Plato and the Yahoos Week Essay

" Pericles said that Athenians did not have to be forced to chose the lot of the soldier, they loved the land that gave them the freedom to chose to live the way they wanted, rather than to fulfill a predetermined ideal and thus, when necessary: "They resigned to hope their unknown chance of happiness; but in the face of death they resolved to rely upon themselves alone." In a democracy, the citizen's sense of self-reliance is its life-blood. Values are created and chosen by consensus and the consent of the governed, not by a single, 'philosophical' intelligence and thus the values are more enthusiastically believed, and because they exercise choice from birth, people more able to undertake creative intellectual change, as they did in ancient Athens. The limits of Yahoo society, although it seems to be more socially stable than most democracies, is that people will not believe in the value of the choices of a ruler, no matter how wise, because they have no personal investment in those decisions.

And what happens when circumstances change, as change is inevitable, even for the Yahoos? If and when the material prosperity of your country is eliminated, either through natural or man-made catastrophes and resources are limited -- the question arises of how they will they be allocated -- will the higher powers want more if things grow more scarce? What if a bad ruler comes to power, as occurred with the shift from republican ideals in Rome to an empire? Not ever ruler is a Claudius or Marcus Aurelius or Queen Bellicose in their objectivity and wisdom. What if there is a Nero? As exemplified in David Lind's "The Second Fall of Rome," the greatness of the Roman republic and its ideals has been lost, because of the memory of what followed when totalitarian rule was so awful.An autocracy can less creatively adapt to new circumstances, when so many decisions are imposed from above, when people do not know how to make decisions. Of course, giving power to the people and rational democracy has many flaws -- because it is a more responsive and flexible form of government, people can make mistakes. "Power to the people" means the popular will is more easily transmitted into a "siege" (Hanson & Heath 119). Totalitarian governments can more easily 'get things done,' as evidenced in the Roman Empire vs. its republican incarnation. But these social and political benefits quickly end with a change in circumstances, such as a famine, a cruel (and stupid) leader, or simply a change in technology that makes, for example, manual labor less necessary.

The democratic social contract is a social contract of glory, not of sadness and compulsion like the vision of the ultimately anti-democratic Socrates in his dialogue "Crito," where he says he 'must' die because he submitted to the protection of Athens all of his life. In killing Socrates, Athens betrayed its ideals through censorship, the ideals of rationality and fellowship, and democracy. It reverted to the Platonic idea that there was only one way to think and structure society, and ironically, Socrates died by the same ideals he espoused, that of the rule of the best. Who is the best, though? The inability to conclusively answer this question in a way that satisfies all circumstances, for all times, demands a democracy and an eternal debate to answer all philosophical questions about the purpose of life, and the purpose of the individual on earth.

You are a great philosopher queen, Bellicose -- but give your people the universal potential to aspire to be philosopher kings and queens themselves and choose their destiny! They will be more loyal subjects….....