
to ethics.
So he has a goal-oriented approach.
Sometimes you could call this utilitarian or pragmatism or consequentialism, the greatest good for the greatest number, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and so on.
And that is the consequences.
Whenever you hear that kind of stuff, this sort of calculus of happiness, and you try a bunch of stuff, you figure out what works and makes people the most happy, you are dealing with Well, it's not even theological approach, because the theological approach to ethics, at least in the Judeo-Christian world, is thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not bear false witness, thou shalt not murder.
So those are principles, right?
They're not condescending.
Well, see if you murder and see how you... Go murder and see how you feel, you know, like crime and punishment, Raskolnikov style.
And so, whenever you see this goal-oriented approach, then you know that somebody does not have objective rational ethics that they can communicate.
So the aim of ethics was to order the conditions under which a society might function most harmoniously.
That's interesting.
Harmoniously.
Now, because true apprehension of the forms is extraordinarily rare, people can't obey the forms.
They can't see them, they can't organize their life according to these forms.
So how on earth can a society function harmoniously if most people can't even remotely grasp or grok the good?
Well, you have to have basically untrammeled fascism or dictatorship to make that happen.
The question is as well, can you really have harmony as the goal of society?
I would say not.
I don't like strife or war or conflict in that aggressive, like physically aggressive way.
But human beings disagree all the time.
And we need an objective methodology by which we can resolve our disputes, which you can find in science, you can find in mathematics, you can find in engineering, you can find in the free market.
But you can't find it in this stuff.
So virtue is a form of spiritual excellence of the soul, according to Plato.
And, you know, this is just, I don't know, adjectives, positive words.
I don't really know what it means in terms of practicality.
So Plato argues that the soul has several components.
Reasons, passions, and spirit, right?
So the passions are your appetites, and reason, of course, is your conscious reasoning mind, and the spirit is very important, right?
So the appetite, the passions, that that part of the soul desires pleasure, right?
So it wants to satisfy its material desires, it wants to have sex, it wants to have a great meal and all of that.
The spirited part is you can think really of honor and pistols at dawn and soldiers.
It's aggressive and it seeks honor and public acclaim.
The rational part is more concerned with acquiring wisdom and knowledge.
These aren't of course always defined the most objectively.
So for reason, excellence is Wisdom.
For passions, it is such things as courage.
So you want to redirect people's pleasures away from that which feeds the mere physical appetite to that which feeds the vanity of social approval or such virtues as courage.
For the spirit, it is temperance.
Justice is excellence in a harmonious relationship between the other three parts.
This tripartite analysis is actually very common in our analysis of the soul, right?
So there is the divine, there is the human, and then there is the devilish.
There is a superego, there is the ego, and there is the it.
There is the upper class, the middle class, and the like.
We just love this tripartite stuff, Father, Son, Holy Ghost.
This tripartite stuff is very, very common, and That is, well, there's the state, there's the law-abiding citizens, and then there are the criminals, right?
So, for Plato, virtue was a form of knowledge, the knowledge of good and evil, required to reach the ultimate good, or eudaimonia, eudaimonia, eudaimonia.
Now, that's a tough word, right?
So, some people say, well, it's happiness, some people say it's welfare, but, you know, thriving is something that is a great documentary, and also thriving is thrive.
Thriving is something close to it, human flourishing, prosperity, you know, just Good stuff!
So let's talk about the Republic.
Now this is complicated as you would expect in Plato.
So in the Republic, which is a dialogue, a long one, Plato appears to be describing an external city.
But the character of Socrates clearly states that they are describing a city in order to better understand the perfect soul.
And again, is this plausible deniability?
Hey, don't get mad at me for suggesting the way a city ought to work.
I'm really just talking about the soul.
Hard to say.
The society being discussed is not an actual physical, political, social structure.
Rather, it serves as a symbol via which the reader can contemplate how his own constitution should be ordered.
And again, fears of censorship and so on.
So he's describing the ideal city.
And of course, Plato never clearly spells out the meaning or end purpose of his dialogues.
It's just kind of something you have to get used to, unlike the writings of Aristotle where he really does spell out the meaning and end purpose.
So for the Platonic dialogues, as we heard earlier, this sort of introduction to philosophy stuff, it's a stimulus for thought, but lacks tensor-like defined conclusions.
And this is where you get, you know, this, uh, virtue is excellence in the spiritual pursuit of wisdom.
And it's like, yeah, okay, but what do I do?
You know, how do I resolve this dispute or how do we organize this?
It's, you know, what Dennett talks about deepities, which I think came from one of his daughter's friends, you know, this kind of fortune cookie stuff that sounds interesting, sounds kind of cool, but when you try and break it down from the clouds to sea level, it kind of falls apart in your hands.
So the ideal state, right?
So what is the ideal state?
How should society be organized?
Huge and foundational question.
And now I already got, I've got my books on this.
You can find them at freedomainradio.com forward slash free.
So I won't go to my stuff here.
Stick on Plato.
So some of Plato's most famous doctrines you can find in the Republic as well as later in the Statesman and the Laws.
So again, we see this tripartite structure, right?
He drew clear analogies between the tripartite structure of the soul and body, right?
Appetite, stomach, spirit, chest, and reasoned head, and the tripartite class structure of societies.
Human beings in Plato's ideal state were divided up, depending on their innate intelligence, strength, and courage, into The productive, right?
So these, you could maybe the middle class or whatever, these are the workers.
So the laborers, the farmers, the merchants, and so on.
And they represent satisfying the appetite of the physical needs of the stomach.
There are the protective.
These are the warriors.
So these are the adventurous, the strong, the brave soldiers.
Don't necessarily have to be overly smart.
And that's the spirit and chess.
So these would be the enforcers, whether it's domestically police or externally with regards to an army.
And then, we've all heard of this one, right?
The governing.
The rulers, the philosopher kings.
These are the intelligent ones, the rational, self-controlled and wise, best suited to order the community and they represent the rationality or the head, right?
So we've got the stomach, we've got the chest and we've got the head.
We've got the supplying of physical needs, we've got the martial courage required to protect the society and in particular protect the elite and then we have the governing, right?
Now all children are given to the state to be raised in Plato's ideal society and are assigned work as the state sees fit once they become adults so we're talking like literally cradle to the grave maximum totalitarian social control and there's some meritocracy right so it's not you don't completely inherit your father's station or your mother's station right so if
Gold, iron and brass and so on.
So let's say that you're in the productive classes and because so much physical labor was done by slaves and half the city-states generally were slaves, it was not considered to be hugely respectable.
You know, think of the sort of British aristocrats view of the nouveau riche capitalists in the 19th century.
Like, oh, he just made his money through trade, right?
Or what's that famous line?
I think it's a famous line from me out of Oscar Wilde.
Oh, he made his fortune in American dry goods.
It's like, what are American dry goods?
American novels, I think.
He's a funny guy.
Was a funny guy.
There's some meritocracy.
So if you're born in the productive classes, but you're super smart, then you could be sky-hooked out of that, right?
The claw!
You could be sky-hooked out of that, and you could be dropped into the governing classes.
If you are not so smart in the governing classes, but you are very brave, then you maybe would be dropped into the protective classes.
So there's some shuffle based upon meritocracy, and that is Important, right?
So you get promoted according to your value and I assume there would be some kind of objective tests or measures for this kind of stuff.
But yeah, that is pretty nasty.
Children taken by the state to be raised.
So in Plato's ideal society just about everyone is a slave except for the philosopher kings who are slaves to the forms.
So you could be called a citizen but the citizen as a citizen you'd have no rights you'd only have obligations and you'd have no freedom at all except again the philosopher kings.
And look I mean It's monstrous, obviously, and to our modern sensibilities, even for people who are drawn towards this kind of oligarchical hierarchical collectivism, it's pretty nasty.
But if you sort of bounce back in time to, what, 399, when Socrates was killed, 399 BC, the death of Socrates, of course, profoundly influenced Plato's thinking.
Because remember, The trial went on for a while and Plato was sitting in the audience watching his beloved mentor Socrates attempt to reason with the mob.
And it didn't work.
Trying to reason with the mob didn't work.
And those of us who stood up in the public square and told the populace of the world uncomfortable or unpalatable truths Well you very quickly see how ferocious the mob can become.
How the stung vanity of those who are both certain and wrong lashes out in a highly aggressive and destructive manner.
Standing before the mob and speaking the truth is a dangerous occupation.
It always has been throughout human history.
So Socrates had great arguments.
You know Miletus said oh you corrupt the young and he said oh well then you must know how to improve the young.
Miletus of course had no idea and He said, listen, why would you want to put me to death?
I'm old and nature will take care of it pretty soon anyway.
And he had great arguments against why he should be put to death and the mob... I mean, it was close, but the mob didn't care.
The mob put him to death anyway.
And if you've seen the mob, In a sense, tear limb from limb the man you love the most, the man you gave up a career in politics for, the man whose teachings you followed to the point where you were sold into slavery and twice kidnapped and ransomed and suffered and lived under the shadow of the death penalty for censorship your entire life, knowing that the mob can boil over and take you down at a whim.
Your relationship with the mob I mean I get mob is a bit of a prejudicial term but it looks that way sometimes.
Your relationship with the mob is tense.
It's polarized.
So the idea that when the mob put Socrates to death that Plato might end up with the idea that the philosophers ought to be in charge.
It's not beyond the pale.
So, just on the off-chance you think I might be exaggerating about the totalitarian nature of Plato's ideal state, here's some quotes.
The main principle is that nobody, male or female, should be left without control.
Nor should anyone, whether at work or in play, grow habituated in mind to acting alone and on their own initiative.
But he should live always, both in war and peace, with his eyes fixed constantly on his commander and following his lead.
This is his ideal state.
This is how things should be run.
Nobody should be left without control.
Nobody whether at work or play, should grow habituated in mind to acting alone and on their own initiative.
This is, I mean, pure totalitarianism.
This is straight out of National Socialism, out of Nazism.
Everything for the state.
The state is everything.
The individual is nothing.
This is straight out of communism, straight out of fascism.
Ah, fascism is a bit of an odd term because nominal private ownership is not the difference between freedom and slavery.
But, I mean, Mussolini started out as a Marxist, and people used to move back and forth between National Socialism and International Socialism, in other words, between Nazism and Communism.
The Nazis were referred to as a beefsteak, right, if they were brown on the outside or a brown shirt, but red on the inside were basically Communists, right?
So the two rival gangs is not the same as honest citizens versus rival gangs, and Communism and National Socialism were just rival gangs following this same argument, this same idea.
Here's another quote regarding price fixing, the great disaster of economics that always leads to shortages.
This is from Plato.
The lawgivers must meet in consultation with experts in every branch of retail trade, and at their meetings they must consider what standard of profits and expenses produces a moderate gain for the trader.
And the standards of profits and expenses thus arrived at, they must be prescribed in writing.
And this they must insist on.
The market stewards, the city stewards, and the rural stewards, each in his own sphere.
No free market, no free trade, no price mechanism, and of course without the mechanism of price there's absolutely no way to even remotely efficiently allocate scarce resources, right?
It's the basic principle of economics.
