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Video Description
Plato thought anarchy was the fever just before the tyrant walks in. This video from the Conscious Radical channel began as a reply to a longtime viewer who asked whether it could stand on its own as a way of living.
It looks at what Plato actually said about anarchy in the Republic and why it never earns its own rung on his ladder of five constitutions. In Book VIII, anarchy appears inside a decaying democracy as what people start calling freedom, and the video asks whether Plato dismissed the wrong part of his own observation.
Full Video Transcript
One of the best things about this channel is you. I know I usually go straight into it because I like
to get straight to the point but I also wanted to take a moment because one of your comments
led me to make this video. To all of you, your comments can take me down a rabbit hole and help
me expand my thinking. They’re not what I call those drive by opinions, you really show up, you
think hard and you challenge me positively even when you don’t agree with me or you’ve read
something in a different way and for that I am grateful to you. One particular comment came from
one of my longest standing viewers on a recent video about the Demagogues Playbook. I won’t
mention their name unless they say I can in the comments but I hope that they will watch this
and know that they gave me the spark. So the question posed was whether anarchy is simply
what happens when democracy falls apart or whether it can stand on its own as a way of living and
being. Now Plato was confident in his answer. He believed that anarchy was the sickness experienced
at the end of democracy, just before the people’s champion, soon to be tyrant, walks in. And we have
been told that story for two and a half thousand years. So yes, I think Plato missed something and
it is integral to us. So let’s start though with what Plato actually said because it’s stranger
than the version that most of us have heard. In the Republic he lays out five kinds of government
so I’d ask you to picture a ladder going down. At the top we have aristocracy, the rule by the wise,
then we have timocracy, the rule by honour and the military types so they’re honour hungry,
then oligarchy the rule by the rich then democracy and at the bottom tyranny each one of these
constitutions dies from its own excess and as a result gives birth to the next but you’ll notice
that anarchy isn’t on the ladder it doesn’t have a constitution of its own but it does sit in book
eight inside democracy as democracy begins to decay plato describes the democratic citizen
renaming his vices so that they sound like virtues so insolence becomes good breeding and
waste becomes generosity and shamelessness becomes courage anarchy becomes freedom plato suggests
that anarchy signals that people have lost sight of the difference between being free and being
ungoverned once the excesses of freedom have become too much that’s when the city is ready
for a strong man. Someone who promises to restore order, who becomes the people’s champion and then
takes everything in exchange as he morphs into a tyrant. And honestly I think we’ve seen this
happen and we are possibly watching it happen again now in more than one country. But look at
the assumption that sits underneath the whole thing. The assumption is that somebody has to rule.
now for Plato that was never in question his only question was who and he described the wise the
brave the rich the many and the one he couldn’t imagine order without some sort of ruler so when
he looked at people living without one all he could see was chaos and we’ve been told the same
ever since without us there would be chaos the alternative would mean chaos always chaos now my
viewer’s argument is that anarchy deserves its own rung on the ladder and they are in good company.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was the first person in history to call himself an anarchist. He declared
that property is theft and that liberty is the mother of order. Now you may have seen the graffiti
circled A sprayed on underpasses. It’s a 1964 creation that was conceptualized in Paris by a
group called the Libertarian Youth, Jeunesse Libertaire, and it stands for anarchy. Peter
Kropotkin, known affectionately as the anarchist prince, renounced his royal lineage. He went off
to Siberia to study animals and he came back convinced that cooperation was as powerful a
force in evolution as competition. His book Mutual Aid was a direct answer to the people who were
using Darwin to justify cruelty. At the heart of the argument for anarchy is that if you take
away the coercive state, people don’t collapse into chaos. They do what they’ve always done.
