
Leadership in crisis – why the West needs Plato more than ever - deepbow
https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/leadership-in-crisis-why-the-west-needs-plato-more-than-ever/
======
DonaldFisk
> The Covid-19 crisis has shocked us by revealing the weakness of Western
> government, particularly in the United States and Britain, and the strength
> of the Chinese government.

> The philosopher and the cult of Plato provide us with both a model and
> inspiration for how to fix the ship of state.

Yet Boris Johnson, the British Prime Minister, graduated in Classics at Oxford
University, and would not only have studied Plato's Republic, but read it in
the original Greek, as part of his course.

~~~
fakedang
Boris Johnson's education at Oxford was less Greek classics and more Oxford
Union, as was that of many current Tory candidates. Of course, the one who led
the UK down the crapshoot of a Brexit path in the first place, David Cameron,
was a first class holder.

------
hcarvalhoalves
The oldest democracy today is ~200 years old, and a modern democracy [1] for
much less - 100 years. Still, we have been talking about democracy for at
least 2300 years.

If Plato had the answers, we should have learned by now. I think the jury is
still out on wether this is just a matter of "bad implementation", or long-
term democracy is an impossibility without degenerating into a dystopia.

Also, funny way to "pick apart" Plato's ideas from a modern lens - e.g.
accepting that we need a caste of thoughtful leaders while at the same time
rejecting eugenics, because we have seen what it leads to, even though it's
the logical conclusion of the former.

[1] No barriers regarding race or gender right to vote.

~~~
diegoholiveira
> If Plato had the answers, we should have learned by now.

The passage of time doesn't implies moral progress, unlike natural sciences
who progress is only forward. What I'm want to mean by this is: we'll do the
same mistakes again and again and again.

~~~
totetsu
Democracy however defined, is ongoing work for all involved.

------
fxtentacle
I think Plato was spot on that when people go into politics for their own
financial gain, the society as a whole will suffer for it.

We need to create systems that make politics attractive to people who do it
out of ideology. I would agree with Plato that character training, or at the
very least testing, is useful and appropriate.

~~~
dwohnitmok
> We need to create systems that make politics attractive to people who do it
> out of ideology.

Is your implication that right now most politicians are not politicians out of
ideology first and foremost, but rather for their own financial gain?

I would take the contrarian view. I would guess the majority of politicians
are politicians because of ideology. Although they may not believe everything
(or perhaps even most of what) they say they do and what they do believe may
change while in office, I would be surprised if they don't have some core
ideology that powers them.

It's otherwise unclear to me why politicians seek re-election so frequently.
In most Western democracies, a person with the opportunity to become a career
politician has far more lucrative job opportunities outside of politics than
within, especially once you've become a high-level politician. If people were
doing it for money, I'd imagine they'd do a single term and then immediately
try to parlay that into another job rather than trying to slug it out term
after term.

The other mildly persuasive explanation to me is enjoying the power of the
office, but the feeling of power is very hard to separate from fervent
ideology.

~~~
vkou
A simple answer may be Darwinism. The politicians that survive are politicians
that seek re-election. The 'why' they originally go into politics (money or
ideology) may be irrelevant as a fitness function for this sort of thing. (And
eventually, as t -> ∞, the percentage of politicians that seek re-election
will -> 100%.)

~~~
dwohnitmok
Darwinism generally arises in a world of fitness where reproduction is the
dominating force. That is if politicians reproduced while in office to form
more politicians and reproduction among politicians was the main source of new
politicians then yes we might have reason to believe that seeking re-election
is an emergent behavior from basic survival.

However, that's not the way politics works.

There is a stable equilibrium where politicians are constantly replenished by
the larger population as they leave office, which holds true as t approaches
infinity. And indeed this is more or less what we observe in Western
societies.

~~~
dwaltrip
Behavior can “reproduce” when it is copied by (or taught to) others. There are
a variety of selective factors that make it more likely for certain copied
behaviors to “survive” and then be copied further. This is cultural evolution.

Of course, much complexity is uncovered when you dig into the details. It
isn’t a perfect analogy but it seems very useful.

~~~
dwohnitmok
By the time we're talking about things like cultural evolution and memetic
propagation, we're getting pretty close to just talking about ideology again.

