Author: Edward Feser Via American Mind
The Views of the Author are not necessarily the Views of Enigmose
Since the 2016 election, the thesis that Plato’s critique of democracy in the Republic holds the key to understanding the rise of Donald Trump has become a cliché of middlebrow left-wing commentary. It is not entirely wrong. But usually ignored is the fact that the tendency toward tyranny which Plato attributed to democracies was a consequence of their egalitarianism, moral relativism, and sexual license—not exactly right-wing causes.
It is no great feat to cherry-pick lines from Plato which, torn from context, can be made to seem applicable to some politician you dislike. A serious treatment must begin with Plato’s psychology, which formed the basis of his political philosophy. It must consider Plato’s account of the four stages by which minds can become progressively disordered, and the ways in which four increasingly corrupt types of society parallel these degrees of psychological disorder.
When that is done, it is manifest that in fact the purest contemporary realization of the tyrannical personality type Plato warned us about is the Social Justice Warrior leftist. As the woke mob comes to realize this, Plato’s statues will doubtless be toppled next—and after statues, people.
Healthy and Sick Souls
Plato distinguishes three main parts of the psyche: reason, spirit, and appetite. Naturally, appetite encompasses desires for food, drink, sex, money, and, in general, whatever brings pleasure. Such desires are a natural concomitant of our being embodied, and as such are not bad in themselves. What is bad is indulging them in a way that is contrary to reason.
Now, rationality, as modern economists understand it, entails maximizing satisfaction of whatever desires we happen to have. That is decidedly not how Plato understands it. Indeed, he would regard this conception of reason as the mark of a corrupt mind. For Plato, reason is that faculty by which we understand the natures of things—what he famously calls their Forms.
A healthy psyche is one in which reason, spirit, and appetite are ordered in this hierarchical way and all properly functioning. In particular, it is evident in a human being who has a correct understanding of the natures of things, feels the right amount of approval for what reason tells it is good and the right amount of shame or disgust at what reason tells it is bad, and whose desires are natural, moderate, and indulged only in what reason judges to be the right time, place, and manner and in a way spirit feels to be honorable.
Such a human being exhibits the cardinal virtues or “excellences”: wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice. He is wise insofar as his intellect grasps objective reality, courageous insofar as he will not allow fear of pain or desire for pleasure to divert him from the right course of action, temperate insofar as his desires are appropriate and indulged only when fitting, and just insofar as reason, spirit, and appetite are all playing their proper role in the hierarchy.
An unhealthy psyche is one that deviates from this ordering of things, and the greater the deviation, the greater the depravity of the psyche. This brings us to Plato’s classification of types of society,
Healthy and Sick Societies
Reason, spirit, and appetite are to be found in all human beings. But each is stronger in some human beings than in others, and which of them most characterizes a person determines which of the three social classes of Plato’s ideal society he will fall into.
The vast majority of people are appetitive. That does not mean that their appetites are ungoverned by reason and spirit, but that reason and spirit are in them primarily oriented, not toward the pursuit of wisdom and honor for their own sakes, but rather toward the pursuit of food and drink, property, marriage and family, and material goods in general. They make up the productive class in Plato’s city: farmers, merchants, laborers, and so on.
A much smaller group is primarily spirited, oriented by temperament to the pursuit of honor and justice. These make up the auxiliary class, which comprise the military and police in Plato’s ideal city.
The smallest and ruling class are the philosopher-kings, in whom reason dominates so thoroughly that pursuit of the true and the good for their own sakes is their basic orientation.
Famously, the guardians of Plato’s ideal society (which comprise the auxiliary class and the philosopher-kings together) live communally and are forbidden spouses, families, and private property of their own. This is not socialism, which in the real world imposes austerity on the majority while the rulers live like capitalists. On the contrary, the majority in Plato’s city—the productive class—are permitted the freedom, material benefits, and ordinary family life the elite are denied.