They cooperate and help each other. So that is very different to what Hollywood or the films
would have us see, where chaos always ensues with no one to lead us. But my commenter’s point was
this look at the money a financial system that’s built on interest debt and endless growth isn’t
sustainable it can’t hold itself up it needs enforcement somebody has to protect property
they have to collect debt and they have to be able to punish at any default and that somebody
is the state which holds the monopoly on legitimate violence if we removed the enforcer
would the parasites still have something to feed on so a quick detour because the word anarchy gets
claimed by some very unlikely people there’s a movement called anarcho-capitalism they want the
state gone too but they’d keep private property markets and the whole money machine and hand the
state’s jobs to private companies instead so courts police security debt collection all up for
sale. They’d remove the enforcer and keep the parasite. Your debts would still be
collected just by whoever the lender can afford to hire. When someone tells you
they’re an anarchist it’s worth finding out what kind. One wants to end coercion
and the other wants to privatise it. So let’s test it. Number one, nature. It is
tempting to say nature runs perfectly well without a leader and it does but
but it’s also full of predators, territory and parasites.
So if we’re gonna call our financial system parasitic,
we have to accept that parasites are completely natural.
So the difference has to lie somewhere else
and I think it does.
In nature, a parasite that kills its host too fast
has lost its supply.
So the ones that survive well
are those that have learned restraint.
They take but they also leave the host alive.
A financial system that demands infinite growth
on a finite planet has lost that restraint.
It will keep taking
until there’s nothing left to take from.
So calling it unnatural is fair.
It’s definitely a parasite,
but it’s one that has forgotten the key
to its own lengthy survival.
Number two, the tribes.
So we were taught for most of human history
that we lived in small equal bands,
and then farming came along
populations grew and the state arrived almost automatically big societies apparently need kings
so sad but inevitable in the dawn of everything david graber and david wengrow pulled that story
apart some small hunter-gatherer groups had hierarchies and some enormous early settlements
like the mega sites in what’s now ukraine housed thousands of people for centuries with no palace
or grand temple and no sign of a king anywhere. Sometimes people switched. So on the great plains
certain nations appointed a kind of police force for the buffalo hunt and that police force had
real authority to punish but when the hunt ended that force and its authority dissolved. Which
means statelessness was never just a stage that we grew out of. People chose it, they unchose it
and chose it again. Number three, Plato’s tyrant. So Plato believed that if you leave a vacuum
someone or something will fill the space. The anthropologist Pierre Clastres, I hope I’ve said
that properly, studied societies in South America with chiefs and found those chiefs had almost no
power. They were expected to be generous, to give away more than they had and to speak well to keep
the peace. They had no right to command anyone and the chief who tried was abandoned. Clastres
argued that these societies saw the state coming and built defences against it, which takes a lot
of work. So yes, a vacuum can invite in a tyrant and order without rulers takes time and effort
and maintenance. I posted a companion essay on my sub stack around the same time that I posted
the video of the Demagogues playbook and I received other comments which one of which
described a lived experience with this. So the commenter said that years ago they lived on a
small tropical island there was no police and no industry. The island was populated with coconut
farmers and fishermen and they swapped fish for rice and coconut oil for whatever you needed
and if you stayed in a family’s beach bungalow you would fill in the book on the counter and if you
took a beer from the kitchen you’d write it down and once or twice a week mama or
papa would come down collect the payment for what you owed and everything was
based on trust. Unfortunately two Europeans started stealing from the
tourist huts and they were warned and they were told to leave but they didn’t
leave they stayed and the thefts carried on. Now the young men of the village
opened their huts they found the cameras and the travellers checks and they put
pair of the European travellers in the old lockup which had been left over from
when the island was a Royal Navy prison. So everyone who had been robbed was
given a stick and allowed a minute or two in the cell. Now my subset commenter
asked an old woman how she could bring herself to do it and she told him that
everyone had a duty to their neighbours and their kin to uphold the rules. These
were rules that the villagers had made for the villagers. Within the community
when one person got a taste of the stick that’s where the punishment ended and a
line was drawn under it. Nobody dragged a record around for the rest of their life.