Human desires are infinite, resources are finite.
So how do those scarce resources get doled out?
Well you can either let the market and the pull of demand do it through the price mechanism, or you have the push of bureaucracy which is disastrous.
And always leads to economic catastrophes.
Price fixing.
I mean, this is minimum wage!
Straight out of this totalitarian book.
Now, there's no free movement.
You can't come and go.
A few older men can travel, right?
Listen to this.
So a few older men can travel to inspect how other city-states or other countries might be doing, like Plato did for 12 years after Socrates was killed.
But here's the quote.
But if, on the other hand, such an inspector appears to be corrupted on his return, in spite of his pretensions of wisdom, he shall be forbidden to associate with anyone, young or old, wherein, if he obeys the magistrates, he shall live as a private person, but if not, he shall be put to death This is, I mean, put to death.
He has become the mob that he was afraid of, right?
Plato here saying he's been put to death.
Appears to be corrupted.
What is the objective standard for appears to be corrupted?
Is that not exactly the same standard that Plato so decried being applied to Socrates?
The appearance of corrupting the young, the appearance of not believing in the gods of the city.
If he appears to be corrupted, he's not allowed to associate with anyone.
And if he lives this life of torturous isolation, he's allowed to live.
But if he talks to anyone, this guy gets put to death because he appeared to be corrupted.
Now remember, he's going to be judged by the philosopher kings, by the magistrates, who themselves are supposed to have this knowledge of the forms.
What empirical evidence can contradict the Philosopher King's perception of the forms, remember?
You always end up with totalitarian show trials and kangaroo courts and these purges because a rational, objective legal system says that evidence trumps anything else.
Right?
Physical evidence, DNA evidence, not then of course at the time, eyewitness accounts, written evidence, plots or receipts or anything like that.
That physical evidence trumps everything else.
But in a forms deluded abstract theological Prison ruled by these philosopher kings.
Evidence doesn't matter because they've got the forms.
Evidence doesn't matter.
It's through the senses.
It's nonsense.
They've got the forms.
They know who's innocent.
They know who's guilty and they'll put to death people they consider guilty.
You understand this is a recipe for whole slayal slaughter of populations.
Where are the restraints?
This is a murder wish.
and he has become what he originally despised.
I mean they they he is also I mean just a by the by and we'll get more to the parenting in a bit but if the population grows too high then you you you can either send people to go form new colonies or you can control the population by killing the newborns right not we're not talking
Abortion here is a long time ago but you know basically strangling or dashing the head of the newborn against the rock and killing the newborn or poisoning the newborn so yeah.
Death penalty for the mere appearance of corruption and baby murder.
Other than that it sounds great.
So let's talk about the eugenics also involved.
in Plato's totalitarian society.
And the reason I'm sort of saying all this is, oh this guy's a great introduction to philosophy.
Although he wants to put people to death on a whim, kill newborns, and now he engages in rank eugenics.
Tell me how this is not entirely in accordance with the most horrifying aspects of all totalitarian states, but in particular the National Socialists, the Nazis.
So Socrates said no individual families are allowed among the guardian class, right?
So those are the chest-thumping warrior guys, right?
Guardians access all women and children in common.
Now the best male guardians in Plato's ideal state breed with the best female guardians to produce similar offspring of a similar nature, right?
So they understood back then something that we try to talk ourselves out of continually in the present, which is that there's no aspect of personality that is immune from genetic transmission, right?
And you can breed There's a guy in Russia who did this incredible experiment where he took a bunch of foxes and he said, I wonder how long it will take for me to breed tame foxes versus highly aggressive foxes.
So what did he do?
Well, he took the most aggressive foxes and he bred them with the most aggressive foxes.
And he took the tamest and most docile foxes and he bred them with the tamest and most docile foxes.
And within just a couple of generations he had Basically two different species of foxes.
One that can play with babies and the other one that would rip apart adults.
And so, yeah, I kind of wish it were different.
I'm not saying there's no free will.
I'm just saying the genetics is kind of important.
So how do you get the best male guardians to breed with the best female guardians?
Well, you have marriage festivals guided by a rigged lottery system.
Shades of a catching fire story.
Shades of... I mean this is crazy stuff.
Crazy stuff.
So you'd say well we're gonna have a lottery and we're gonna randomly assign people but what you do is you figure out Who are the best guardians, males and females, and you just say, oh it was random, here's who you have sex with, here's who you get married to, but actually you have rigged it.
So straight up eugenics and violation of any reasonable moral norms and so on, right?
So after the birth, the children are yanked from their parents' hands and put into a rearing pen to be raised by nurses.
Totalitarianism and destruction of the nuclear family.
It's not a new idea at all.
This goes all the way back to this totalitarian hellscape.
So the parents are not even allowed to know who their own children are.
And this way, the idea is, of course, parents think of all the children as their own.
And you can see this, of course, you can see this going on in the modern West to a lesser degree, of course, but it's still pretty important.
Which is that the state raises the children in terms of, you know, daycare, usually licensed by the state.
You've got pre-k, you've got kindergarten, you've got primary school, junior high school, high school, and all that.
And, you know, strangely enough, after being educated for a dozen or more years by the government, well, everyone comes out thinking that the government is absolutely necessary and without it, yeah, right?
So, hmm.
Socrates now, this is important, Socrates in the Republic, he accepts that this system will result in members of the same family having sex with each other.
Right?
So you understand this?
Right?
You got Bob and Alice, Oedopolis, you got Bob and Alice And the kids get, they have three kids, right?
Two boys and a girl.
Those kids get thrown in the rearing pen, but they don't know that they're siblings.
They don't know who their parents are, they don't know who their siblings are.
So this means that you're gonna have brother-sister incest as a result of the system.
I mean, come on!
How bad does it have to be before we say, well, we don't say that Mein Kampf is a wonderful introduction to political philosophy.
But we'll say, yeah, you got to read The Republic because it's a great introduction to philosophy.
Plato is just so, oh, my God.
But as I said, this is the inevitable consequence of metaphysics, right?
The nature of reality is that the forms and then you can't communicate them.
So knowledge is revelation and therefore you can't Have people responsible for their own ethics.
So you've got to have a dictatorship right and the moment you say higher realm boom Cantor all of them Hegel you get a dictatorship out of that.
This is like it's a straight path from one to the next This is why I fight so hard on metaphysics about this stuff.
I understand what it's all about.
I Now, Plato was not a parent.
I mean, Plato was gay, right?
I mean, to be straight up, right?
I mean, there was a lot of oiled naked men at the Olympics in Greece.
So, yeah, it was a bit of a homoerotic environment in many ways.
So, Plato was not a parent.
So, maybe he just didn't understand that this, maybe he wanted this, right?
Because this is the guardian class.
So, this is a breeding ground for rampant sociopathy.
I mean, we know that, right?
I mean, if you look at what happened in Ceaușescu's reign in Romania, right?
I mean, you had... abortion was banned, you had a hundred thousand unwanted children being thrown into soiled, half-broken baby pens watching old VHA's copies of The Lion King all day and they just grew up to be monstrous.
A bunch of French people tried adopting them and they were throwing cats out the window and they had to have their own safe room so they wouldn't tear apart the furniture and the other children and God knows what else, so...
Rampant sociopathy comes out of this and that's not particularly hard to fathom, I think, but I guess he didn't.
I mean, how, how, how?
I mean, can you imagine if I had put forward anything, I'm sorry, can you imagine that if I had put forward or someone else had put forward these kinds of ideas?
Totalitarianism, judicial murder whims, everybody controlled by the state Massive government control over the economy.
Oh, people seem to like that these days.
And eugenics and fake marriages to make sure that the strongest breed with the strong.
Killing babies if there's overpopulation.
And a system that results in brother-sister incest on a regular basis.
And people would say, you monster!
and they'd be right.
Well, of course, again, if you want to have power over people, you have to destroy their ability to think for themselves, which means you've got to have this otherworldly, new and mineral realm, the Nirvana realm, the realm of the forms and so on, which it's really true, but the Nirvana realm, the realm of the forms and so on, which it's really true, but you can understand it, Well, he serves power, right?
He serves power.
That's why he has remained popular, despite these absolutely horrifying... Like, if somebody's proposing a system like this, They've made a mistake somewhere!
Like, they've made a mistake somewhere!
I mean, maybe you could get away with this kind of crap 17th century, 18th century, maybe 19th century, but dear God, after the totalitarian nightmares of the 20th century, the idea that this is somehow an introduction to philosophy rather than a sociopath's handbook on how to murder a billion people is crazy.
Right, so Plato, and I was trying to come up with a word for this and I couldn't come up with a good one because when I say radical environmentalist people think that, you know, they're animal liberators and so on, but for Plato there is no such thing as constant or innate human nature.
Right, so he's a radical proponent of the nurture hypothesis.
that we're all just these blobs of water that we get poured into whatever fashionable container and that's what we become and right there's nothing but of course we do have fixed traits within our personalities both as human beings and as just the genetic admixture that we get from our parents we just have and if you've had more than one kid you kind of get this or if you have had exposure to siblings that are very different sibling IQ points can differ on average or do differ on average about eight points which is pretty considerable and
The Big Five personality traits are all influenced by genetics, not 100%, influenced by genetics.
So we do have built-in natures that aren't malleable.
But for Plato, it's like, well, you raise a guy as a soldier, he's going to be a soldier.
But then, of course, he also wants this genetic mix and all of this.
So Marx said that your nature is determined by your relationship to the means of production.
Like if you own the means of production, a factory or whatever, then you are one kind of thinking.
Your class consciousness is one way.
If you're a slave to the productive system known as reality, then you're a worker and then you have a whole other kind of class consciousness.
Your entire personality and thinking and way of being is utterly determined by your relationship to the means of production.
And he had this great, well the feminists do this too, right?
So if you are a worker but you don't feel oppressed, well that's just because it's false consciousness, right?
Or if you're a woman and you don't feel oppressed by the patriarchy, well that's because you've internalized misogyny, right?
So they say this is who you are, and if you disagree with them they say, well you're wrong.
Because I know you better than you know yourself, because ideology.
And this is a kind of dehumanization, it is dehumanizing.
Extraordinarily, destructively dehumanizing to say to people that you are the mere shadow cast by your environment, you have no innate characteristics or nature and if you disagree with me you're wrong because I have an ideology that says exactly how you're supposed to be.
That's cold and it's profoundly uncurious, it's profoundly anti-scientific.
The genetic bases of personality have been known for A long time, just as the genetic basis for difference in intelligence has been known for considerable amounts of time.
I mean, our intelligence is 80% genetic by our late teens.
It's just, it's the way it is.
So, this is why he figures, well, you know, it's the environment they grew up in, they'll be fine with it.
And again, you can't oppose his views.
He's false consciousness.
If you oppose him, well, you just don't know yourself.
Now, This is, I mean, it's kind of a hyper-accelerant of a Greek conception at the time.
And we know this, right?
Do you remember this controversy a couple of years back when Barack Obama was like, you didn't build that, right?
And people sort of misunderstood that.
He was saying that society educated you and built roads and there's a legal system and so, you know, you can't just say you achieve atomically in isolation from everyone else.
