Leadership in crisis – why the West needs Plato more than ever

> The philosopher and the cult of Plato provide us with both a model and inspiration for how to fix the ship of state.

Yet Boris Johnson, the British Prime Minister, graduated in Classics at Oxford University, and would not only have studied Plato's Republic, but read it in the original Greek, as part of his course.

If Plato had the answers, we should have learned by now. I think the jury is still out on wether this is just a matter of "bad implementation", or long-term democracy is an impossibility without degenerating into a dystopia.

Also, funny way to "pick apart" Plato's ideas from a modern lens - e.g. accepting that we need a caste of thoughtful leaders while at the same time rejecting eugenics, because we have seen what it leads to, even though it's the logical conclusion of the former.

[1] No barriers regarding race or gender right to vote.

We need to create systems that make politics attractive to people who do it out of ideology. I would agree with Plato that character training, or at the very least testing, is useful and appropriate.

But every time someone brings up old ideas, in this case Plato's philospher caste, there's an immediate question. If it is so great, and if it worked in the 19th century, why did it die out? Good things don't vanish randomly. Whenever someone tries to restore some old form of governance the question needs to be answered why it died out.

I think for Plato's Republic it's quite obvious. Modern commerce and technology, mass communication and the information society have melted all that is solid into air, and there's no barriers in the way of democracy. Celebrities and businessmen have more to say than the Dean of Harvard and that's not going to change unless you put technology back into its box, which is hard to do.

The author brings up China as a modern society that improves governance, and I think that's true. But Chinese politicians aren't philosopher kings. The CCP is more like a hyper-competitive, ruthless machine than some kind of school for the humanities. Xi himself was cast to the countryside for years, people who make it to the top have to proof themselves over and over, and punishment can be quite harsh. It's fundamentally still Marxist and technocratic, and sees economic and technological advance as a driver for pretty much everything. It's not virtue that matters but Darwinian competition.

Stalin said that Leninism is American effectiveness combined with Russian revolutionary spirit. I think when China decided to ditch parts of its socialist economic program but kept it's Marxist political system in place they created a governing body that embodies that quite well. I don't think it's possible to recreate that in the West at all.

This is not correct, we don't know how China faired yet. Firstly; they are probably lying about their case numbers - their case counts are absurdly low. And secondly, we aren't going to get a clue about what the experience on the ground is like for the Chinese citizens. It isn't like the Uyghurs situation was obvious 6 months in. It takes time to figure out what China is doing.

And more Plato isn't going to solve anything. You'd need to be an idiot to sign up as an honest politician. The only reward is people screaming at you on the streets. Corruption is the only way to get rewards that justify the vitriol. It'd be good to change that equilibrium.

Meanwhile, from the viewpoint of Covid, I think Sweden showed that it would have been just the same results if we simply left people to make their own choices and decisions about how to react based on their own personal risk profiles and tolerance. This idea of centrally managing a mega region like Europe or the United States is absurd, and bound to fail. The states in the U.S. with the tightest regulations on Covid have had the highest death rates and the highest amount of social unrest. It's really hard to argue from that perspective that tighter, more centralized control of the citizenry is warranted, even without addressing the moral implications of it.

Consider this paragraph:

> Democracy’s fetishisation of freedom inevitably gives way to anarchy. Fathers pander to their sons, teachers to their pupils, humans to animals, and ‘the minds of the citizens become so sensitive that the least vestige of restraint is resented as intolerable’. Anarchy produces class struggle, as the poor attack the rich and the rich retaliate; class struggle produces war and disorder. When all this becomes intolerable the masses will turn to a dictator who can restore order.

It's meaningless! Democracy apparently makes "humans pander to animals." Why does this happen? Just because! The author spits out this weird gob of nonsense and continues as if he's made a real argument that democracy always leads to anarchy (which, confusingly, leads to class conflict, and not the other way around).

He does mention uneducated voters making bad decisions earlier, but that's a whole other can of worms that he never even digs into (i.e. can we fix this with education reforms, or by introducing new journalistic standards into media?). He just throws it out there as if it's all the proof he needs that only "wise elites" can save us from ourselves.

How about this part:

> Thus the paradox at the heart of tyranny: even though tyrants have absolute power over other people, they have no power over themselves. Slaves to their own passions – ‘ill-governed’ in their own souls as Plato puts it – they use their positions to inflict those passions on the entire population. A tyranny is a psycho-drama in which everyone is caught up in the tyrant’s raging ego.

This is flatly untrue. Let's look at some of the greatest tyrants of the 21st century. Xi Jinping, Vladmir Putin, the Saudis... we could go on. Are any of these people particularly prone to temper tantrums? "Slaves of their own passions"? No! They're ruthless, disciplined, and experts at consolidating and leveraging power. This weird psychoanalysis of authoritarianism has no basis in fact -- it's just storytelling.

Finally, scraping away the abysmal analysis, we get the actual argument:

> The metaphor of the ship is a way of driving home Plato’s wider point about the importance of ‘guardians’. Plato argues that a successful republic is run by a class of people whose job it is to think about the long-term success of the polis.

The trouble with this is that putting a discreet class of people in charge of society leads to those people acting in their own interests. The whole motivating reason behind democracy is for the public to have a veto on their leadership so that leaders can't act in their own interest. The author's solution is "let's educate our leaders not to act in their own interest," but that's practically a childish suggestion. What part of history has ever suggested that you can educate humans out of their innate instinct to act in self-interest?The author provides basically no real examples. Who gets to decide how these rulers are educated? The rulers? Wow I'm sure we can trust them not to act in their self-interest in that regard. After all, they "educated" themselves not to.

They did include a couple vague gestures at evidence:

> Benjamin Jowett, the master of Balliol from 1870 until his death in 1893, devoted his life to two great projects: producing a definitive edition of Plato and turning his college into a production line for Platonic guardians.

> [...]

> There was a certain amount of priggishness in the cult of Plato. But it nevertheless produced an elite that was remarkably public spirited by today’s standards: too dignified to put its fingers in the cookie jar and too well-educated to be blown hither and thither by the latest intellectual fads. The old elite didn’t hog publicity for the sake of publicity – most of them were happy to work in the background without any public credit – and they wouldn’t dream of piling up vast private fortunes. This was a world of modest but tasteful cottages in the country, not swanky apartments in Belgravia or Manhattan. Dignified public service was its own reward.

But again, that says nothing. Who exactly are we referring to here? Which individuals led so well? By which metrics? How do they compare against other leaders? No actual evidence, just a bunch of emotionally-loaded language. The period in question (19th century England) was absolutely abysmal for workers' rights, by the way. It was the workers' movement -- a grassroots populist movement -- that ultimately led to pro-worker reforms. Not "wise Platonic leaders."

TL;DR this article doesn't make any real arguments, and relies on emotionally-loaded language and appeals to the nobility of elites rather than the material conditions of history.