Plato, Power and the People

It is probably also true that corruption starts more often from the top than from the bottom of the social pyramid. It then works its way down until, often after several generations it reaches the lower level of society.

A change of heart, a revival of thinking, and a vision of better things often becomes the motivation for many from among the lower orders to educate themselves and to enlighten their fellows. While this goes on, increasingly the moral change among the workers affects and effects some change of heart among those who had traditionally exercised power and control.

Though Sartre, in Nausea, mocks the “autodidact”, such people are heroes and heroines and not the parody presented by Sartre. They are not to be despised by those who by birth and not by talent have opened up to them the paths of power, of prestige and of preferment. Nor are they to be slighted for they are the hope for a better future by a society jaded by mass entertainment and “dumbed down” by cheap pleasures where the final bill is to be paid by a society where ignorance and vice make for inefficiency and idleness.

Walter Lipmann makes the point that every society and every culture needs a “public philosophy”. This must consist of a set of standards of virtue agreed upon by the majority of the population. One might add that such a value system cannot be promulgated by the government, nor can it even be taught in the schools, nor is it to be made up by any one class for its own ends. It has to be what governs the thinking of the whole of the society because that society agrees that it is good and just and right.

Such a philosophy may seem impossible to conceive of or to implement. Such a philosophy will be resented by vested interests but will lead to equality of opportunity where all humanity is valued and where all education is of the first rate with the well-being of the individual in view. Such a philosophy is, as was described to one of old who wrote. “A new heart also will I give you and a new spirit will I put within you. And I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you. And ye shall keep my judgments and do them.” (Ezekiel 36:25-27.)

The laws of a just society are to be agreed upon by all. They should be part of the very moral nature of all the people, written as it were on their hearts and their minds, and based upon an absolute set of moral values, where that vision of the good is open to all and not restricted to an elite.

Plato has much to teach us but we should beware of many of his ideas for they lure the ship of state into dangerous waters where shoals and treacherous currents make navigation perilous. Working class traditions, whatever the supporters of Platonic elites might think, in Britain and the USA, have been the real cradle of democracy and of all that is and has been good in those societies.