This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Say then, my friend : Plato on Democracy and Tyranny
(c) J. Nelson Rushton. January 27, 2025 Note: this is the second post in a series. The first one is here.
Some people believe that wokeness emerged from the progressive counterculture of the 1960’s. Some hold that it has its roots in the 1930's with FDR and the New Deal. Others say that the origins of wokeness go back to the Frankfurt School of economics in 1920's Germany. Whatever wokeness is at its core, and whether it is good or bad, I submit that it is in fact older than any of that -- and, indeed, very old. That is the main thesis of this essay.
In The Republic, Book VIII (c. 375 BC), Plato described a faction whose social and political agenda included moral relativism, lax enforcement of criminal laws, multiculturalism, equality of outcomes, and the repudiation of their society’s founding principles and traditional values. Plato called the adherents of this ideology dēmokratikoi andres [democratic men]. Plato wrote that a state ruled by such "democratic men" is on the brink of descending into tyranny. Steps along the path to tyranny, as Plato described it, include sexual liberation and equality, aggressive taxation of the rich, expansion of the welfare state, open borders, forgiveness of debts, suppression of dissenting speech, and the confiscation of weapons owned by private citizens. Today, many with a similar agenda refer to themselves as "progressives". Most of them, I suppose, are unaware that they are "progressing" toward a vision of the world that dates back at least two and a half thousand years.
Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once wrote, the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato [Whitehead (1929): Process and Reality]. Whitehead was exaggerating, of course -- but at any rate this essay will consist literally of a series of footnotes to Plato. To the extent that there is truth in Whitehead's witticism, the difference between this and any other work in the Western canon is that I am up front about what I am doing.
Overview of The Republic, Book VIII
In The Republic, Book VIII (c. 375 BC), Plato takes the view that the chief distinguishing characteristics of a person is the set of virtues that person honors. He sorts men into five basic categories, according to the virtues they honor most:
Plato wrote that a nation's form of government emerges naturally from the values of its citizens, and in particular from the virtues they honor. In Plato's view, when the people of a society honor a certain virtue, they raise up leaders who exhibit that virtue -- and, conversely, when citizens fail to honor a certain virtue, they raise up leaders in whom that virtue is absent. The virtues present and absent in these leaders in turn determine the general character of the government. Thus, Plato writes that in principle there are five basic forms of government, corresponding to the five basic sorts of citizen (though, in practice, any given state is liable to be a mixture of these pure forms):
The five forms government considered by Plato in The Republic are as follows:
Book VIII of The Republic is presented as a narrative relating an archetypal story of how societies can decay over time -- from the ideal form of government, aristokratíā, to the worst form, tyrannía, and passing through the three intermediate forms along the way. At each stage in the process, the regime-change is affected by a change in the values of the public, in terms of the virtues they honor. In other words, for Plato, politics is downstream of culture.
It is easy to see how politics could be downstream of culture in a modern democracy -- because the voting populace consists of the entire adult population, who confer official authority upon whomever they wish. It is less easy to see how politics would be downstream of culture in, say, a timocracy (military rule) or oligarchy (rule by the wealthy), where one class of people has an exclusive hold on official power. The question is why would the class-in-power willingly abdicate that power, or how could it be wrested from them by others with no official authority? One factor in such a transfer of power could be violent revolution or the threat of it -- but it seems that for Plato, this is not the only factor, or even the chief factor. On the whole, the transfers of power from one class to another in Plato's narrative hinge more on moral suasion and perceived legitimacy than on threats or force. The driving force (or the control variable, so to speak) in Plato's theory of political and societal change is what Thomas Paine called the constitution of the people -- that is, the moral character of society. This stands in contradistinction to Karl Marx's theory of dialectical materialism, in which the driving forces of societal change consists in the material conditions under which people live, including the laws they have written on paper.
