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Video Description
In 404 BCE Athens lost a war, and thirty men took the city. Two of them were Plato’s family, and twenty-five years later he wrote down, step by step, how a free society hands itself to a strongman. This video from the Conscious Radical channel is a close reading of Books Eight and Nine of the Republic, the part most people never reach because they stop at the cave.
It follows the five constitutions Plato describes and why each carries the seeds of its own collapse, how the love of freedom turns into a craving for order, and how language shifts before behaviour does. The ending turns inward: the part of us that thinks it needs a champion is worth watching just as closely as any would-be tyrant.
Full Video Transcript
Plato was born in 428 or 427 BCE and grew up in a time where Athens had been at war for most of his
life. The Peloponnesian war ran for 27 years and in 404 BCE Athens lost to Sparta. Athens was handed
over to 30 men whom the Athenians called the 30 tyrants. By then Plato was in his early 20s and
two of the new regime’s leading men were members of his family. Critias who led the 30 was his
mother’s cousin and Carmides was his uncle. According to a letter attributed to Plato they
invited him to join them but having seen them commit widespread atrocities he says they made
the old government look like a golden age. So Plato stayed out of it, he was disillusioned
and began turning towards philosophy. Within a year the 30 had fallen and democracy was restored.
Then in 399 BCE that same democracy put Plato’s primary teacher and mentor Socrates on trial
and sentenced him to death by drinking a cup of poison hemlock. About a decade later Plato sailed
to Syracuse during the reign of the tyrant Dionysius I. Now the ancient story is that he
criticised tyranny to the man’s face and was sold as a slave on the voyage home until a friend
brought him back. So by the time he roached the Republic, which was in around 375 BCE,
Plato had watched a democracy lose a war, an oligarchy murder its own citizens, a democracy
kill the best man he knew and he had met and offended a tyrant. Books eight and nine of The
Republic are where he describes how a just city and a just soul degrade into corruption one step
at a time until the road ends in tyranny. One important detail before I go further because
this changes how you read the Republic. It’s set in Piraeus which is Athens’ main port on a festival
night. The characters in the book are almost entirely based on real historical figures who
Plato knew or knew of in Athens. The conversation takes place in the house of Polymarcus and his
elderly father Cephalus is there and he’s still wearing his garland from a sacrifice. Polymarcus
opens the conversation by jokingly refusing to let Socrates go home. Now
Polymarcus’ family were Metics, meaning they were resident foreigners and they
were originally from Syracuse and they were rich. So when the 30 came to power
that was enough to have Polymarcus arrested and ordered to drink hemlock.
His brother Lysias escaped and years later wrote a speech against one of the
men responsible for his brother’s death. So Plato sets a long conversation about justice
and about how cities decay in the home of a man who’d be killed by a regime that Plato’s own
relatives helped run. And every Athenian reading that possibly knew that. Plato’s big idea in these
books is that a city and a person are built the same way and that every kind of government has a
matching kind of human being or soul. And Plato describes five constitutions. At the top sits
aristocracy, though not in the sense that we use the word now. Aristos is Greek for the best and
Plato means rule by the wise with reason in charge. Now below it comes timocracy, rule by military or
warrior class, the honour lovers who run on pride. Then oligarchy, which is the rule by the few, a
wealthy elite governing for personal gain where their appetite is in charge but it’s
quite tidily for the sake of money. Then there is democracy which is the rule by the people in the
name of freedom and equality where every appetite is allowed and satisfied. And at the bottom there
is tyranny where one ambitious man holds absolute power and rules through fear, oppression and
lawlessness and one appetite which eats all the others. Plato treats this as a cycle of political
decay with each regime carrying the seeds of its own destruction. Each one falls because it loves
its own thing too much. So for example the son of the honour lover watches pride ruin his family
and so he decides money is safer and moves towards oligarchy. The democrats revolt against the rich
man’s meanness and the tyrant is who the crowd reaches for when democracy’s chaos gets to be
too much. And it’s these last steps that I want to walk through with you because the stages are so
exact they’re actually very uncomfortable. So it starts with freedom. Oligarchy loves money and
ends up choking on it. It splits the city into the rich and a growing crowd of the poor and the gap
keeps widening because the people at the top have every incentive to exploit it. Democracy loves
freedom and freedom with no limit keeps going until there’s chaos and no order. So as an example
Plato describes fathers starting to be afraid of their sons and not reprimanding them
and teachers flattering their pupils through fear. Even the horses and the donkeys are allowed to
walk down the middle of the street and barge into anyone who won’t step aside. So Plato describes
equality pushed so far that it tips into anarchy and the citizens grow so touchy that the slightest
hint of restraint or order feels like slavery. Democracy as Plato sees it treats every desire
as equally valid and if you were to run on that principle long enough you would get chaos and
lawlessness and that unending chaos breeds a craving for a strong man to come and restore
order. So Plato accepted that democracy looks like the fairest and most beautiful constitution of all
a many-colored cloak embroidered with every kind of ornament that was lovely to look at but he just
didn’t believe it had the structure to hold itself up or any idea of how to stop itself.
