By Senad
Greece. The region where democracy was supposed to have come to life and where the rational thinking of the West took its baby-steps. We still revere individuals like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle for equipping us with the cognitive strategies and abilities that help us pursue our democratic and egalitarian life-style, questioning authority through our reason and escaping the yoke of the immature, unwise and irrational. After all, the ancient city of Athens is basically inseparable from democracy in all its beauty and (im)perfection – right?
Well, here is the funny part – the revered philosophers in question basically really fucking hated democracy and deemed it a threat to society.
One of the flagship-thinkers of the ancient Greeks, Plato of Athens, wasn’t all too keen on Greece’s biggest political exports ever since Socrates was driven to execution for “corrupting the youth” and making “unreasonable arguments seem reasonable”. This was done by democratic vote and led to Plato regarding this entire scenario as proof that democracy meant nothing more than violent and vulgar mob-rule.
Instead of equipping the average person with the possibility to vote and partake in the political process, Plato had another constellation in mind. He divided his ideal state (as written down in his Politeia) into three classes:
- The rulers
- The guards
- The workers
The rulers ideally consisted of only philosophers, since according to Plato, philosophers know what is best for the rest of society. This is grounded in the claim that philosophers mastered the art of rational thinking and Socratic (self-)interrogation, that we can also vaguely call dialectic for the sake of simplicity. The most important part: philosophers should be the rulers because they are concerned with finding the forms, archetypical metaphysical instances that are the sources of our material world. A philosopher can only have knowledge and wisdom if they have found said forms through rational thinking, since they cannot be found empirically or physically. You could say that a form is the ideal image of materially existing things.
The guards are there to keep the peace of the established order, the only class in the constellation that has the right to arms. They are not entitled to voting-rights.
The workers, the “lowest” part of the hierarchy, have no voting-rights either – they mostly serve the circulation of the economy.
Whilst this societal constellation may sound like a technocratic wet-dream to the average Musk-fan, an important footnote must be made: Plato actually opposed the idea of private-property, especially within the ruling philosopher-class. He claimed that private property and other kinds of worldly pleasure do nothing but distract the thinkers from the pursuit of finding the right forms. Again, to emphasise – we do not mean forms strictly in the geometrical sense, but in the metaphysical and ideal sense. The ideal form of a chair, for instance. A chair so complete with the property of chairness that all the material, worldly chairs stem from it and bear its fruit.
Thus beware the next time you refer to the old Greeks when attempting to formulate a pro-democratic argument: at least Plato and Socrates were not all too fond of democracy, which they considered to be the rule of the irrational, unbalanced and corrupted peoples. If you insist on quoting a Greek to defend democracy, you might try quoting Solon of Athens. Solon laid the foundations for democracy by, amongst other things, overturning the ridiculous and strict laws created by Draco (which is why we call exaggerated punishment “draconian” up to this day).