Plato's Dēmokratía and the Democratic Man
Foreshadowing the Christian doctrine of the “will of the flesh”, Plato argues that men's hearts are naturally home to unclean carnal passions:
He writes that while all men have these beastly desires, they are restrained, more in some people and less than others, by law (nomos) and reason (logos):
When a society is in decline toward disregard of virtue, it will be a mixture of those who have some regard for virtue left (in particular, "oligarchical" virtues such as industriousness and temperance), and those who have little or none. However, the less virtuous citizens may gradually corrupt the more virtuous and recruit them into their ranks. This recruitment proceeds by Orwellian manipulation of language -- by calling good things evil and evil things good -- and has a religious character, as if the target is being indoctrinated into a cult:
Through this process, the recruit is finally transformed into a full blown dimokratikos anēr [Greek: democratic man], who no longer distinguish between clean and unclean desires:
Plato writes that as more and more men within a society are corrupted, the entire society is transformed toward a state of dēmokratía, or virtueless society. Dēmokratía is a challenging word to translate. It is usually rendered as democracy, and its meaning is something like democracy (in the modern sense) in that it entails relatively broad and equal participation in government. In Plato's narrative, however, dēmokratía entails much more: a thoroughgoing ethos of equity, in which people regarded, not only having equal rights of life, liberty and property, but also as being of equal ability, uprightness, and achievement -- regardless of their actual respective degrees of ability, uprightness, or achievement.
According to Plato, the virtueless society has a freewheeling spirit of moral relativism -- and, in that spirit, discards the principles of its national constitution.
Its public officials are often selected on the basis of their professed loyalty, rather than ability or integrity,
or, in some cases, at random by the drawing of lots, presumably on the grounds that "all men are equal" (Strange as this practice may seem to us today, this was indeed the policy of some Greek city-states in and around the time of Plato):
The society that has ceased to honor virtue repudiates meritocracy:
Since all ways of being are held in equal esteem, the people of the dēmokratía are diverse in their norms and values — one might say “multicultural”:
Thus, the society loses its sense of shared national identity and social cohesion:
In addition to discarding its traditional principles and values, the dēmokratía neglects enforcement of the law, allowing criminals to freely roam the streets:
In summary, the agenda of Plato's democratic men includes moral relativism, leniency in criminal justice, multiculturalism, equality of outcomes, and a loosening of their society's founding principles and traditional values. Sound Familiar?
Plato's Narrative of the Descent into Tyranny
Plato held that a society ruled by "democratic men" -- that is, men who neglect to honor virtue, or to distinguish between clean and unclean desires -- is in danger of degenerating into tyranny. The descent into tyranny is driven by a collection of people Plato calls drones, defined generally as those who do no useful work. The name "drone" is taken from the entomological term for male bees and ants -- who, even in Plato's time, were known to live off of the work of others in their hive, contributing nothing except to reproduce themselves.
Plato's "drones" are a rather curious coalition. He writes that there are two broad sorts: drone followers and drone leaders, which he metaphorically refers to as crawling drones and flying drones. The crawling drones, or drone followers, consist of career criminals and the non-working poor. The flying drones, or drone leaders, are elected officials and government bureaucrats who garner power by catering to the constituency formed by the crawling drones.
The descent into tyranny begins the decline of patriarchy within the home.
Foreigners and resident aliens are treated like citizens:
Children grow entitled and arrogant, and adults cater to them for fear of being labelled as authoritarians. Everyone wants to be the "cool parent" or the "cool teacher".
The decaying society embraces a spirit of sexual liberation and sexual equality.
Plato wrote that as the drones grow more numerous, the more ambitious drones begin to occupy positions of power and influence. Meanwhile, their less capable constituents form mobs to shout down speakers and suppress the political speech of those who disagree with them:
There are some members of society who have retained the virtues of the previous generation, such as diligence and temperance. Theses people naturally prosper, but the drones elect leaders who confiscate their wealth and redistribute it:
The drones use bureaucratic and criminal indictments to harass and immobilize their political opponents:
The redistribution of wealth continues, including the cancellation of debts:
The drones elect a leader who drums up national emergencies as a pretext for expanding the power of government. In Plato’s narrative, the emergency is a war — but a war on poverty, or a war on drugs, or a global pandemic would also do the trick.