Try saying that about our justice system. Anyway, of course the idea of the stick
isn’t comfortable. There was no trial, no right of appeal, so if the wrong person
ended up being in that hut nobody could have saved them. Order without rulers
can be hard, it can be wrong, and we know that. But in this case, the rules came from the people
who lived under them. When the Westerners arrived, the island changed, so a local could start earning
as much from selling a plate of noodles as from eight or nine hours husking coconuts in the
jungle. They didn’t have to pass a new law, the money coming in changed it. And that brings me
back to the money one more time. In ancient Mesopotamia debt was crushing. A farmer could
borrow against a bad harvest and would end up having to hand over his children as debt servants
to pay that bill off and if that wasn’t enough he’d have to sell himself too. And every so often
a king would wipe the slate clean so debts would be cancelled and the debt servants were released.
the sumerian word for this was amargi it’s the earliest word that we have for freedom and it
literally means a return to the mother so when debts were cancelled people went home to their
families prudhon said liberty was the mother of order and four thousand years earlier the sumerians
were saying something similar the ancient state enforced the debt but it also wiped it out from
time to time because rulers understood that a society buried in debt eventually breaks. Our
state enforces debt and never offers us any freedom from it. Now there is a place where I think Plato
and my viewer meet. The Republic is a book about the soul and the city is just the enlarged image
of that soul. Every kind of government has a matching kind of person. The tyrannical city
mirrors the tyrannical soul. Someone ruled by appetite, unable to say no to themselves.
But Plato’s deepest worry was never really about the politics. It had more to do with his belief
that people couldn’t govern themselves and that someone would have to do it for them.
If inner order is something us ordinary people can reach, then a society without rulers stops
being a fantasy. It becomes the natural shape of a population that’s done its own inner work.
Gandhi read Tolstoy’s book, The Kingdom of God is Within You, and said that it overwhelmed him,
that order could come from within, which Plato didn’t think was necessarily possible for all.
Now, another commenter on my subject, who I will call Zed, pushed me further. I’m saying Zed
because I’m British, so we’ll have to go with that. For Plato, inner order meant the mind was
in charge. Reason sat on the throne holding the reins of everything else. The philosopher king
would be installed inside your own head. Zed said we had reached the failed conclusion of rule by
mind. In his words, mind serves heart and soul and a society that makes mind king will inevitably
create a heartless monster. Look at the 20th century and tell me he’s wrong. If we try to
engineer a society it fails because those that lead with the mind don’t truly understand people
because we’re complex and we can be irrational. We can be great on a Monday morning and terrible
by Thursday and I’m speaking from my own experience here. So perhaps Plato got the inside
wrong as well as the outside. The order that makes rulers unnecessary may have little to do with
discipline. Now Pascal said the heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of. That kind
of order grows out of connection, out of people who care about each other. They care enough to
keep the rules that they made together. Out of joy even. It’s very hard to rule somebody who already
has everything that they need. This whole thought process has actually hit me quite hard. I know I
spent the last few years doing a smaller version of this in my own life i’ve taken apart the
structures that i’d inherited about who i was supposed to be and that has meant removing other
people’s expectations not completely because i am a work in progress as as we all are but i’m slowly
shedding the weight of the person that i used to be when those outside rules and expectations came
down i didn’t fall apart because something else came forward and that had been there the whole
time, it was just waiting for all of the external noise to stop, even the external
noise that I’d allowed in. It came the moment I started following what really
lit me up inside and mostly it feels like joy rather than discipline. But
don’t get me wrong, some days I get dragged straight back into the old
patterns but it’s getting easier to come back to my own centre a little bit
quicker. Now that’s anarchy at the scale of one life but isn’t that a great place to start? So
to my viewer here’s where I landed. I agree anarchy is far more than democracy that’s run amok and
Plato may have seen it that way because he couldn’t picture someone who doesn’t need ruling
but I can picture them. I think I’m one of them and I think I’m talking to a lot right now.
The work is becoming a person who can think for themselves, a critical
thinker, who doesn’t just believe the top line message, who has a really
good level of discernment and is prepared to dig a little bit deeper.
That kind of work happens to one person at a time.
And to be fair, that’s the only part that any of us can control.
This whole video came out of a YouTube and a Substack comment section where
you think out loud with me where you disagree in places but ultimately we build on each other
and that is my type of society so I’d love to know your thoughts
let me know in the comments and I will see you next time
Source: The Conscious Radical