So this is an old Greek idea.
It's not that much that's new.
I'm trying to add some of my own.
The idea that the individual is dependent upon society, that you are a fragment of the society, that you are, you know, no bee can make the hive and the honey.
This is part of a collective, right?
And so the community nurtures the individual into a civilized person.
The community is more important.
It takes precedence over the individual.
The individual is born, the individual lives, the individual dies, but the society and the state and the culture lives on and so you're just passing through this eternal, again, abstract form, more important than the individual instance which we talked about before.
So, for the ancient Greeks, outside of this, the Republic of Plato, so they would say, So you have freedom.
You have freedom if you're a citizen.
Not a woman.
You have the right to participate in political affairs.
You can make speeches.
You can write.
You can do pamphlets.
You can vote.
So you're free to participate.
But, dude, once the vote has been cast, your freedom ends.
Your freedom ends.
And this is part of the argument that Socrates made.
He said, listen, the law has protected me my whole life.
What am I going to just abandon now that they don't serve my particular need?
Well, that's going to harm people's conception of the validity of the laws and of society as a whole and blah, blah, blah.
So I'll drink the hemlock.
Thank you very much.
So yeah, you're free to provide your input, but once your input is provided and once the vote is then you're a slave to the will of the majority and I mean that's, even the Founding Fathers were probably aware of much of this history which is why they put in a Constitution, Bill of Rights and so on.
So!
Socialism, Plato's plan includes... See if you recognize this from the Ten Plans of the Communist Party.
So, the abolishment of private property, the collectivization of individuals, the governing of society through elites.
And listen, There's a lot of prominent socialists and communists, including Karl Marx himself, who were very big fans of Plato's description.
Because they said, look, what this guy's talking about is a genuine, socialistic society.
And they toyed, socialists and communists, toyed with incorporating some of Plato's rules, even the most horrible ones, into their own systems.
So he has been a pied piper of totalitarians for thousands of years.
Now, of course, the totalitarian promise is that things are going to get much, much, much better, right?
This is another thing that the communist countries were supposed to vastly outstrip.
The economic productivity of the free market economies.
And again, when quite the opposite happened, well, they switched to immigration to achieve socialism rather than trying to argue for empirically discredited theories.
Because so Plato said, look, the specialization of labor under state control will create maximum economic progress.
And this is a whole idea that You need a central coercive agency to organize people in society and maybe that's kind of like a childhood thing that people have now like when I was a kid you just went out and played and you spontaneously generated games and you figured out what to do so we didn't need any referee we didn't need a gym we didn't need structure in that way we would just come up with stuff and enforce the rules mutually and people the kids who repeatedly didn't
Obey the rules would be ostracized for a while until they wised up and so we all have this spontaneous self-organization Maybe that's got some reason why I'm more of a fan of the free market than this kind of stuff But there is this kind of perception that Society's got to be organized and the organization always turns out to be giving a small number of people all the weaponry in the world and disarming the population for them to be controlled And so, it goes very much along the lines of the Marxist doctrine, right?
From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
In Plato's world, each person is assigned his or her work according to tested and proven abilities.
Individuals, therefore, don't choose their own work.
The work is assigned by the rulers.
Pay, rewards, and status are also determined by the rulers.
So this is maximum, not just social control, not just thought control or cultural control, which we'll get to, But economic control.
And this is always a disaster.
I don't know what the world of forms has to say about crop rotation or what should be grown according to what soil conditions, but basically you want the market and the farmers to determine that.
Otherwise you end up with the Holodomor, right?
The mass slaughter and starvation of millions of Ukrainians by the centralized Soviet state.
Now Plato also said, of course, in this work, that warriors should not own any real property, not even a private house.
The women and the guardians should live communally.
Property must be held by the state, right?
So this is straight-up communism, right?
Nationalization of the means of production, as well as labor and finance, everything for the state.
Now Socrates, I don't believe, because Socrates said that he knew nothing That he was the wisest man, it turned out, as the article had described him.
He was the wisest man because he knew that he knew nothing.
Now, if you take the rational humility, which I think goes to excess in Socrates, he says, I know nothing, right?
The only thing I know is that I know nothing.
So, when you admit to your lack of knowledge, then your thirst for dominance and control of others is diminished.
Why?
Because you don't know that much, right?
I don't believe that the forms came from Socrates, because Socrates said he knew nothing.
And he was wiping slate, wiping the clean slate of sophistry and lies and bullcrap and all that kind of stuff.
So the forms came from Plato, not from Socrates, I believe.
Because Socrates, if he'd say, well, I know the forms.
But he said, I know nothing.
But Plato said, I know the forms, I believe.
I mean, this is what the evidence shows, right?
If you have humility about your expertise, then your belief in centralized coercive control of society vanishes.
Humility breeds freedom.
Narcissism, malignant narcissism, that you believe that philosopher kings can tell everyone what to do, and who to have sex with, and how the children should be raised, and what the wages should be, and what the prices should be, and what everyone's job should be, and who should get married to who, and how they should live, and where they should own property.
No!
The megalomania involved in that is the polar opposite of the humility of Socrates.
Because Socrates would say, hey, I don't know what the price of eggs should be next Thursday.
I don't even know what virtue is.
I'm really wrestling with truth here.
So let's have a free society so that everyone can work to pursue truth in their own way.
Not Plato.
Plato has his divine knowledge of the form so damn well get in line and obey or die.
And he uses the Socratic sock puppet to get these ideas across.
Which I think is a monstrous hijacking of a humble man's reputation in order to have him, against his eternal will, spew your fascistic communist totalitarian nightmare arguments.
No.
No, Plato was Judas to Socrates.
So, Reason.
So, at the time, the Athenian democracy was driven by rhetoric and persuasion.
Now, Plato effectively rejected these principles and therefore he rejected Athenian democracy.
So, you know, sophistry, making the worst argument appear the better, and appealing to, you know, we see this all the time, you know, like if you're skeptical of government control of healthcare, it's because you want sick people to die in the streets, alright?
So, it's still the great battle that's between reason and sophistry, and I, again, I go more into this in my book, Essential Philosophy.
But rhetoric and persuasion were very very powerful ways of appealing to the mob, right?
And again you can see this on the left and on the right and all over the place this appeal to the mob, to sentimentality and so on.
Sentimentality as well.
So of course the Republic focuses on how the ideal educational system should be run with the goal of producing philosopher kings or at least maintaining that lineage.
The Philosopher King, you know, their reason, will, and desires are united in virtuous harmony, a moderate love for wisdom, and the courage to act according to that wisdom.
And Plato, you know, in his mind this is all benevolent stuff, right?
It's better for the people to be ruled by a single tyrant since only one person could commit bad deeds, but in bad democracy all people are now responsible for bad actions, as we saw the 30 were trying to implicate Socrates by having him arrest someone.
So Plato predicted that a state made up of different kinds of souls will tend to deteriorate.
Different kinds of souls, he's not sort of talking multiculturalism, because that idea would have been pretty foreign to him at the time, because there was not a lot of multiculturalism going on, at least in the way that we have it now.
Different kinds of souls would tend to deteriorate from an aristocracy, which he considered rule by the best, to a timocracy, rule by the honorable, right?
So you're going from the Noblest to the most courageous or the most soldiery This would probably be in the the Pinochet style, right?
To an oligarchy which is ruled by the few to a democracy which is ruled by the people and then finally to a tyranny ruled by a single tyrant and
We are of course in the late stages of democracy ruled by the people where there's so much chaos and so much predation upon the common public purse and so much kicking the can down the road and so much using the unborn as collateral with which to buy votes in the here and now that we either wise up or we're gonna go to that that last one on the list pretty damn quickly.
So I want to zoom in a little bit on Plato's critique of the later stages of democracy, which is kind of where we are.
So democracy is the rule of the people, and pure democracy is just majority rule.
And there's no moral limitation upon the enactment of the will of the people.
Insofar as if red-haired people are outnumbered by brown-haired people and brown-haired people say, let's put all the red-haired people to death, well, that's just the will of the majority.
If the will of the majority says, or the will of the People in the court say, let's put this guy to death.
Well, that guy gets put to death.
So that is democracy as a whole.
But the problem is, of course, democracy will give a certain amount of liberty.
to people.
And it's a funny thing about humanity that when we get freedom to, we quickly devolve into we want freedom from.
So when we have the freedom to trade, when we have the freedom to accumulate property, when we have the freedom to speak, then we gain wealth, we gain security.
And And because of what's known as the Pareto Principle or Price's Law, the square root of a number of people in any reasonable meritocracy produce half the value.
So if you've got a company of 10,000 people, 100 of them produce half the value, and of that 100, 10 produce half the value of that.
So you've got 10 people out of 10,000.1% producing a quarter of the entire value, which means they're going to get paid a lot.
So you get a lot of more rich people.
You do get a middle class and you get poor people.
And then when you get excessive wealth, people get very sentimental and say, well, we just take from the rich and we give to the poor.
And it destroys the very foundation that gave rise to the wealth to begin with.
So when you have freedom, then you gain wealth as a society.
When you gain wealth, you gain disparities of income.
That's the only way you can get wealth is by allowing the most productive people to gain the most resources, gain control of the most resources.
The farmer who can best use the land should be the farmer and will be the farmer who can afford to pay the most for the land, right?
Like if you can produce $50,000 per acre and your neighbor can only produce $25,000 per acre, you can bid more for that land.
And that's how land gets centralized in the ownership of the most productive people, thus making everybody happy because there's a huge amount of food.
But But of course the Marxists and the collectivists say, well that's bad, the only reason that they're rich is because they're stealing from the poor.
Not because they are geniuses of productivity, you know?
And it's funny because, you know, you don't see a great singer and say, well, she's only a great singer because she stole my sister's voice.
It's like, eh, it's just how you're born, you know?
A great songwriter, if someone writes a great song, they didn't, assuming it's not stolen, they didn't steal that song from someone else.
And so this fundamental misunderstanding about the source of wealth, that the source of wealth is a meritocracy, it's a free market, and the peculiar geniuses of productivity allow... the free market allows them to accumulate the most resources, which multiplies those resources for everyone, but it makes people
feel poor because they're looking at people who are more rich and the Marxists come along, the collectivists come along, the leftists, the socialists come along and say the rich are only rich because they've stolen from you and then they cause all this resentment and the poor then rise up against the rich and anyway so the more liberty men have the more they want and at some point you get this instead of freedom to do stuff you want freedom from consequences And, you know, if you didn't save and then you lose your job and you want the government to give you unemployment insurance.
And if you didn't buy health insurance and you get sick, then you want free health care.
And if you are a woman and you have a child or children with a man and then you drive that man off or he was a bad man to begin with and he buggers off, then you want money from the state.
You want welfare from the state.
In other words, you no longer want the freedom to do things.
You want freedom from consequences.
And those things are diametrically opposed.
So, legitimate authority collapses in an excess of freedom from consequences, which is tyranny of others, right?
I mean, how do you get freedom from consequences?
How do you get, let's say you're a single mom and you want money for your kids, how do you get that money?