To enlarge his constituency, the drone-leaders open the borders and encourage the immigration of more drones from foreign countries:
In the last stages of social and political decay, corruption spirals out of control. Having plundered the wealth of the upper classes, the tyrant begins to confiscate the property of the working class and underclass that elected him, but now they cannot remove him from power. Plato likens the tyrant to a son who steals from the father who has raised him:
Finally, the tyrant turns violently on its own citizens, drones and all, after depriving them of the right to bear arms:
Conclusion
It may be worth mentioning how I came to be acquainted with Plato's account of dēmokratía and the descent into tyranny. I first learned of it in listening to a lecture by Hillsdale College historian Paul Rahe. The lecture was on Plato's Republic for its own sake; Rahe did not make any analogy between Plato's narrative and current day politics, and am not sure whether he intended to. Nevertheless, the analogy was clear to me, and I found it so uncanny that I was incredulous. To be frank, I was pretty sure that Rahe was cherry picking passages from a long text to make it look as though Plato was writing about contemporary politics. So, I read Plato's Republic for myself. In doing so, I found that, contrary to my expectations, Rahe was simply summarizing a section of Book VIII -- and that, if anything, he had undersold the similarity between Plato's "democratic man" and the modern left. I would not insist that you take my word for that, and I do not even believe it would be rational to take my word for it on the basis of the snippets quoted in this essay (for all you know, if you haven't read the text, I am doing what I suspected Rahe of doing). Thus, I invite the reader to examine the relevant sections of Plato's Republic for themselves. The entirety of Book VIII can be read in about an hour, or in two hours for a slow reader like me.
When he spoke of tyranny, Plato was speaking from experience, both personal and collective. At the time he wrote The Republic around 375 BC, Plato's home city of Athens had suffered through four different tyrannical regimes over a two-hundred year period -- including the reign of the so-called "Thirty Tyrants", which Plato himself lived though as a young man, and during which approximately five percent of the population of Athens was murdered by its own government. Summarizing the history of the era, Alexander Hamilton would later write,
So in The Republic, Plato was not speculating about something distant from his experience. On the contrary, like the "Ghost of Christmases Yet to Come" in Dickens's Christmas Carol, Plato had been where we might be going, and hoped to warn us so that we would be less likely to go there. Plato clearly has a low opinion of the "democratic men" of his own time, and was probably on the other side from them of whatever political aisle ran through Athens at the time. Maybe they were right and he was wrong. But right or wrong, this faction must have existed, more or less as Plato describes them. If Plato made them up out of thin air, then he was not only a philosopher, but a prophet.
I think theres something missing here, on the connection between indulging ones appetites, and the ideology which approves of such. Plato seems to think the drones cause the ideology, but how does selfishness cause approval of other peoples selfishness? Most drones currently dont even do that - honest approval of lifestyles other than ones own is mostly seen in the supportive elites.
And that is the important part of your claim - moocherism as a constant political background force is not a new idea. An ideology which approves of them in general would be. Again, most poor people even today do not claim a general right to redistribution - they have stories about how these particular rich people, or the current rich people, dont really deserve what they have, often with justifications that try to be similar to the bourgeois standards of justice. This may be motivated reasoning, but thats not the point. If Plato does indeed describe progressive ideology this well (I have yet to read), then thats evidence for something - but Im not even really sure yet what his version of that thing is.
I think there are two things that can fill in the missing pieces of this puzzle:
Even one man marooned on an island has a conscience. He knows what he'd be ashamed for his father to see him do, if his father was there -- and that inner voice doesn't go away when his father dies. So in order to indulge his unclean appetites, he has to tell himself things like, "It's all good", and "Who's to say what's clean and unclean", and "Dad was a prick anyway" (which is why the woke smear their ancestors and tear down their statues). For that reason, I believe the behavior depends crucially on the ideology.
Remember that not all drones are poor. Also, Plato's view is not as simple as drones causing demokratia.
