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Video Description
Plato counted five kinds of government, from rule by the wise down to tyranny. This video from the Conscious Radical channel asks whether we have quietly built a sixth, one in which nobody is in charge and nobody can be held to account.
Hannah Arendt named it in 1970: rule by Nobody, the bureaucracy in which responsibility dissolves. The video places that sixth form beside Plato’s ladder, Eichmann in Jerusalem, and the Cabinet Office’s nudge units, and then asks a very human question: what kind of person does rule by Nobody produce?
Full Video Transcript
In the Republic Plato describes five possible constitutions and the kind of people that they
produce and I explain them in my video the Demagogues Playbook which I will link somewhere
along here. However I think we have built a sixth and we’re living in it. More than 50 years ago
the political theorist Hannah Arendt described it but I don’t think anyone has placed it next
to Plato and considered what kind of people it’s produced. So each of Plato’s five kinds of
government comes with a matching kind of person, the living soul which mirrors the city. The
aristocracy, and note in Plato’s interpretation this meant wise or knowledgeable person, well
they ruled with wisdom and reasoning. A democracy was ruled by the love of honour and by pride,
oligarchy by the appetite for wealth, democracy by everyone’s appetite in its quest for freedom
and tyranny by one lawless appetite that eats all the rest. Each constitution is born from the
excesses of the one before it and each dies from its own excesses. Now Plato ends at tyranny. Now
the 20th century has brought us tyranny on an industrial scale and those who have lived through
it spent decades ensuring it could never happen again that no single man should ever hold that
much power and in our aim to spread power equally we created constitutions international bodies
independent central banks as far as they can be regulators and frameworks we’ve created a
faceless bureaucracy. In 1970 Arendt wrote a short book called On Violence. She described the old
ways of ruling and added bureaucracy to the mix, describing it as the rule of an intricate system
of bureaus in which no men, neither one nor the best, neither the few nor the many, can be held
responsible. Basically a rule by nobody. She argued if tyranny means a government that never has to
account for itself, then the rule by nobody may be the most tyrannical form of all, since there is
no one left who could even be asked to answer for what is being done. That is the sixth constitution.
Now we could make a really tidy argument that the rule by nobody constitution is the child of
tyranny, built out of fear of the fifth constitution, but Arendt understood it was messier
than that. In 1961 she had sat in the courtroom in Jerusalem watching Adolf Eichmann explain that he
had no choice but to follow orders and procedure. As far as he was concerned his role in the
Holocaust was one of administration, keeping timetables and completing forms. But as you may
see the rule by nobody was already at work inside the worst tyranny of the century. So the fifth
and the sixth weren’t consecutive but concurrent. There was an overlap. Okay so back to Plato. In
his 60s he went back to Syracuse to try to turn the young tyrant Dionysius II into a philosopher
king. Unfortunately this failed and on the last trip Plato was detained at court until a friend
sent a ship to release him and ensure his safe return back to Athens. In Plato’s last and longest
book the laws he gives up waiting for the philosophy king and instead designs a second best
city where law rules and the rulers are the law’s servants now he wasn’t the first person to come up
with this idea solon which is one of the seven sages of greece has done this in athens and
herodotus the father of history wrote about how a spartan told the persian king that his people
have a master and its name is law so plato argues that every constitution has a matching kind of
person so who is the sixth he describes the five souls of the constitutions each ruled by one of
their own parts whether it be reason pride or appetite however the sixth soul is ruled from
outside near the end of book nine of the republic plato says that everyone is better off ruled
by the divine wisdom within them or if this be impossible then by an external authority in order
that we may be all as far as possible under the same government friends and equals that external
authority was meant to be wisdom that lived in someone else and i think we’ve kept the external
authority but we seem to have dropped the wisdom plato also describes how each man was raised
so let’s do the same the sixth man is a child of the tyrannical age his parents saw what one
enormous appetite can do to a country and they taught the child to distrust strong desire his
own included and they would have underlined that wanting things too much is dangerous in 1950 the
sociologist david riesman described him as a man steered by radar constantly reading signals from
everyone around him. The Sixth Constitution doesn’t give orders, it arranges the environments, so you
arrive at the right choices. So think about the Mindspace Report which was published in
2010. It was published by the Institute for Government for the Cabinet Office and I will pop a link for it below.
But it lists nine ways to influence behaviour, many of which work below the level of conscious attention.
tension. Its levers include the default option or the pre-ticked box. If Plato’s democratic man
was pushed around by his desires, at least they were his own. Are the sixth man’s desires his own
or have they been shaped for him somewhere upstream where he still believes he’s making
a conscious choice? And that’s what makes it so hard to see because it feels like freedom of
choice. So every constitution in Plato dies from its own excess. So surely the sixth will die from
the absence of anyone in charge once that becomes completely unbearable to everyone. Now we are
incredibly resilient but we can be worn down after years of a system with no face where nobody really
chose and nobody can be blamed. How many times have you been on a call waiting for someone to
be accountable only to be passed from pillar to post for what feels like forever. Eventually we
actually want to see a face, a person in charge. We want to be able to put a face to the name
to look someone in the eye and this is an open door for the champion, the one who says that
he will come in and fix it all. He will be the person with the name and the face that you can see
but we know from Plato’s perspective how that ends. It would just be a loop straight back into
tyranny. So how can we break this loop? Plato hoped for the philosopher king, who would need
at least 50 years of education, not be allowed to own their own property, not be allowed to have a
private family, and be the person who basically least wants the job. Unsurprisingly, he never
found that ruler. But at the end of book nine, Glaucon points out that the ideal city doesn’t
exist anywhere on earth and socrates replies that it doesn’t matter he says in heaven there is laid
up a pattern of it methinks which he who desires may behold and beholding may set his own house
in order the philosopher andy hobbes calls these people philosopher citizens people who take
responsibility for their own thinking instead of waiting up for the right ruler to turn up and as
far as I can see this is the only move that the loop can’t absorb because it doesn’t need
a single champion or a procedure. But of course there’s a catch. In book six Plato says a philosopher
in a corrupt city should keep their head down. But in book seven he contradicts this by saying
those who have climbed out of the cave have to go back into the dark knowing the people there
might kill them for what they say. Plato himself went back to Syracuse three times, twice in an
attempt to turn a tyrant into a philosopher king. So where would you stand? I think that once you
have clarity in your mind you have a duty to help others but I also know this isn’t easy. Plato’s
guardians never worked for a living and thinking takes time. Plato’s tyrant kept his people poor
and busy on purpose. If becoming a philosopher citizen is only available to those with free time
then we have a problem. But it also takes courage which Hobbes has written about too. I think
courage is cheapest early and the longer you leave it the more it will cost us. So where do we start?
Well start with the city inside you. Grow your own wisdom. Take charge of yourself first
and then shed some light back into the cave.
Source: The Conscious Radical