Well, you run to the state and you cry crocodile tears, and then the state goes to productive men and women, but mostly men, and points guns at them and says, "Hand over your money," and then they buy the vote to the single mom by handing over that money, right?
So freedom from consequences is tyranny in general to the property of others.
So legitimate authority collapses in a mad orgy of debt-based vote buying, and then you get this hard-learned conservatism that comes sweeping back.
And in the late stages of the collapse of legitimate authority, Socrates says, subjects who are like rulers, and rulers who are like subjects.
And another quote, the master fears and flatters his scholars, and the scholars despise their master.
And here's a quote, the father grows accustomed to descend into the level, to the level of his sons and to fear them and the son is on a level with his father.
Legitimate authority, the wisdom that is hard won and accumulated through the ages, just falls apart.
And you can see this, right?
So like in Disney TV shows and other sort of shows aimed at kids, the parents are always kind of goofy and not smart and don't understand things, and the kids are always with it and hip and cool and know things and are smarter than their parents, so there's this inversion.
values and you can see this where the students rioting from the 60s onwards in universities and condemning their professors and tearing things down and Commercials right?
I mean, it's always the man particularly the white man who's goofy and dumb and silly and and so on and yeah You know, well, I mean the West was sort of built by white men, but hey, what do they know?
so this we can see this going on quite continually and So law and authority cease to function and a class of idle spendthrifts emerge who destroy the state.
So this is, sometimes it's the sons of single moms, sometimes it is just people who don't feel like working, sometimes you can look at, because there's less and less freedom economically speaking in late democracy and so The rewards that drove people's motivations in the past no longer really exist.
Taxation has become too high, regulation has become too claustrophobic, licensing is rampant and therefore it's not really worth going out and busting your ass a hundred hours a week to go build a business because it's all uphill.
And of course the businesses that were established before the rise of hyper-licensing and hyper-regulation and hyper-control of the economy have all accumulated their value and it's one of the reasons why established businesses love new regulations because it prevents new competition from coming along and displacing them So the rich and the established in the economic sense always have to fear the poor and the ambitious, right?
So if you're wealthy, you have a big house, you have a couple of cars, you have a whatever, right?
Then you have a certain amount of income requirements to maintain your lifestyle.
If you're poor, then you can live on very little, and therefore you can undercut the wealthy if you're ambitious.
So the wealthy always want to keep, in general, if they have the access to the power of the state, and the wealthy do, right?
I mean, everybody says the government should do this, and the government should do that, without remembering that the government isn't going to be listening to you, it's not going to be listening to me, it's going to be listening to its rich donor friends, and it's going to be running in fear of the sophists in the corporate media.
So the rich really love putting up barriers to entry to their businesses to the poor who can undercut them because the poor require less money and therefore can charge less for the goods that they produce.
So after these barriers get erected in the economy then a lot of young men in particular, I don't really want to work, they don't really want to become ambitious and reach for the gold and so on, because it's too hard, it's too problematic, it's too complicated, it's too messy, and it may in fact be generally impossible.
Now of course when you get the massive redistribution of wealth that occurs in the welfare state, and of course this is famously characterized by bread and circuses in the late stages of the Roman Empire, like what did they give The proletariat, the population as a whole, well they gave them free bread so that they didn't have to work and they gave them Well, circuses, right?
They gave them entertainments so that they were distracted and now it's fentanyl, marijuana and welfare state and all that.
And of course the cheapness of online entertainment has become pretty rampant in terms of hollowing out people's willingness to become ambitious and sort of fight for the growth and manifestation of their dreams and of course video games have hollowed out, it's given people Video games are to male ambition as porn is to the source of the family, right?
I mean, it gives you the illusion of something that it actually prevents from materializing.
So, a class of idle spendthrifts emerge who destroy the state, because once you have this class of people dependent upon state money, Then it becomes impossible for politicians to talk about the end of income redistribution, because they fear, well, revolution.
They fear massive amounts of social instability.
The power of the state always hangs by a thread.
It doesn't take a lot of people to disobey in order for the situation to be completely lost to any kind of rational control.
I mean, let me just look at the Rodney King riots in L.A.
I mean, it doesn't take very long or very much at all for this kind of stuff.
And particularly if it becomes multigenerational.
Like if the welfare state comes in and people get depended on and people say, well, that's really, really bad.
And then they pull it out five or ten years later.
That's difficult enough.
But when you've had two or three or more generations of people who've become dependent on the welfare state, all social capital is – well, most of the social capital, economic capital.
How do you get a job?
How do you keep a job?
How do you negotiate with bosses?
How do you deal with customers?
How do you – like all of that gets lost.
And it's really, really difficult.
So...
And generally what happens is when the government can't pay its bills it goes to war.
So that way it can get rid of the people who are dependent on it.
It's nasty but That's why sensible people argue against these kinds of programs to begin with.
So what happens in late democracy, this is again back to Plato's theory, there are three classes.
There are the drones who live on others, the orderly and wealthy class who are fed upon by the drones, right, so sort of the middle class, the upper middle class, the bourgeoisie and so on, the people who Get up and go to work and mow their lawns and raise their kids and so on, and they're fed upon by the drones.
And then there are the workers, whose leaders, and I quote, deprive the rich of their estates and distribute them among the people, at the same time taking care to reserve the larger part for themselves.
Right?
So that's very important, right?
And they saw this, right?
With the 30 tyrants, right?
They saw this after the end of the Peloponnesian War when Sparta won.
And we saw this of course in 1917 plus in Russia under the Communists that the wealthy had their estates taken away and distributed to the people.
And of course this is the welfare state, right?
And so the welfare state, in the welfare state, very little of the money actually gets to the poor.
A lot of it, most of it, is absorbed in the bureaucracy and all of that.
So yeah, it's pretty nasty.
So the rich strive to defend their assets as best they can in this predatory civil-civil war situation.
In response, the people, or the demos, find a populist champion for their greed.
and uh... you can think of this as hugo chavez right in in venezuela that uh... he comes up or or or uh... bernie sanders and someone so they come up and say well i'm gonna get your money back and i'm gonna all the unjust gains from these wealthy people and of course in a late democracy it becomes very difficult to figure out Whose wealth has been acquired in some free market fashion?
And the answer is, of course, almost none.
It's all kind of polluted by statism and controls and regulations.
But it's really tough to figure out.
So there's some wealthy person.
Now, maybe they became wealthy because they produced a valuable good and service and sacrificed their life and built a company and did the right thing and served their customers.
And yeah, they got wealthy, right?
Good for them.
But, of course, it's all clouded and polluted by all the people who use manipulative, sofist tricks controlling government power, a corporate kleptocracy, or, it's called crony capitalism, or crapitalism, which is, you know, well, I'm starting a consulting company to help influence government power by populating it with sofist-based lobbyist lifeforms, and I'm selling my services to corporations who wish to destroy any capacity for poor people to compete with them, and it's like, well, you can make a lot of money that way,
But it's not generated money, it is transferred money and transferred through the coercive power of the state.
So it becomes really tough.
And then what happens, of course, is that people, and this is more contemporary, of course, but people look at the wealth gained unjustly and immorally through the power of the state and access to that power of the state.
And they say, well, that's capital, that's the free market, that's capitalism.
And it's like, nope.
The moment a gun enters into the transaction, it's no longer capitalism, it's no longer the free market, it's no longer voluntary trade.
And seeing the gun in the room can be kind of shocking.
So once the people find a populist champion for their greed, then You see the last stages of democracy, and this is what you're seeing, of course, playing out in Venezuela.
And it also played out to some degree under Pinochet in Venezuela.
In Chile.
And I've done a whole show on that, so you can find out more about that.
Now this is one of the mistakes that is made in Plato, right?
So, one of the reasons that Plato dislikes private properties, he has this kind of theory.
He says, look, if we deny people private property, then people won't be so concerned with accumulating money for themselves.
What they'll do Is those ambitions for personal greed and personal enrichment will be turned to the general and common good, right?
So if everybody owns property, then the selfish greed that makes people want to increase their own property will be turned to wanting to increase the general property of the collective, of the state, of the city-state.
And yay, right?
That's good, according to Plato.
Now that's not true.
That's not what happens, of course, right?
I mean, what happens is Always the same and it's entirely predictable.
What happens is when people can no longer, and in this case we'll basically say, man, this is ancient Greece, right?
So when men can no longer manifest their ambition and their desire to dominate and their desire to win in the free market, which is a benevolent and positive way that men compete with each other.
I mean competing with each other on who can produce the best widget, who can lower the price of mousetraps the most, who can produce the most efficient, fast and responsive phone or anything.
That's a pretty benevolent way for men to compete with each other because it involves a minimum of clubs and poisonings and border crossings and so on, right, in terms of war.
So the male ambition to – testosterone ambition to dominate and to win and to compete and all of that, I mean it's subsumed to some degree in sports, although sports is often training ground and preparation for war.
But in the free market, men's ambitions are sublimated to serving the general good, serving the good of customers, right?
Now if you take that away, if you take the free market away, if you take the incentive of profit and private property away, men don't suddenly switch into these altruistic, anti-evolution, I-just-care-about-everyone-else's genes rather than my own.
What happens is the male drive to compete and to dominate gets transferred from the free market into politics.
and that is a very dangerous situation because then instead of being honest with customers instead of being upfront with the value of goods and so on they start to have to lie and pretend and there's all these handshakes and deals under the table there's a lot of backstabbing and none of the deals in a democracy can be Enforced in a court, right?
I mean, because they're usually not... They're either directly illegal or very much frowned upon, right?
So if you donate a bunch of money to a politician and then you ask for a meeting, there's no contract.
You don't have a contract to say, oh, I donated this amount of money.
So now I get to have this meeting.
So it becomes terrible.
I mean, terrible.
And of course, instead of providing value to customers in a voluntary situation, which is the free market environment, what they do is is they end up using the power of the state to transfer wealth from one section of the population to another while keeping a significant proportion of it for themselves, which causes a general decay in the wealth and motivations of society.
So it's just a fundamental error that, you know, could be considered somewhat important in that it literally has cost hundreds of millions of lives over the course of the world.
So the champion, right, so the rich are trying to defend their assets and then the people find a populist champion for their greed.
This champion, cheered on by the mob, becomes a tyrant.
Now, this is very interesting.
Well, I hope it's all very interesting, but I break it up the slide, what can I say?
Presentation 101, tell people when you're moving on to a new idea.
So one thing that's very interesting about the arc of Western civilization at the moment, particularly in America, is if you kind of look at the hedonistic swinging sixties with sex, drugs and rock and roll, that seemed to be about all the dissolution of rules and live and let live and they were all into free speech and so on, right?
Mostly because they wanted to speak out to defend the communist government in North Vietnam that they loved so much.
But anyway, topic for another time.
Move on.
But How did you go from this freewheeling anything-goes Woodstock stuff to the toilet-trained-at-gunpoint anal-retentive triggered fascism of the current crop of social justice warriors?
It's a kind of interesting question how that pendulum has swung from sort of free love To this censorious attack, can't say anything, everyone gets offended, claustrophobic social and sometimes legal tyranny of the current crop of leftists.
It's very interesting.