In an earlier part of the narrative, not recounted in my essay, Plato says that it is brazen oligarchy that first begins to make the drones more numerous: ruthless exploitation by the rich of the poor and of each other, turning the some of the losers in the economic free-for-all into poor, ruined wretches (my words, but his basic picture of things). From there, the causation between drones and demockratia is a mutually recursive chicken-and-egg cycle. More drones --> more democratic men --> more drones --> more democratic men... But *basically if Plato had to pick a single root cause, I think he would pick the ideology rather than a certain group of people. He tends to focus on the ideal as ultimate.
I'm not sure what "new" means here. I think Plato implicitly posits such an ideology.
I submit that living off of the work of others in your peer group violates universal, intuitively self-evident natural law. Every clan and tribe has disdain for people who don't pull their weight. Thus, saying it's OK to be a moocher requires turning down the volume on morality itself. It doesn't require that logically, but I believe it requires it psychologically. Moral nihilism is a very old philosophy, and I think its chief motivations make up a very short list: theft (by deception or by force, including government force), and sexual libertineness.
So as far as the ideology and the practice, I don't think you can have one without the other. Men find it easier to rationalize than to brazenly violate their conscience. A rationalization is better than sex. Have you ever gone more than one week without one good juicy rationalization? [Jeff Goldblum as Michael Gold in The Big Chill]
I don't know about that. They probably lean in that direction as a group far more than the working and middle classes when asked -- but they are not as zealous and vocal and organized in advocating it, because they are not zealous or vocal or organized on the whole. Crawling drones play different positions on the team than flying drones -- as different as quarterback and an offensive lineman.
Maybe I wasnt clear enough about this, but what I mean is: Yes, people need a justification for what theyre doing. But there is a lot of freedom in how that justification generalises. You can justify taking a rich guys money by arguing he got it illegitimately. This isnt that different politically, because you can make these allegations against whoever you want, but its not an explicit endorsement of redistribution. Its this explicit endorsement that I think is limited to elites (even actual leftist politicians often prefer to argue without it, e.g.), and would so far have considered a modern phenomenon.
Basically, I dont see why drones would lead to the development of democratic-man-ideology specifically, instead of some variation on "We wuz".
This is not something Plato touches on directly, but I have an idea about it. The guiding principle, if you can call it that, is a collective decision by the drones on the central question in founding any fundamentalist/extremist movement: As a function of the material and cultural circumstances I find myself in, what group can I demonize, scapegoat, and rally a coalition to attack and plunder? The details of the target group, the moral rationalization, and the attack strategy arise from culture and circumstance -- but when they find the answer it then plays out in (1) censoring the target group and their ideas, (2) scapegoating them for all the world's ills, (3) disarming them, (4) seizing their property in the name of justice, and often finally (5) murder. The target group is chosen opportunistically, not according to any eternal principle. Depending on circumstances, it could be heretics, Jews, the aristocracy, the Tutsis, the vaguely defined and ever-morphing "bourgeoisie", or straight white males. The tyranny Plato observed must have been of the left-wing variety, like that of Stalin and Mao -- but the dragon can wear the mask of the left, the right, religious fundamentalism, racial supremacy, or whatever.
Plato's "crawling drones" are thugs and paupers, that tend to stoke leftist tyranny, but leftist tyranny is just one of many possible answers to the question of who can I blame for my problems and attack and plunder with righteous indignation?
Also, that's pretty much a summary of the top-level post I am planning for next week.
Thats what I would have thought as well - but as per your post, Plato does describe something much more similar to modern ideology. You dont need moral relativism to fuck up the heretics. I guess Im waiting for next week.
Maybe this is the line that is causing the problem (from the OP):
Plato's view here is narrow -- focusing on the sorts of tyranny he (or his teacher, Socrates) witnessed -- which were evidently of a leftist variety. The most natural constituents of that kind of tyranny are the non-working poor. But in a broader view, which Plato does not discuss, the natural constituents of the tyrant might be a different group.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link