------
nine_zeros
We just need leaders who are capable. We haven't seen any capacity or desire
to improve human lives from current leadership. We are suffering for our
choices.

~~~
krapp
We could have leaders who are capable. Unfortunately, we would never vote for
them because we'd find them boring, or assume they're venal baby-killing
sociopaths like every other politician, or vote for someone else because we
believe government is inherently evil and should be hamstrung by idiots.

If society treated governance, politics and civic leadership the way it does
any other profession, we would raise up competent leaders the way we do
doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc.

------
082349872349872
Good to see he mentions some of Plato's odder (to our eyes) ideas in _The
Republic_. Add iPhones to them and one arguably winds up close to _1984_ :
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24069572](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24069572)

~~~
dynamite-ready
Take his ideas on procreation, and you'd also end up with a Brave New World.

~~~
082349872349872
load Tinder for the latter?

More seriously, does _1984_ ever address the sex lives of the Inner Party? For
all I know, they're also purely Platonic.

Bonus clip: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZRA-
Dwv86E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZRA-Dwv86E)

------
lapcatsoftware
The last paragraph was a bizarre pivot to China, which no apparent
justification for the analogy. As a totalitarian state, China would be the
first to suppress and oppress philosophers. No freedom of thought. They'd put
Plato to death much faster than Athens did to Socrates.

~~~
fennecfoxen
It's not bizarre. It's the culmination of an unfortunate "democracy is bad"
and even "freedom is bad" undertone in the rest of the author's essay.

Plato of course got a lot going for him, but The Republic never really solved
the problem of making sure you get a philosopher-king instead of a tyrant.
This essay's author declines to mention the possibility of tyrants because he
knows it will undermine his argument badly.

~~~
lapcatsoftware
> The Republic never really solved the problem of making sure you get a
> philosopher-king instead of a tyrant.

I disagree.

"train the guardians through a prolonged education that involves not just
academic education but also character-training designed to ensure that
guardians put the public good above private interests"

"the guardians should be banned from getting married or owning private
property in order to focus their minds on the common good"

The point is that you don't just give any idiot supreme power after they win
an election. The guardians go through lifelong training for rule, and only the
best of the best, the most thoroughly tested, are left at the end of that
process.

~~~
fennecfoxen
This isn’t actually a solution in fact.

------
Barrin92
There's good general stuff in the piece. Governance is important, we do need
better governance, and we need to cultivate virtue and responsibility in
citizens and leaders. That's all true but it's also kind of obvious. That
things go to crap if society is run by private interest, greed or straight up
clowns seems self-evident.

But every time someone brings up old ideas, in this case Plato's philospher
caste, there's an immediate question. If it is so great, and if it worked in
the 19th century, why did it die out? Good things don't vanish randomly.
Whenever someone tries to restore some old form of governance the question
needs to be answered why it died out.

I think for Plato's Republic it's quite obvious. Modern commerce and
technology, mass communication and the information society have melted all
that is solid into air, and there's no barriers in the way of democracy.
Celebrities and businessmen have more to say than the Dean of Harvard and
that's not going to change unless you put technology back into its box, which
is hard to do.

The author brings up China as a modern society that improves governance, and I
think that's true. But Chinese politicians aren't philosopher kings. The CCP
is more like a hyper-competitive, ruthless machine than some kind of school
for the humanities. Xi himself was cast to the countryside for years, people
who make it to the top have to proof themselves over and over, and punishment
can be quite harsh. It's fundamentally still Marxist and technocratic, and
sees economic and technological advance as a driver for pretty much
everything. It's not virtue that matters but Darwinian competition.

Stalin said that Leninism is American effectiveness combined with Russian
revolutionary spirit. I think when China decided to ditch parts of its
socialist economic program but kept it's Marxist political system in place
they created a governing body that embodies that quite well. I don't think
it's possible to recreate that in the West at all.

~~~
lapcatsoftware
> Good things don't vanish randomly. Whenever someone tries to restore some
> old form of governance the question needs to be answered why it died out.

Good things vanish because people forget history, or fail to learn it, and
thus don't understand the reason why the things came to be. Consequently, we
ignorantly and futilely attempt to reinvent the wheel.

------
roenxi
> The Covid-19 crisis has shocked us by revealing the weakness of Western
> government, particularly in the United States and Britain, and the strength
> of the Chinese government.

This is not correct, we don't know how China faired yet. Firstly; they are
probably lying about their case numbers - their case counts are absurdly low.
And secondly, we aren't going to get a clue about what the experience on the
ground is like for the Chinese citizens. It isn't like the Uyghurs situation
was obvious 6 months in. It takes time to figure out what China is doing.

And more Plato isn't going to solve anything. You'd need to be an idiot to
sign up as an honest politician. The only reward is people screaming at you on
the streets. Corruption is the only way to get rewards that justify the
vitriol. It'd be good to change that equilibrium.