So Socrates had some useful stuff to say about this.
So here we go.
The ruin of oligarchy is the ruin of democracy.
The same disease magnified and intensified by liberty Over master's democracy.
The truth being that the excessive increase of anything often causes a reaction in the opposite direction.
And this is the case not only in the seasons, and in vegetables and animal life.
But above all, in forms of government.
It's true.
The excess of liberty, whether in states or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery.
Yes, the natural order, this is a dialogue, of course.
Socrates says, and so tyranny naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme form of liberty.
Right?
So again, it's important to recognize this liberty to freedom of speech freedom of trade freedom of movement and then there's liberty from liberty from negative consequences where you petition the state to take resources from other people and give them to you to sort of cover up bad decisions or whatever has happened right so this is sort of this pendulum swing is very very important when you have say for instance You have the rise of free love and you have the rise of, you know, ladies.
If you're not happy in your crushingly oppressive patriarchal marriage, then you should just run off, go live in a loft downtown and try and get some young sculptor to bang you every second Sunday.
Well, what happens?
Right?
What happens when, yeah, you can just go have sex with people, you don't need to worry about waiting until you're married, you don't need to worry about stability, well what happens is you end up with destroyed families, you end up with children growing up without fathers, and in general, the children who grow up without fathers Father absence is like an environmental toxin that really harms, greatly harms children.
Promiscuity is higher.
Addiction is higher.
Criminality is higher.
Dropping out of school is higher.
It is a terrible environmental toxin for there not to be a father around.
And so what happens is you say, okay, we want all this freedom.
We're going to go have sex.
We're going to leave our husbands.
We're going to break up families.
We're going to, you know, we get all these freedom from consequences.
But then what happens is, you need now a tyranny of income redistribution.
Because just because the parents want freedom, that doesn't mean that the kids don't need food anymore.
Right?
So a woman can say, well, I'm just gonna have sex, and I'm gonna get pregnant, and I'm not gonna have a husband to provide for me, and it's like, okay, well, the kids need to eat, and the kids need health care, and the kids need dental care, and the kids need education, and the kids need whatever, right?
So then the government has to go run around and gather resources at the point of the gun and hand it to the women because the women are like, how are my children going to eat?
So this excess of freedom leads to an increase in tyranny.
And that's what we're facing now.
So now, whereas before it was all this freedom, Now what's happened is anyone who's sort of anti-income redistribution, because it's immoral, it's an initiation of the use of force.
So anyone who's anti-income in redistribution is perceived as an existential threat to all the people who are dependent upon the state for their survival.
And then what happens is you get these hysterical mobs condemning and damning anyone who's against income redistribution, against socialism, against the welfare state.
And they get historical and they will use any means necessary to maintain the source of their income.
In other words, they perceive someone who's against the welfare state as the same as a farmer would perceive someone setting fire to all his crops and killing his livestock.
Because that's the source of his survival.
And the welfare state is perceived by many to be the source of their survival, and anyone who criticizes it.
This is where you get this hysterical control, right?
And these leftists who come out and de-platform people and punch people and so on, they're just basically sent out by their single moms to ensure that mommy's goodies keep rolling in.
So, yeah, as we might expect.
This is the response to what Socrates says.
Socrates says, and so tyranny naturally arises out of democracy and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme form of liberty.
As we might expect.
It's nothing new.
People are kind of shocked when I talk about this kind of stuff.
I mean, I don't mean to sound overly precocious, but I read Plato a long time ago.
This is not like, people are like, it's horrifying what that guy on the internet is saying.
It's like, you know, some of this isn't that new.
Some of this isn't that new.
It's horrifying, you see, what I say.
But Plato is an excellent introduction to philosophy, as always.
All right.
So, the laws.
Let's talk about the laws.
So the Laws is probably Plato's last work.
It's very long, it's very complex, and it is his most loathed work.
And let's sort of talk about why.
So it's a political conversation between three elderly men, an unnamed Athenian, a Spartan named Megillus, and a Cretan named Clinius.
These men work on creating a constitution for Magnesia, a new Cretan colony.
So, Magnesia is obviously an imaginary place.
So, whereas the Republic was Plato's ideal government.
Sorry, just threw up a little in my mouth.
What's my friend used to say about bile?
Oh, I've got to record this joke.
It was a good joke.
This is when I was a teenager.
You're not going to vomit right now, but if you were, this is what it would taste like.
So, the Republic was Plato's ideal state, and the laws is more how it would actually work in reality, in the existing world, with the existing frailties of human nature, and with an existing city-state, right?
So, it's the practical implementation aspect of, it's sort of like you can draw some fantastical bridge, let's say, and it can be the coolest thing.
It can levitate, it can be made of fog and polystyrene or whatever, right?
It can be the coolest thing.
And it's like, wow, that's a really cool bridge, right?
And it's like, hey, you know, we need you to actually build a bridge.
It's like, oh, okay, well, can't have it made out of fog, really can't have a lot of polystyrene, I have to take in gravity, I got to get tensile strength, I got to get balances, I got to get all this kind of stuff.
And I've got to build for longevity, so it's taking something out of the abstract and into the practical.
And that's the difference between the republic and the laws, right?
The republic is the theory and the laws would be the implementation.
So magnesia, of course, it's...
It's one constant, right?
It will have slaves and foreigners to carry out tasks forbidden to citizens, trading and menial labor, right?
And then this goes right back to why is there no Industrial Revolution?
in uh... the ancient greek world the ancient roman world well because i mean there's this aristocratic disdain for labor because labor is associated with the slave class right and uh... it's it's sort of like going to Noam Chomsky and saying hey would you like to work for Raoul as a gardener right although i kinda like Noam in a way except for his support for Chavez but anyway uh... so
You're not going to have an industrial revolution because slaves are carrying out the trade and the menial labor, right?
So you don't work to reduce the requirements for labor when you have bought a lot of slaves because it's going to reduce the value of your slaves, right?
That's the price of slavery.
The price of immorality is stagnation, right?
And decay, right?
So the price of owning slaves in the ancient world was no Industrial Revolution.
And the moral is the practical, as has been said by many people before me, and now including me.
So the question in Plato's The Laws is, what is a genuinely practical, although not ideal, form of government?
So Plato goes into a wide variety of empirical details of statecraft and you know as you can imagine it can be a little bit tedious and and so on but interesting nonetheless.
His goal is to create rules designed to meet any number of possible contingencies arising in the real world of human affairs.
So I wrote a book called Everyday Anarchy, which was, again, it's not ideal versus practical, but in my book Practical Anarchy, I'm talking about how a stateless society would meet a wide variety of challenges.
And it's not rules, it's solutions and so on.
So, this again is rubber meets the road, it's a real bridge in the real world.
And, to be honest, I mean, obviously read all of this stuff yourself, it's well worth it.
The laws is kind of an unnerving escalation of the totalitarian tendencies in Plato's earlier political theories.
Now, not all the laws in the laws are tyrannical, so Plato reminds us that, you know, absolute power corrupts absolutely, no person should be exempt from the rule of law, and so on.
But theories are all just like niceties.
You can design some tyrannical system...
And then just say, well, it's real freedom, right?
I mean, it's what the Marxists did, right?
So the proletariat control the means of production.
They do so through a violent revolution, which promotes a small oligarchy to be in control of the state and point the guns at anyone.
But then, whoo, magic!
What happens, you see, is the state withers away and you end up with a truly classless society.
And it's like, yeah, that last bit where human beings voluntarily give up the power they've become addicted to, I'd kind of like a little bit more explication of that, because that just seems like human beings are replaced by angels and society flourishes.
And it's like, no.
And it's funny, too, because if you recognize, as we all do, that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and then you want the government to do more and more, you've got to pick one.
Keep in your lane, people.
So now we're going to talk about the laws.
So we have two contrasting books from Plato.
One is the Republic, which is his political utopia, but the laws represents what Plato considers an actually attainable society, again, given all the defects and irrationalities of human nature that he'd absorbed throughout his life.
So in the Republic, the ideal society, Kallipolis, is a utopia.
Like Thomas More's Utopia or Galt's Gulch.
So there's not a whole lot of point fleshing out the true details of the customs and the laws and the Constitution and so on.
However, since Plato considers the society and the laws, Magnesia, to be achievable, these details are well worth discussing.
And boy does he ever.
So the city has 5,040 households.
Why?
5,040 households, you ask?
Because 5,000 would just be crazy.
Well, the reason is, this is the Athenians, assists on this number, 5,040 households, because it is divisible by any number from 1 to 12, except 11, which is very convenient for administration.
So, that's why.
Each household in Magnesia is allotted two plots of land.
So, one is near the city center and one is further away.
Now these plots of land cannot be transferred from the holder's family, right?
So you can't buy and sell them, which means no improvements in agriculture.
It means if you're just a crappy farmer, you just hang on to this land.
If you're an excellent farmer, you don't gain any more land, which means no improvements.
The intention of the laws is to prevent citizens from becoming wealthy at the expense of other citizens.
And there is this desperate terror of an income gap.
Even though people are generally getting wealthier in the free market.
Like the wages of workers in the Industrial Revolution went up enormously against all the predictions of course of scientific Marxism.
But just because you have two or three or four times the income of your father, if someone else has a hundred times your income, you still feel poor.
You still feel envious.
It's just how quickly you adjust to good fortune is one of the fundamental truths of human nature, right?
I won the lottery!
I'm thrilled!
And then like three weeks later it's like, I'm bored.
I'm discontented.
Everybody wants something from me for my money.
I don't know what I'm going to get and what I'm going to drink.
How quickly we adjust to good fortune and recalibrate ourself.
I have no particular problem with that.
I think it's actually kind of why we have a civilization.
Right?
So as soon as somebody figured out how to make a fire, it's like, oh, this is fantastic!
Now we don't have to freeze to death every night.
And we have something to cook our food on and we don't have to wait for lightning to strike a dry trunk, which never happens because it's raining.
So if we had not adjusted to that and say, okay, what's next?
Like what's next?
Right?
Like, like the old line from, uh, was it Josh Wyman in, um, The West Wing, where they say, or the woman says, why do you want to go to Mars?
It's like, well, that's what's next.
We're going to the moon.
This is what, like, you always got to aim for more.
Because if people had said, oh, you know, this fire is great, we'll never need to invent anything else again, because this is perfect.
You, you, you get things better.
And then you, wow, like, you remember your first touchscreen phone, you're like, this is amazing, right?
And now, if you had to use it again, you'd be like, this thing is crap.
Oh, gosh, so sorry for so many ancient pop culture references, but This is the Steve Martin joke about the stereo.
You know, I bought a stereo.
It sucks.
And then I bought a quad speaker.
It sucks.
And then Google Plonics, the infinite speakers, it sucks.
Maybe it's the needle.
I mean, it's funny stuff because we have improvements and then we get dissatisfied.
And we have improvements and we get dissatisfied.
So that's an inevitable part of human nature.
So when you have a free market, you get some very, very wealthy people.
And you get a big middle class, which is the stable place where the poor can reach.
And there's a big cycle in the free market.
It doesn't harden into aristocratic lineage classes.
