The Platonic ideal of a society

Ironically, it's one that rejects Plato.  John Michael Greer (who formerly blogged as the Archdruid) has a brilliant post that masterfully takes today's elites down a peg or three.  The problem, he (persuasively) argues, goes back to the school of philosophical thought originating with Plato.  Plato, you see, got things very, very wrong:

One of the things that makes Plato so significant a figure in the history of thought is that his mistakes were even more useful to future thinkers than his successes ...

Like a great many utopian authors, Plato built his imagined society on a particular view of human nature. It wasn’t a particularly rose-colored view—he managed to dodge that bullet—but it had a subtle but no less fatal flaw. Plato’s model divided up human nature into three basic parts. First was the collection of animal appetites, epithumia in Greek, the desires for food and sex and other creature comforts, which he associated with the belly. Second was a set of character elements for which there isn’t a good English collective term—the Greek word is thumos—which include pride, aggressiveness, and the sense of honor and self-esteem; these Plato associated with the chest. Finally there was the rational part, nous in Greek, the part that seeks to know and understand, which he associated with the head.

To Plato, as to plenty of other intellectuals then and later, there was a strict hierarchy among these parts, with epithumia on the lowest level, thumos above that, and nous above all. What he did in crafting the utopia of The Republic—and what plenty of other people have done since his time—was to turn this into a social hierarchy. The equivalent of epithumia was the working class; the equivalent of thumos was a class of guardians, armed warrior-policemen whose job it was to maintain social order and defend the Republic against all enemies internal and external; the equivalent of nous, of course, was an elite class of philosopher-kings who had received a thorough education to fit them for their roles as the governing caste.

It’s a very common notion, not least because Plato’s impact on the history of human thought is almost impossible to overstate—if you grew up in a Western or Muslim society, dear reader, you use categories and concepts Plato invented literally every time you think. It’s also a very common notion because a great many members of the intellectual class like to fancy themselves in the role of Plato’s philosopher-kings, handing down wise commandments to the guardian caste which are then obeyed without question by the masses. Popular as it is, it’s the biggest bellyflop of Plato’s many bad ideas. We know this because it’s been tried many times and it always fails.

At this point, everyone will have at least a couple examples running through their minds.  Two quotes (from two different ruling elites) that come to my mind are "After us, the deluge" and "Basket of Deplorables".  but that's just me.

The problem is quite simple. Let’s start by granting that every human being is composed, as Plato suggests, of epithumia, thumos, and nous.  If that’s the case, then it won’t work to assign any one of these to a social class, because every member of that class has all three, just as they all have heads, chests, and bellies. The working classes aren’t just epithumia; they also have their thumos—their pride, their self-respect, and their capacity for violence—and their nous—their capacity to think, and in particular to wonder whether the laws proclaimed by the philosopher-kings are actually wise commandments or are simply another helping of self-serving cant.

The self described Philosopher-Kings are nothing of the sort; rather, they're what Lenin described as "Useful Idiots".  The term "idiots" applies not just because their vanity repeatedly overwhelms their learning, but also because their learning is so very lacking:

Plato offered a scheme for getting [Philosopher-Kings] to behave as such—basically, giving them a philosophical education—and that was an interesting hypothesis when it was originally proposed. It’s hard to think of a hypothesis that’s been more thoroughly tested over the last 2300 years, though, and the verdict is in:  it doesn’t work.

Boy, howdy.  Smartest dumb-asses around is what they are.

Geer continues applying this model to the failure of today's elites:

Expert specialists are by and large too busy listening to each other and to their preferred sources of data to notice when the data from those sources, and the consensus opinions based on them, have drifted out of touch with the real world.

Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, ironically enough, provided an epic example of that kind of failure in action. All through the latter months of the campaign, as Trump flung prodigious resources into the critical northern Midwest states that ended up putting him in the White House, field staffers in the Clinton campaign in those states tried frantically to get the national campaign to notice what was happening and give them the help they needed to fight back. Their increasingly desperate pleas were dismissed by Clinton’s top staffers with the airy retort, “Our models disprove your anecdotes.” That turned out to be the epitaph for Clinton’s presidential ambitions, because models don’t prove or disprove anything: rather, they reflect the real, anecdotal world—or they don’t.

His solution?  A political system that provides a correcting force to the managerial elite's mistakes, via a representative democracy.  This circles back to what used to be taught in school - the genius of the Founding Fathers was to be able to look with clarity at history, and to use history's lessons to craft a political structure.  They saw the repeated failures of Plato's Republic, and designed their own that would fragment power, and then fragment it some more.  This made it hard for an elite to gather all the reins to themselves, and mostly left decision making to be done at the lowest possible level, by the people most effected by the decision.  Genius.

I cannot more highly recommend his post.  It has been said that the first responsibility of a true intellectual is to question their own initial beliefs.  This questioning will, it's said, help identify the sorts of pitfalls that today's Intellectuals stagger into so often.  Perhaps the first questioning should be of the very foundation of their education.  Plato was about as wrong as you can get, and everything you've been taught is based on his ideas.  That's one righteous "Elite", right there.