Democracy, according to Plato

Post Reply New Topic

One of the earliest cynical write-ups of democracy occurs in the writings of the ancient Greek Plato. Disgusted at how democracy was being manipulated to launch disastrous pre-emptive military campaigns by twisting the opinions of those uneducated citizens who could vote, he argued that any uneducated society's attempts at democracy must eventually become totalitarian rule by those who could control the attitudes of the masses, and that only a highly educated nation could have a sustainable democracy.

2,500 years on, we are in the grips of a not entirely dissimilar situation. For all that I may fault education in America and Britain (the US spends a total of $50 per person per year on education, and that's before you subtract overheads, earmarks that aren't actually educational, etc) the current state of both nations is far, far beyond anything Plato could have imagined in his time.

He also advocated specialization - something that generally didn't happen back then, when people could become skilled in everything and usually ended up doing exactly that. These days, people complain about too much specialization and dream of times when generalization was more in fashion.

So was he right, wrong or somewhere in between? Is education enough? Is specialization enough? And if he was right, how advanced must a society be, or how evenly educated, before his objections are countered?

Or have we reached that point already? Is the modern-day situation so different that Plato's complaints don't really apply at all? Is the similarity real or all just an illusion?

It has, I agree with everything Mordy said. Yes, humans are a disease, genetically little more than shaved apes, because this is where we came from as a species. Just because someone believes in genetics doesn't mean they believe in eugenics. Genetics are scientific facts, eugenics is a proccess of using those facts for ignorance and elitism.
America is battshit, listen to the constant bickering between "liberals" and "conservatives". Theyr insane, both sides. And almost every single american follows one of those labels out of herd mentality, to the point of lacking common since. America is currently a nation that values ignorance, dishonesty, elitism, and selfishness. And if doing the right thing means challenging one's impulses, most americans quit caring about doing right and defend biggotry as morality. Wake up America.

Today America is in the Nordic kingdoms of Europe, namely places like Finland and Netherlands. America stopped being america a long time ago.