And Dr. Thomas Sowell has written about this, S-O-W-E-L-L.
It's a great work on this, just talking about how much churn there is.
I mean, it's not like sedimentary layers in a free market.
The classes, it's like a washing machine, just rolling around up and down.
They call it shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations, right?
First guy works You know, Nick Cage in Moonstruck style of shirt sleeves and then his kids do really well and they got a collar and then their kids do badly again.
And we know this because IQ cycles up and down and wealth is very closely associated to IQ, though not exclusively of course.
And so what happens is in a free market some people get really really rich and there's poor people and if the poor people get the explanation which is, hey man those guys are super smart like it's Not their reward, I mean it's just a lot of it is accidental IQ is just kind of like rolling the dice.
It's super smart, they work very very hard, but they benefit you and here's how and here's why, right?
Like you'd rather be poor in 21st century America than wealthy in 19th century France.
I mean there's no question of that, right?
So, yeah, they're inventing the computers, they're inventing the cell phones, they're inventing the air conditioners, they're inventing antibiotics and radiation treatments and so on.
And so, you know, those people are rich and also their lives kind of suck because the only way you become super rich is generally by ignoring your family and traveling all the time and working like an insane banshee who can't leave the scene of the crime.
So if you can explain this to poor people and say, listen, the fact that they're rich is totally benefiting you and it's not like they have much better lives, IQ is not specifically associated happiness, neither is wealth in many ways, outside of a bare minimum.
And so, you know, let them have their money because letting them have their money means that you get all this cool stuff and so on, right?
So you can make that case and people can understand that.
Or, you know, the big, the wedge that's hammered in by the leftists.
The collectivist that drives apart society and fragments it and sometimes shatters it completely is when you have a free market and people become wealthy and you get this middle class where there's some people who remain poor and a lot of that has to do with just not working.
I've got a presentation called The Truth About Poverty wherein I sort of point out that, you know, poor people with two adult members in the household combined work an average of 15 hours a week.
Like, it's not!
Not a huge amount of work.
And so, and that's a choice.
I respect that choice.
If people don't want to work and don't want to become wealthy, I think that's perfectly fine.
I mean, there's lots to be said about that.
And so, you know, monks, they obviously have eschewed wealth in terms of spiritual, in preference.
for spiritual contemplation.
I don't know.
I'm with Socrates.
I don't know how everyone should live.
I know that they shouldn't use force and so on, but I don't know how everyone should live.
I don't know what the price of wheat should be next week, and I don't know how bridges should be built, which is why I'm kind of a big fan of freedom, because I have the humility to not think that anyone, myself least of all, knows how everyone else should live and what they should do with their energy, time, resources, anyway, so you get all of that.
So the leftists come in when there's this wage, sorry, this income gap, right, when there's a big gap between the rich and the poor, the leftists come in and say, well, they're rich, you see, only because they've stolen from you, they've exploited you.
And then they start to whisper all of this nasty stuff into the ears of the poor.
That's destroying the happiness of the poor and destabilizing society.
It is really, really terrible stuff.
Really terrible stuff.
And people are very susceptible to this kind of sophistry.
And sometimes it's because the sophistry is really good and so on.
And other times, though, it's because, you know, sometimes the poor can be lazy.
And sometimes the rich can be lazy too.
Don't get me wrong.
I'm not equating wealth with virtue, but if the poor just don't really feel like working that much, and of course statistically on average they don't, and someone comes along and says, I'll get some free money for you, just sign up for this hammer and sickle parade, right?
It's like, yeah, that's a lot easier than going to get a job.
So there is that aspect as well.
So Plato recognizes the danger of income disparities, right?
Of having super rich and super poor or super rich and somewhat poor.
And I think that's because deep down, maybe this is his experience watching Socrates be sophisted into death.
He says, look, I mean, I'm speculating here.
I don't know, right?
But it could be something like this.
We can't defend against the sophistry of provoking class resentment, right?
We can't.
We can't.
And so, given that if we end up with wealthy and poor people, the sophists are going to come in and rile up the poor to attack the rich and we're going to lose everything.
Because, you know, the poor outnumber the wealthy, of course, right?
At least they used to.
Then for a while there was this big middle class, but the middle class is being hollowed out now as the government gets more and more powerful, which is, again, what you would expect.
So Plato could be looking at society and saying, look, as soon as you get this void, in a sense, this gap between the rich and the poor, the sophists rush in, they provoke the poor by saying that the wealthy stole from them, the poor then try and grab the property of the rich, the rich defend themselves, try and put down the poor, the poor rush to
some semi-fascistic warlord to take over and represent their interests and you end up with a tyranny and everyone starves to death and it's disgusting and horrible and wretched and right so he's going to say look we can't we can't have this gap between rich and poor because it's a vacuum into which righteousness offers to destroy the society so the whole city in the laws right this magnesia is designed to prevent citizens from becoming either extremely wealthy or extremely poor right so you go back to well you got these plots of land you can't sell them
They're stuck with the family.
So what that means is you're not going to get someone who's so good at agriculture.
that they're gonna buy up half the land around the uh... the city and become super wealthy because then when they buy up all this land they give up some money to the poor and what do the poor do?
Well I mean some of them will invest it wisely and and so on but some of them will just you know what that old line about oh yeah yeah I inherited a million dollars what happened to it?
Well ninety percent of it I spent on wine women and song and the other half, the other ten percent I just frittered away Right, so sometimes that will happen.
So the rich will take over, or the competent will take over, the very productive will take over the land, and they'll buy it from the poor.
And then the poor will fritter that money away sometimes, often.
I mean, when was the last time you heard of a rich entrepreneur who got his start from the lottery?
Doesn't really happen, right?
So the poor then get displaced, they get kicked off their land.
Well, not kicked off, their land gets bought, but then maybe they fritter the money away and then they're really poor.
So you've got greater wealth, got greater poverty, and then the sophists come in and start riling up the poor for revolution, right?
Because then when the poor, everybody hopes that the poor is going to choose them to be their Genghis Khan, so to speak.
Genghis can't have a civilization.
So he's like, okay, forget that.
Forget this accumulation of wealth.
Forget this buying and selling of land.
If the poor always have their land, they're never going to be super poor.
And the really competent can have a little bit more money, maybe, because they're better at farming, but they're not going to be able to buy everyone else out, right?
But of course, you know, the buying out of land and the displacement of the poor was one of the foundational drivers behind the Industrial Revolution, right?
The enclosure movement in, well, Western Europe, particularly the UK, England.
The land was allowed to sort of be bought up and centralized because it had been so subdivided that it became impossible to farm efficiently.
So people bought up the land, it displaced the local population, the local population went to the cities where they provided a pool of people who could be hired by capitalists as workers in the urban environment and boom bingo bango bongo you get the Industrial Revolution.
Again, it's really, really hard to predict what's going to happen in the future, which is why we have to act on principle, not consequences.
So yeah, I'm sorry for this long bit, but it's really, really important to understand there's this great terror of a gap between rich and poor.
A great terror of a gap between rich and poor, because it's such fertile ground for revolution and sophistry and lies.
So there are four property classes based upon the family wealth accumulated before coming to Magnesia.
And again, a lot of this has to do with implicit intelligence tests or IQ tests, right?
Because in general, IQ is associated with income.
So it's kind of like a proxy intelligence test.
Now the land is not going to be farmed in common but it is a part of the common property and shareholders have to make public contributions so it's not full communism with regards to the land but the land is part of the common property you have to make public contributions so it's sort of like a massive property tax on everything that you produce and it's interesting because
Earlier, with his, you know, no private property and sort of full-on communism, now, and this is sort of similar to what happened under Lenin in the 1920s, because, you know, the communists came in in 1917 and almost immediately destroyed the economy of Russia.
Collectivization and all this just disaster of food production stopped.
Farmers were accused of hoarding and they were dragged out and killed.
And it was just a complete nightmare.
So then what happened was, and you can see this happening in China, starting from, what, the 90s onwards.
I remember being in China in 1999 for business, going down to the local market and haggling by punching numbers into calculators.
It was really kind of fascinating to think of what had been one of the greatest nightmarish regimes in human history.
In fact, by body count, the greatest and most nightmarish regime in human history was communism.
And Mao and others, which killed, what is it, 60 million people?
Like just like World War II and a half, just slaughtering their own people from end to end of a great country.
And so that went from complete communist control of property to allowing for some private entrepreneurial initiatives, right?
So that happened in China and it happened in Russia in the 1920s.
It was called the New Economic Policy or NEP and the people who did it were called netmen.
Where there was some incentive, some profit motives allowed and so on, and that was because everybody was just starving to death and the whole society was going to collapse.
So Plato kind of went the same route, right?
In the Republic it's like communism, like full-on state control of just about anything.
Maybe you can't even own your own toothbrush or something like that.
And now what he's moved towards, which is what Russia moved towards, briefly, and what China moved towards in a more consistent manner, is saying, okay, private ownership but public control.
Right.
So, under communism, there's public control and public ownership, right?
The government owns everything and the government controls everything.
In another economic system, there's nominal private control, but there's, there's not, sorry, well, private ownership, but public control.
and that means so you're allowed to keep the factory but the government tells you what to produce and how much to produce and it might tell you how much to to charge for you the goods that you produce and and it may tell you how to treat your workers and all this kind of stuff right so you have nominal private control but you have public dictatorship over the means of production and that that's fascism communism is public control and public ownership
And fascism is nominal private control, but public control as a whole.
And this can occur either explicitly, insofar as the government tells you what to produce, how much to produce, what to sell it for, where to ship it to, and so on, but you're allowed to keep some profits if you can.
Or it can occur more implicitly, in that the government just buys a whole bunch of stuff from businesses, and therefore is taking money from taxpayers, giving it to businesses,
uh... and the businesses get to keep the profits but they're still their production is largely dictated by the quote generosity of the state so like a lot of systems it goes from uh... you know democracy to communist tyranny to fascism because you have to have some profit motive some incentive some nominal private ownership for people to bother getting out of bed like that old joke of the soviet union that they
They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.
So yeah, that's important.
So women are forbidden from owning property in Plato's practically ideal society, but are considered citizens and can hold political office.
Women are able to enter the military as soldiers and can attend their own private common meals.
Two rights usually reserved for male citizens in ancient Greece.
Plato was somewhat more friendly to women than Aristotle and that's an important weakness of Aristotle to put it mildly.
And, you know, let me do a tiny aside.
I promise this will be real quick, but it's just come up so often that there's some people who think that, well, you know, just take away women's voting rights and everything will be fine.
And this, I don't agree, but this system, this whole situation, this tyranny was all emerging when women didn't really have any capacity to participate much in politics at all.
So it's not the solution you're looking for.
Now, let's talk about aesthetics.
Absolutely fascinating.
So, Plato, of course, a very strong artistic genius, but his views on aesthetics, on art, highly ambivalent.
So, you know, he's got the usual positive language associated with things he wants to prove, thus thinking he's proven something.
Aesthetically appealing objects should incorporate proportion, harmony, and unity among their parts.
Like, let's say you're going bald.
Is it better to have the round Charlie Brown bowling ball head or some Mutant elephant man head.