~~~
lapcatsoftware
> And more Plato isn't going to solve anything. You'd need to be an idiot to
> sign up as an honest politician.

Plato knew that. The role of guardian wasn't exactly voluntary. The
philosopher-kings were compelled to rule. The only rulers you can trust are
those who don't seek power.

------
chrisco255
I do not look to China's Covid-19 response as worthy of emulation. People were
literally bolted into their apartment complexes. China has a gross disrespect
for individual rights that the West should never, ever adopt. We don't even
know what the extent of Covid deaths are in China. We actually have no clue,
because all information is tightly controlled by the CCP. Anything coming from
China should be viewed through a lens of skepticism.

Meanwhile, from the viewpoint of Covid, I think Sweden showed that it would
have been just the same results if we simply left people to make their own
choices and decisions about how to react based on their own personal risk
profiles and tolerance. This idea of centrally managing a mega region like
Europe or the United States is absurd, and bound to fail. The states in the
U.S. with the tightest regulations on Covid have had the highest death rates
and the highest amount of social unrest. It's really hard to argue from that
perspective that tighter, more centralized control of the citizenry is
warranted, even without addressing the moral implications of it.

~~~
blululu
A lot to unpack here. China's response to Covid is maybe not the best, but
Taiwan provides an excellent example of how a democracy can responsibly react
to a crisis. The author's point that western governments have become woefully
ineffective can be seen in other examples. A lot of civil institutions in the
west are languishing and this should be improved regardless of what's
happening in some foreign country.

Finally, the Sweden example is pretty demonstrably false. Compare the death
rate between Denmark and Sweden (very similar cultures) and you will see the
effect of doing nothing. The reality is that the US has broad bipartisan
consensus to do very little about Covid and consequently we have seen very
little progress in putting a stop to the disease and getting things running
properly again. There are loose regulations, but they are not enforced. Most
of the country's response has been purely voluntary on the part of citizens.

~~~
hartator
> China's response to Covid is maybe not the best, but Taiwan provides an
> excellent