Just as a rightly ordered psyche is one in which reason rules the appetites through the agency of spirit, so too a rightly ordered society is one in which philosopher-kings rule the productive class through the auxiliaries. The greater the deviation from this model, the more unjust and disordered a society becomes, and the degrees of deviation parallel the degrees of depravity that can exist in an individual psyche. Indeed, for Plato, types of unjust society are defined less by their governing procedures than by the disordered character types that dominate them and are admired within them.
There are four, each one worse than its predecessor: timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny. ....
“Love of money and adequate self-discipline in its citizens are two things that can’t coexist in any society,” says Plato. The rich come to have “no greater concern for excellence than the poor.” (All quotes are from the Desmond Lee translation of the Republic.) Appealing to an insect metaphor, Plato says that a class of shiftless and unruly “drones” arises in this decadence, dominated by “unnecessary desires” such as an excessive interest in sex and a taste for “a more varied and luxurious diet.” (A mashup of hooligans, swingers, and “foodies,” as it were.) In this way oligarchy tends to give way to democracy.
The Dēmos and its Demons
Democracy on Plato’s account is characterized by the “diversity of its characters” and “treats all men as equal, whether they are equal or not.” In particular, it treats all ways of life as equal, no matter how puerile, irrational, or immoral.
The young “throw off all inhibitions” and celebrate “insolence, license, extravagance, and shamelessness.” They flit faddishly from one activity to another. At one moment they will pursue “wine, women, and song,” and at the next “water to drink and a strict diet”; a keen interest in “hard physical training” might give way to “indolence and careless ease”; today they will devote themselves to philosophical study, tomorrow politics, and the day after that business. If anyone tries to tell them that some desires are bad and should be suppressed, they “won’t listen,” but insist that “all pleasures are equal and should have equal rights.”
. . . The end result is that “the minds of the citizens become so sensitive that the least vestige of restraint is resented as intolerable.” In the end, “in their determination to have no master,” the citizens of a democracy “disregard all laws, written or unwritten.”
Enter Tyranny, Stage Left
Plato proposes a mechanism by which democracy finally mutates into tyranny. He tells us that the parasitic “drone” class that builds up under late oligarchy and democracy can be divided into two subclasses, the drones with “stings” and those without. Those without are the passive hangers on, whereas the “stinging” drones are the nastier bunch, aggressive and inclined to stir the rest up to sedition. Think of the upper middle-class wokester, saddled in debt for a useless college degree in grievance studies, whose idea of finally doing something with his life is signing up with Antifa or the Bernie Bros.
Intimidated by the most aggressive elements of the mob, the intellectual in a democratic society is “swamped by the flood of popular praise and blame, and carried away with the stream till he finds himself agreeing with popular ideas of what is admirable or disgraceful, behaving like the crowd and becoming one of them.” As if in fulfillment of this Platonic prophecy, a radical and intolerant egalitarianism has swept the American intelligentsia—the academy, journalism, the arts, and popular culture—its leaders routinely bullied into submission by even the most groundless accusations of bigotry. .....
Plato says it would take a “miracle” or “divine providence” to keep philosophers from being corrupted under such circumstances, and that even then only a “very small remnant” will resist. As Socrates’ execution indicates, this resistance might even seem futile in the short run. But its long-term effects are what matter. Today, no one but a few scholars knows the names of Socrates’ persecutors. It is his greatest student, Plato himself, whom we remember.
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Liberal Narcissism
Liberal Narcissism Exploitation by the Left
In 'Liberalism is a Mental Disorder' author Michael Savage argued that the typical Liberal is mentally deranged, which is something most sane people already knew. In 'The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness' Dr. Lyle Rossiter took the thesis a step further when he described Liberal progressive ideology as a psychological malady that denies personal responsibility and encourages self-pity. Freelance journalist Rusty Weiss in an article for the Political Insider [1] argues that Liberalism is not a newly discovered or novel mental disorder at all, but simply a manifestation of an already studied psychological issue known as narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).