Well, proportion, I suppose, is better.
And with faces, right?
I mean, if you have a proportionate face and it's equal between left and right, it's considered more attractive because it does also indicate good genes as well.
So yeah, proportion, harmony, and unity among their parts.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But he had a real love-hate relationship with the arts.
He had been, of course, a poet in his youth and remained a wonderful literary stylist, a great storyteller.
I mean, this is what he wrote down.
Can you imagine how great it would be to have Plato tell you a story?
I mean, it would be fantastic.
But, and I think we can all understand this, Plato found the arts threatening because the arts have such incredible power to shape character.
The arts substitute a moral empiricism for reality that shapes people's moral character In a ferocious kind of way.
And so, again, sort of going back to all the kids' movies where there's the evil developer who wants to displace the woodland animals, well, that gives you a negative view of capitalism.
It's not an argument.
It gives you a negative view of capitalism and of development, and it gives you a sort of hysterically sentimental view of nature, which, you know, I love nature, but you've got to keep that witch chain down, because nature will kill you as soon as it looks at you if she's not pretty tightly controlled.
And that's kind of important, right?
I was just reading about A town way, way, way in the north.
I think up around the Arctic Circle, if not right on the North Pole.
It's like 1,100 people out there and a lot of kids.
And the kids are out there playing street hockey at 2 o'clock in the morning and there's a polar bear roaming around.
And they used to bang stuff and sent off rifles to scare the bears away, but that works less and less.
Of course, bears are smart and will learn quickly.
So they had to go and shoot the bear.
And then they got in big trouble because bears are protected.
And it's like, yeah, you know, it's one thing to write about how cute polar bears are when you're sitting in a comfortable office somewhere in a city thousands of miles away.
It's quite another thing when you have a bear roaming the neighborhood, you know, ripping the heads off your children.
You know, it's easy to be sentimental about nature when you've already got nature under control.
And again, we should take care of the environment and all of that.
But that's... Art is very, very powerful.
Art is very powerful.
So if you want...
to generate sympathy for the poor it's easy to do as an artist right all you do is you relentlessly portray the poor as noble and struggling and heroic and brave and sacrificing and all this kind of stuff
And the rich are like Mr. Creosote, fat cats with monocles who grease their hair and laugh hysterically and love to spoil the environment and you make the poor are pretty people, grimy but pretty, and the rich are snarky, nasty, right, mean people and so on, right?
And that's, you know, I mean this is Jack and whoever the The guy is that the topless Wanda kept parading around with in Titanic.
That is, um, that's how you do it.
You just relentlessly portray the poor, or single moms, like they're heroic and they're struggling and they're brave and they're always wonderful mothers and they just, you know, this is how you do it, right?
And then that has incredible impact on people.
Like when I provide the facts about single motherhood to people, people lose their minds.
Why?
Because it goes against the propagandized narrative that they've been fed, right?
And again, there are some great single moms, but statistically on average, right, it's not great in terms of outcome and parenting.
So, everyone likes to think they have an identity, and you've reasoned things through and you've thought things through and you've come to rational conclusions and moral conclusions and so on, but, you know, the vast majority of people have just been programmed and propagandized by ideologues who are great writers, who have an agenda to control your moral center in order to exploit you for resources.
That's the reality of the world.
So nobody likes to look inside and say that I'm an empty-headed cathedral built on the theology of leftist radicalism.
I mean, nobody wants to look at it and say, I don't have my own identity, I'm just kind of an NPC programmed by people through art.
So they react very strongly to people who bring the truth and pierce through the veil of artistic manipulation that has been, sadly, our birthright for many, many, many years.
So yeah, he loved the arts, but at the same time, The arts can be terrifying because it's very hard it's very hard to argue against art.
I mean I guess you can make your own art which I know some people are trying to do but unfortunately it's pretty pretty hard to peer through that stuff and so that's that's pretty important stuff.
So Plato when he was talking about the ideal society To both train and protect ideal citizens for an ideal society, Plato argued that the arts must be strictly controlled.
And this is what totalitarian societies always do, is they control the arts, right?
So poets, playwrights and musicians must be excluded from Plato's ideal republic, or severely censored in what they can produce.
Once again, very, very important.
What's that old Bruce Hornsby song?
Well, they passed a law in 64 to give those who ain't got a little more, but it only goes so far.
And, you know, these kinds of songs, that's just the way it is, don't you believe them?
Well, they passed a law in 64 to give those who ain't got a little more, but it only goes so far.
That's not an economic argument, and it doesn't have anything to do with the ethics of coercive income redistribution.
But it's a pretty catchy tune.
And then he joined the Grateful Dead, I think, for a while.
Anyway.
So one of the reasons Plato didn't like art was he viewed reality as a copy of the forms, and art was a copy of reality.
Right?
So art is just an imitation of the objects and events of our ordinary lives, and our ordinary lives are just a copy of the ideal forms, right?
So art is a copy of a copy, and our sense life is degraded from the forms, and art is degraded from our sense life, so it can't be like me saying, well, I can give you the original painting, or I can photocopy it 50 times, or, you know, photocopy and photocopy of the photocopy of the photocopy, and you're like, well, no thanks, I'll just take the original painting rather than whatever hellacious forehead-banging smudge fest you're gonna extract from multiple photocopies of photocopies.
So art for Plato is even more of an illusion than our everyday experience and thus it's very best Plato would consider or Plato does consider art mere entertainment and at its worst it's a dangerous and distracting delusion so it has to be strictly controlled.
And again this comes back to Aristophanes wrote a pretty harsh comedy called The Clouds with Socrates as its main character and that had a huge impact on Socrates' reputation.
Now, Aristophanes did not engage with Socrates in conversation.
He just wrote a play that mocked and attacked Socrates.
And what could Socrates do?
I mean, was he supposed to write a play mocking and attacking Aristophanes?
I mean, it's really, really hard to pierce through the veil of artistic license.
And, in general, the corporate media these days is exercising artistic license when they describe anyone who opposes their agenda.
It's really hard to pierce entertaining lies with mere empirical truth.
So, the Symposium and the Phaedrus.
So Plato introduces a theory of eros, or love, which is long since known as platonic love, which is love of the ideal person or a love without sexual consummation or romantic intent or interest like that.
Now, I'm gonna just throw something out here.
It's probably nonsense, but I would be remiss.
I want to be honest with you guys about everything I've thought about in this topic.
In the gay culture, youth and beauty, of course, are very high coins of the realm, so to speak.
And so as Plato aged and became infirm and obviously less fit and so on.
He was very fit as a young man, being a very broad-shouldered wrestler and athlete.
So the idea that as he ages, he starts saying, well, what's really, really important is the quality of character rather than physical beauty and sexuality and so on.
Yeah, well, you know, it's not too shocking.
So in the heterosexual life, right, you get married, if you get married, you have kids, if you have kids, and what happens is you age.
Right?
You age and you become less attractive but it doesn't really matter as much because you've got continuity with your wife, you've been together for, I've been married close to 20 years now, so you've got continuity with your wife, you've got the love of your children, they're having children, you have companionship, you have a whole tribe around you that loves you and cares for you and so on, right?
But if you're gay, And you focus on sensuality or sexuality in your youth and you don't have kids and you don't get married.
What happens is you're going to end up kind of lonely in your old age, right?
Because you just, you don't have that long drawn-out companionship that can't be replaced by anyone else.
You don't have kids.
They don't have grandkids.
You don't have a group or tribe when you're old.
So the idea that you would introduce some idea of platonic love is not too, too shocking.
And this is not an argument.
Understand, this is not, this makes it true or false.
It's just interesting to me in terms of motivation.
So although Plato promoted the image of two lovers being each other's joint halves, he actually viewed physical or sexual contact between lovers as degraded and wasteful forms of intimate expression.
So it's not too uncommon for people who have this ultra-purest, abstract, idealized version of the truth To view, you know, messy, sexual, earthy, mammalian biology and rutting, so to speak, as icky.
As, I guess you could say, infused with ooeyness.
And that's one of the things that kind of happens and not too shocking, right?
And because for heterosexual people, sex, Makes children, right?
So the idea that it's degraded and wasteful, it's like, well, that's why we're all here.
It's why we draw breath.
It's why we have a world and a culture and a civilization.
So saying that sexuality is just sort of degraded and wasteful when it produces children is kind of hard to sustain.
But of course, in the gay community back then at the time, there was no gay marriage and there was no gay adoption, of course.
And so back then, it's easier to see how he could come to that.
Now the power of erotic love must be channeled, according to Plato, into higher pursuits, right?
The goal and the end goal of all of this is knowledge of the form of beauty.
Or people would be doomed to lives of frustration, sadly squandering the potential power of love by limiting themselves to the mere pleasures of physical beauty and sexuality.
Now, again, If your sexuality does not produce children and pair-bond you with a wife or a husband and so on, then, yeah, I can kind of understand that.
And also, just remember, as an aging gay man, Plato would have been passed up for the physical attractiveness of younger, well-oiled, often nude athletes in the Greek tradition, so the idea that he would then say, well, you know, physical beauty and sexuality is a degraded blah blah blah blah blah, You know, again, there's some motivation.
But again, it's not an argument.
On a somewhat unrelated note, Plato's also responsible for the myth of Atlantis, which shows up first in the Timaeus.
So, math and science!
Ooh, I hate this home stretch of the presentation because I've enjoyed it so much.
So, Plato's influence had been very strong in mathematics and the sciences.
It's a bit of a stretch, but basically Plato is why you had to learn geometry in junior high school.
Now Plato didn't make any significant contributions to mathematics himself, but he believed that mathematics provides the finest training for the rational mind.
And again, as an idealist, he's going to be drawn to the abstract and pure world of numbers.
So that seems to make sense.
Over the door of his academy was written, let no one unversed in geometry enter here.
Plato espoused the idea of proof, insisting on accurate definitions and clear hypotheses in mathematics, and this approach laid the foundations for the more systematic approaches to mathematics of Euclid, which was around 300 BC, a century or so after the murder of Socrates.
So, with regards to physics, In the universe, Plato believed that the stars, the planets, the Sun and the Moon all moved around Earth in a series of crystalline spheres.
The sphere of the Moon was closest to the Earth, of course, then the sphere of the Sun, then Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn.
They didn't know about the further planets.
The sphere of the stars was the furthest away.
So of course, it's so funny, it's so strange to me.
So you don't say that Plato is an excellent introduction to astronomy.
Why?
Because he's wrong!
There's no spheres and no crystalline blah blah blah, right?
He's completely and totally wrong, got everything wrong about the placement and nature and physics of the solar system or the universe as a whole, right?
He's totally... So why would you say Well, Plato is an excellent introduction to science.
Plato is an excellent introduction to astronomy and physics and so on.
You wouldn't say that because he's wrong.
But there's more evidence for his perspective on the solar system and the stars than there is for the world of the forms.
At least they knew that the moon was closer to the earth than Saturn, right?
So there's true elements within what he says based upon the measurements of the planets, right?
So he's more accurate in his astronomy than he is in his metaphysics.
He's more accurate in his astronomy than he is in his epistemology, in his study of knowledge.