Then he describes how the language is morphed and changed. In the soul that matches this city
Plato says, and I’m using Jowett’s translation here, insolence they term breeding and anarchy
liberty and waste magnificence and impotence courage. Plato describes a moral dictionary
being rewritten. In modern terms it’s like describing rudeness as sophistication and
disrespect as edginess. So even though the old words will stay in circulation, the meanings
underneath them change. And by the time the alternative behaviour arrives, the vocabulary
you’d need to object to it has already been borrowed by the other side. Thucydides watched
the same thing happen in the civil war at Corsaira in 427 BCE, which is the same year that Plato was
born or near enough and i’m probably sure you could find examples of this in your scroll today
so during the civil war in corsaira the island was split into two with each faction backed by an
outside power athens was on one side and sparta was on the other and fear did the rest and in
between there was reckless violence which came to be called loyalty moderation became a polite word
for cowardice. So if you were to swap the foreign powers for hyper-partisan media, you’d have a
fairly accurate description of the tribal mood that most of us scroll through in a day. Plato
goes on to describe the three groups that emerge and borrows his picture from the beehive. There
are the drones, which is his word for the loud, idle political class, the unproductive ones who
live off everyone else’s work. There are the rich, the orderly moneymakers, who as
Plato puts it, are the easiest to squeeze for honey. And then there are the people
who work, have no time for politics and are the biggest power in the city
whenever they gather in one place. The drones squeeze the rich and hand a slice
to the people, keeping most of it for themselves. The rich push back and for
pushing back they’re accused of being oligarchs which in the end they become because they have
every reason to. Then the people pick a champion and from this route tyranny grows because the
people want a protector and the protector is the man who says he will fight for you. This champion
protector brings charges against his opponents. Some of them will go into exile, some are killed
and he drops hints about cancelling debts and handing out land and it’s here that Plato reaches
from an old story from Arcadia. Mount Lysias was home to an ancient open-air sanctuary of
Zeus Lysias and the rumour was that whoever ate a single piece of human flesh minced in with the
entrails of the sacrificed animals would be turned into a wolf. The protector who sheds his own
people’s blood has become a wolf. By now the wealthy and whatever free citizens remain can
see the danger and sometimes they manage to drive him out but it rarely holds for long
because due to outside alliances or the sheer force of his popular base he gets back in and he
comes back a full-grown tyrant. And one of the first things he asks for is a bodyguard. That is
to say armed men to protect the people’s champion from the people’s enemies. And for a while he’s
all smiles. Plato says he salutes everyone whom he meets, swears he’s no tyrant, makes promises
and hands out favours. Then he starts a war which has nothing to do with the enemy because a people
at war need a leader. A people taxed to pay for a war are too poor and too busy getting through the
week to plot against him. And the front line is a very handy place to send anyone suspected of
ideas about freedom. And then there is the purge. So where a doctor would remove the cancerous
cells and keep the best cells, the tyrant works the other way around by removing the brave,
the clear-headed and then anyone who has a spine. He ends up ruling people he despises, guarded by
men he pays with the people’s taxes footing the bill. And when the people who raised him finally
object to feeding him and tell him to leave, they find they can’t make him go. It is really difficult
to shake Plato’s image where he describes the people who would escape the smoke which is the
slavery of free men has fallen into the fire which is the tyranny of slaves. Okay, so you have
probably got a face in your head maybe several i get it i have done exactly the same thing
but i think that is the easy reading plato has shown us the template of how this works
and this template has worn the colors of the left and of the right and it will turn up again in the
future and that is exactly why it’s worth learning about in books eight and nine plato also asks us
to look at ourselves in this and the role that we play.
Plato describes the matching person to the constitutions
where Plato’s democratic man is a chaotic, undisciplined soul,
the citizen who fits the decaying democracy,
and he treats every desire as equally entitled to rule.
Plato has in one day lapped in drink and strains of the flute.
The next day, a water drinker trying to get thin.
politics one week philosophy the next then nothing at all and he calls it freedom Plato says this man
runs on doxa which means opinion it seems to me he uses episteme knowledge as an argument against
this and his whole philosophy is built on the gap between the two the difference between something
you’ve reasoned your way to and something that just feels right as a gut reaction at the bottom
of his scale of understanding is icasia the habit of taking shadows and reflections is the real
thing it’s the same condition of the prisoners who are in the cave and i’d suggest it’s also
the condition of anyone whose politics arrives by feed on their phone his argument is that people
who live on it seems to me or gut responses are the ones who get played and manipulated
opinion is unstable by nature which makes it very steerable and the drones and the tyrant are both
in the steering business remember the tyrant is an opportunist who arrives to meet the demand of
the population that’s already waiting for him but plato’s final twist is that the tyrant turns out
to be the least free person in the city he’s ruled by one appetite that can never be satisfied
He doesn’t trust anyone. He can’t go on a journey to see what other free men see.
He lives, Cleitus says, in his hole like a woman hidden in the house. The man with all the power
is a frightened prisoner in his own home. Now to explain that quote, the wives and daughters
of respectable Athenian citizens were expected to stay indoors, sequestered in their guarded
women’s quarters of the house, supposedly for their own protection. So the worst fate that
Plato can imagine for the most powerful man in the city is to live as those women already did
and he meant it as an insult to the tyrant but it also tells you a fair amount about Athens at the
time. But there is something hopeful in all of this which I didn’t really expect. If you were
to go back through the stages and look at who does most of the work, although the champion
protector brings the speeches and the promises, everything else comes from the crowd, the ordinary
people with their craving for order, the borrowed words, the readiness to hand over freedom in
exchange for being looked after. Plato’s tyrant turns out to be an ordinary man who shows up to
meet demand but the demand is something that we make which means we can stop making it. We may
have lost the habit of governing ourselves but we can regain it too one person at a time and yes
it’s unglamorous it starts by noticing when you’re being moved by feeling or influenced
into thinking something that you haven’t properly looked at yet and you pause or give it a moment
before you act on it that pause is where plato’s whole project begins it puts reasoning back into
the driving seat instead of letting the appetites drive it’s also a happier way to live which plato
would tell you was the point of book nine all along he calculates that the just man
lives 729 times more pleasantly than the tyrant now i’m not 100 sold on the maths but the direction
does resonate with me so yes watch the champion by all means but also keep an eye on the part of you
that thinks that you need one.
