Leadership in crisis – why the West needs Plato more than ever
What a bad essay. I&#x27;m shocked that standards for writing have dropped so low.<p>Consider this paragraph:<p>&gt; 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.<p>It&#x27;s meaningless! Democracy apparently makes &quot;humans pander to animals.&quot; Why does this happen? Just because! The author spits out this weird gob of nonsense and continues as if he&#x27;s made a real argument that democracy always leads to anarchy (which, confusingly, leads to class conflict, and not the other way around).<p>He does mention uneducated voters making bad decisions earlier, but that&#x27;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&#x27;s all the proof he needs that only &quot;wise elites&quot; can save us from ourselves.<p>How about this part:<p>&gt; 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.<p>This is flatly untrue. Let&#x27;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? &quot;Slaves of their own passions&quot;? No! They&#x27;re ruthless, disciplined, and experts at consolidating and leveraging power. This weird psychoanalysis of authoritarianism has no basis in fact -- it&#x27;s just storytelling.<p>Finally, scraping away the abysmal analysis, we get the actual argument:<p>&gt; 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.<p>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&#x27;t act in their own interest. The author&#x27;s solution is &quot;let&#x27;s educate our leaders not to act in their own interest,&quot; but that&#x27;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&#x27;m sure we can trust them not to act in their self-interest in that regard. After all, they &quot;educated&quot; themselves not to.<p>They did include a couple vague gestures at evidence:<p>&gt; 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.<p>&gt; [...]<p>&gt; 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.<p>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&#x27; rights, by the way. It was the workers&#x27; movement -- a grassroots populist movement -- that ultimately led to pro-worker reforms. Not &quot;wise Platonic leaders.&quot;<p>TL;DR this article doesn&#x27;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.