There's more evidence for these crystalline spheres than there is for the world of the forms!
But nobody would say, well, if you really want to learn about the solar system, first place to start is Plato.
Because he's wrong!
But people still say that this tyrant-loving, incest-provoking, substituting, lottery-rape-for-marriage tyrant is somehow a great introduction to philosophy, even though his most essential theory of forms Not only has never been proven, but can never be proven.
He's utterly, completely, and totally wrong by any rational and empirical definition.
But it's a great introduction to philosophy.
He also accepted that the moon shines by reflected sunlight, so... He got that one right!
Yay, Plato!
Alright, shall I do conclusions?
I mean, okay, I'll do a couple of conclusions.
All right, so let's start charitably, and we may not end up quite so charitably, but the charitable and I think somewhat valid explanation as to the source of Plato's tyrannical nature is that the man was shaped by a story of heartbreak, and the heartbreak of course was the murder of his beloved mentor Socrates by the mob.
So his work is written under the shadow of threat, under the shadow of Murder and he did face extraordinary dangers for his Philosophical pursuits particularly of course when he involved himself in the world of politics So When you look at the mob and say, well it's you or me brother, you know, either the mob rises up and kills the philosophers or the philosophers use sophistry to control the mob.
You can't reason with the mob according to Socrates and therefore you just have to lie to them.
And this is called the source of the noble lie, which is you lie to people about society and about their natures and that they're divided into the three categories of gold, silver and bronze.
You lie to people But it's a noble lie, because it restrains their violence and their self-destructive tendencies, and it keeps them under control, right?
Like, you lie to people the same way that some people lie to kids.
And, like, I remember when I was a kid, I was told I had to brush my teeth, otherwise sugar fairies would dance on the enamel at night and break through with their Michael Flatley-style bouncing nutsack footsteps.
And so I brushed my teeth.
It was a noble lie, because at least it got kids to brush their teeth, right?
He saw his beloved mentor murdered by the mob, he was not able to reason with the mob, and therefore he's like, well, I gotta be in charge and I gotta control you because it's you or me.
And that's a challenge.
Now one of the reasons he couldn't reason with the mob was because of the theory of forms, right?
This ideal abstract universe of blah blah blah, right?
Truth is falsehood, falsehood is truth, anti-empiricism is empiricism, and so on.
So you can't talk about that with people, you can't reason with them, you can't show them evidence of it.
And so if the ultimate good and the ultimate truth is beyond Explication.
You can't talk about it with people.
Of course you've got to dictate and dominate them.
Of course, right?
It's sort of like if you can't explain to your kids why running into the road is dangerous, you've just got to hold their hand.
You've got to build a fence around your yard.
You don't want to end up as a player in some movie about pet cemetery, right?
That is important.
Now, I don't know if his fear of the mob led to the forms, or if the forms led to the fear of the mob, or it was all wrapped up in the death of Socrates, but that's one of the reasons why.
Now, the forms is a false hypothesis.
It is a false conjecture.
And we know this by its very definition, its very nature.
It is cheating!
To the nth degree, to invent a realm where anti-rationality equals rationality, where anti-empiricism equals empiricism, where contradiction equals consistency, that is cheating.
I mean, and we wouldn't accept that in any rational universe, right?
Let's say that someone borrows $500 from you.
and then they don't pay you back and you say hey man you owe me 500 bucks and you pay me back he's like no no no I paid you back but in another universe in another universe this debt is perfectly settled and that's the higher universe and that's the more pure universe so stop bothering me for your money it's like no you've not paid my debt you've just invented a realm where the debt is paid and say that your debt is paid that's not reality that's not that's not that's not even sane fundamentally so inventing an alternative universe
Where error equals accuracy, where falsehood equals truth, where non-existence equals ultimate existence, is cheating.
It's not philosophy.
It's not philosophy at all.
And we would never accept these, oh, mathematics, mathematics, mathematics, right?
You go to Plato and you say two and two make five, he's gonna say you're wrong.
You say, no, no, no, in the realm of forms!
Two and two make five.
He's like, well no, my forms disagree with your forms and because we can't negotiate, what happens?
One of us has to submit to each other.
Like we can handshake in rationality and in reality.
Empirical reality and reason allows us to negotiate.
With a third party called reason and evidence that we are all going to submit our judgment to, right?
In an ideal sense, that's how science works, right?
The empirical test determines whose hypotheses and conjectures turn out to be accepted or valid, at least conditionally based upon new evidence.
So in terms of human disputes, how are we going to resolve human disputes?
Well, philosophy, rational philosophy says that we resolve human disputes according to reason and evidence.
But the world of Plato and this psychotic schizophrenic dissociated world of forms says, well, we can't negotiate because the forms are intuitive.
So the only way that we're going to resolve human disputes is through tyranny.
I'm in charge, you obey, or we kill you.
Irrationality or anti-rationality turns the free market into the mafia.
Comply or die.
And that's basically the law.
That's the role of the state.
Comply or die.
So the fact that he has these forms and that it results in tyranny is entirely predictable.
And it shows the consistency that Plato had with the insanity of his metaphysics.
Now, higher reason is a cop-out.
Higher truth, truth with a capital T, it's a complete cop-out.
And it's a will-to-power scenario.
And it's terrible.
It's terrible.
And we can see these collectives all over the place at the moment.
The rich.
Right?
The race.
The white privilege.
All of these collective concepts that are considered more important than the individual and are used to dominate and bully.
Like we can handshake in reality.
But if you have an anti-rational metaphysics, and reality is higher truth, blah blah blah, you can't negotiate.
You can't reason with each other.
So it's like pushing two pieces of paper together, like one has to go on top and one has to go on the bottom.
That's about it.
One has to dominate, one has to submit.
That's what the price of anti-rationality is, is brutality, tyranny, violence, threats, and domination.
Which is why post-modernism has given birth to feral leftism that relies on violence instead of argument.
Because once you attack reason, once you undermine reason, what are you left with?
The fist.
That's all that's left.
The only way to negotiate in the absence of reason is the fist, which is why Plato's ideal societies and even his practical societies are That's what O'Brien says to Winston Smith in 1984.
Imagine a boot stamping on the human face forever.
That's Plato's world.
And the idea that this is some great introduction to philosophy is terrifying.
It's terrifying.
Now, the defense of slavery is something worth touching on as well.
Think of the number of technological things.
Sorry, that's a really, really bad way of putting it.
Imagine the number of machines that are facilitating this conversation, or me talking to you, right?
I mean, we've got the microphone, we've got the computer, we've got a camera, we've got the network lines, data lines, the computer servers, the YouTube, whoever, right?
And then you can see... There's a huge amount of machinery.
A friend of mine was driving me to an airport when I was away a while back ago.
And, you know, sort of like, yeah, well, if suppression online continues, this is how I'm going to have to do my podcast is just accept rides from people and give them a live podcast in their car by person.
Right.
Or I used to sometimes think about the distribution of what it is that I do and how it would have been done in the past.
In the past, I wrote a long poem about the mind-body dichotomy, an epic poem about the mind-body dichotomy, and I recorded it on a cassette tape and sent it to a friend.
This is back when I was working up north.
So can you imagine if you wanted my podcast I'd have to send you a crate the size of half a truck full of cassette tapes.
You'd have to find them and play them and oh, I mean, it would be insane.
It would be thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars as opposed to you can just, you know, click and, right?
And if you want to help out, listen, freedomainradio.com forward slash donate.
This is the culmination of 35 years of philosophy.
So it's really concentrated and I hope that you find value in it.
And please, please help me out to continue this work.
There's so many other things I would like to do.
This is my favorite stuff of all.
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So think of the amount of automation and machinery that facilitates this conversation.
And it is a conversation.
Like, I will check the comments.
I will look and I will respond.
If people got good arguments or want to correct me on stuff, I'll engage for sure.
I'm not going to pretend this is all absolutely perfect.
It's what happens when you don't script, but I like the spontaneity of speaking off the cuff for the most part.
So Plato relied upon slaves.
That was his perception, right?
How do you have the academy?
Well, you have the academy because you have people doing the work for you.
It's sort of like the CEOs in the West now believe that they need all of this H-1B visa labor and labor coming in from overseas and so on, when they don't.
Of course they don't.
I mean, there's plenty of domestic people who can do the work and also they'll just end up automating that which they don't hire for, right?
Automate.
Ah, well, you know, without the illegal immigrants there won't be anyone to pick crops.
It's nonsense.
Complete nonsense.
They just automate.
I mean, you can automate the picking of grapes.
They already have automated the picking of strawberries and grapes and other things.
So it's sort of like saying, well, without slaves, who's going to pick the cotton?
It's like, well, it turns out they got some pretty cool ways to get cotton picked without slaves.
So because Plato believed that philosophy was dependent upon slavery, that without slavery there would not be any excess wealth to subsidize philosophy.
He can't get to universality in his ethics, neither could Aristotle, because Aristotle was all... well, if you're a citizen, right?
Because Aristotle was... totally justified slavery, right?
He said slaves are the possession of the family and property of the Master or the family, slavery is natural, said Aristotle, and beneficial to both the slave and the master, and so on.
But they couldn't get to true universality, like what I call universally preferable behavior, which is moral rules independent of personhood, location, time, true universals.
They couldn't get there, because they could not conceive of machinery that could replace slavery.
And slavery, of course, has been a human institution since there were humans 150,000 years ago or so, so slavery has just been around forever.
So, none of the ancients could get to universality because the society was so heavily dependent upon slavery that the idea of universality in humanity, universal human rights or anything, completely couldn't get there.
They could not get there.
And this is what happens when you bypass principles, right?
When you bypass principles and go for consequences, because deep down they feared that the consequence of ending slavery would be the end of philosophy and they kind of liked being able to opine at the academy.
rather than toil in the field.
So, of course, the end of slavery was the Industrial Revolution.
So, the end of serfdom as well.
So that's kind of important, right?
So, I think his fear and his horror at what happened to Socrates had him give up on reasoning with the masses.
And therefore, you know, we are surrounded by dangerous beasts.
How do we tame them?
Well, we tame them through tyranny.
That's his answer.
And of course, he would say that they're going to be, the mob is happier if they're being dominated or controlled by a philosopher king, because the philosopher king knows and is wise.
The mob is scary, right?
The mob can be scary.
The mob can be dangerous.
And the sophists who whip up the mob against rational thinkers are very dangerous.
They are the greatest danger in society because you can take precautions against a transmitted germ, but it's really, really hard to hide from an angry mob whipped up by dangerous sophists.
So it is natural.
And given Plato's fear of the mob, And given Plato's abandonment of any capacity to reason with the mob.
So his fear of the mob would lead him to a place where he would have no need to negotiate.
He would have no need to negotiate with the mob because he felt you can't negotiate with the mob.
He watched Socrates try and fail and be killed.
So this is the truth about Plato.
that he gave up on negotiation he gave up on rationality and succumbed to the thirst for power because he couldn't reason with anyone he wanted to dominate everyone and everything forever and that very dangerous thread has remained very much alive even to our time This is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid.
Thank you so much for watching.
I'll talk to you soon.
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