Taiwan is not China.

~~~
cttet
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan)

------
bccdee
What a bad essay. I'm shocked that standards for writing have dropped so low.

Consider this paragraph:

> Democracy’s fetishisation of freedom inevitably gives way to anarchy.
> Fathers pander to their sons, teachers to their pupils, humans to animals,
> and ‘the minds of the citizens become so sensitive that the least vestige of
> restraint is resented as intolerable’. Anarchy produces class struggle, as
> the poor attack the rich and the rich retaliate; class struggle produces war
> and disorder. When all this becomes intolerable the masses will turn to a
> dictator who can restore order.

It's meaningless! Democracy apparently makes "humans pander to animals." Why
does this happen? Just because! The author spits out this weird gob of
nonsense and continues as if he's made a real argument that democracy always
leads to anarchy (which, confusingly, leads to class conflict, and not the
other way around).

He does mention uneducated voters making bad decisions earlier, but that's a
whole other can of worms that he never even digs into (i.e. can we fix this
with education reforms, or by introducing new journalistic standards into
media?). He just throws it out there as if it's all the proof he needs that
only "wise elites" can save us from ourselves.

How about this part:

> Thus the paradox at the heart of tyranny: even though tyrants have absolute
> power over other people, they have no power over themselves. Slaves to their
> own passions – ‘ill-governed’ in their own souls as Plato puts it – they use
> their positions to inflict those passions on the entire population. A
> tyranny is a psycho-drama in which everyone is caught up in the tyrant’s
> raging ego.

This is flatly untrue. Let's look at some of the greatest tyrants of the 21st
century. Xi Jinping, Vladmir Putin, the Saudis... we could go on. Are any of
these people particularly prone to temper tantrums? "Slaves of their own
passions"? No! They're ruthless, disciplined, and experts at consolidating and
leveraging power. This weird psychoanalysis of authoritarianism has no basis
in fact -- it's just storytelling.

Finally, scraping away the abysmal analysis, we get the actual argument:

> The metaphor of the ship is a way of driving home Plato’s wider point about
> the importance of ‘guardians’. Plato argues that a successful republic is
> run by a class of people whose job it is to think about the long-term
> success of the polis.

The trouble with this is that putting a discreet class of people in charge of
society leads to those people acting in their own interests. The whole
motivating reason behind democracy is for the public to have a veto on their
leadership so that leaders can't act in their own interest. The author's
solution is "let's educate our leaders not to act in their own interest," but
that's practically a childish suggestion. What part of history has ever
suggested that you can educate humans out of their innate instinct to act in
self-interest?The author provides basically no real examples. Who gets to
decide how these rulers are educated? The rulers? Wow I'm sure we can trust
them not to act in their self-interest in that regard. After all, they
"educated" themselves not to.

They did include a couple vague gestures at evidence:

> Benjamin Jowett, the master of Balliol from 1870 until his death in 1893,
> devoted his life to two great projects: producing a definitive edition of
> Plato and turning his college into a production line for Platonic guardians.

> [...]

> There was a certain amount of priggishness in the cult of Plato. But it
> nevertheless produced an elite that was remarkably public spirited by
> today’s standards: too dignified to put its fingers in the cookie jar and
> too well-educated to be blown hither and thither by the latest intellectual
> fads. The old elite didn’t hog publicity for the sake of publicity – most of
> them were happy to work in the background without any public credit – and
> they wouldn’t dream of piling up vast private fortunes. This was a world of
> modest but tasteful cottages in the country, not swanky apartments in
> Belgravia or Manhattan. Dignified public service was its own reward.

But again, that says nothing. Who exactly are we referring to here? Which
individuals led so well? By which metrics? How do they compare against other
leaders? No actual evidence, just a bunch of emotionally-loaded language. The
period in question (19th century England) was absolutely abysmal for workers'
rights, by the way. It was the workers' movement -- a grassroots populist
movement -- that ultimately led to pro-worker reforms. Not "wise Platonic
leaders."

TL;DR this article doesn't make any real arguments, and relies on emotionally-
loaded language and appeals to the nobility of elites rather than the material
conditions of history.

~~~
082349872349872
_1984_ owes much to Orwell's boarding school (pre-Oxbridge) experiences.
Orwell's having been second rate, they studied strictly to the test, and never
read entire works, but I find it plausible he read _The Republic_ on his own.
Which leaves the question: does _1984_ resemble _The Republic_ because Orwell
was directly making fun of Plato's ideas[1], or because his school was
stanning Jowett who was stanning the greeks, and playing telephone with Plato
produces Oceania?

[1] Goldstein explicitly states the Inner Party / guardians _are a
meritocracy_. (Orwell's observation on equality of educational chances is that
children of the Inner Party do not _in principle_ become inner party members
themselves.) Life is difficult for the Outer Party, because, having failed
their quals, they must rely on ideology over aptitude to keep their positions.
(The yanks, innovative as ever, have shown us the IngSoc model works even
better with _two_ mutually antagonistic yet still self-policing outer parties.
Competition between outer parties frees up inner party members to do, without
having to waste time keeping everyone else down, whatever it is that inner
party people do.)

Bonus track:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEeBAO5o3aU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEeBAO5o3aU)

------
Kednicma
Right, we need a tough-guy philosopher-king who wrestles his opponents into
submission.

~~~
krapp
Minus the philosophy, we have that now in the US.

Tough guy persona, a king in all but name, and formerly a wrestling heel[0].

[0][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkghtyxZ6rc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkghtyxZ6rc)

~~~
Kednicma
Yes. I suppose my sarcasm didn't come through very well. To paraphrase a
popular meme, Plato is only known to us today via his wrestling nickname. His
opinion on leadership was that a philosopher-king, somebody both thoughtful
and powerful, should dictate society. In his own life, he was politically
entangled, but he was never given the power that he felt he earned.

I'm also reminded of Idiocracy, which checks all of the same boxes. I don't
know whether Mike Judge was thinking of Plato, though.

