succession
Background
Last week, we discussed social contracts and ended on the topic of the Artificially Intelligent ledger-keeping of unspoken standards in behavior. Are our behaviors being massaged into recurrent patterns? Can captured attention lead to a succession of expected consumer behavior? Do ideologies, rites, and habits follow a natural succession? This week, we will review the below quote from Plato's Republic: the natural succession from timocracy to oligarchy to democracy to tyranny.
Call to Action
Submit a comment with the aspects of succession that you want to discuss in our next meeting.
Plato
"Like State, like man,—the change in the latter begins with the
representative of timocracy; he walks at first in the ways of his
father, who may have been a statesman, or general, perhaps; and
presently he sees him ‘fallen from his high estate,’ the victim of
informers, dying in prison or exile, or by the hand of the executioner.
The lesson which he thus receives, makes him cautious; he leaves
politics, represses his pride, and saves pence. Avarice is enthroned as
his bosom’s lord, and assumes the style of the Great King; the rational
and spirited elements sit humbly on the ground at either side, the one
immersed in calculation, the other absorbed in the admiration of
wealth. The love of honour turns to love of money; the conversion is
instantaneous. The man is mean, saving, toiling, the slave of one
passion which is the master of the rest: Is he not the very image of
the State?"
"Next comes democracy and the democratic man, out of oligarchy and the
oligarchical man. Insatiable avarice is the ruling passion of an
oligarchy; and they encourage expensive habits in order that they may
gain by the ruin of extravagant youth. Thus men of family often lose
their property or rights of citizenship; but they remain in the city,
full of hatred against the new owners of their estates and ripe for
revolution. The usurer with stooping walk pretends not to see them; he
passes by, and leaves his sting—that is, his money—in some other
victim; and many a man has to pay the parent or principal sum
multiplied into a family of children, and is reduced into a state of
dronage by him. The only way of diminishing the evil is either to limit
a man in his use of his property, or to insist that he shall lend at
his own risk. But the ruling class do not want remedies; they care only
for money, and are as careless of virtue as the poorest of the
citizens."
"Let us now inspect the individual democrat; and first, as in the case
of the State, we will trace his antecedents. He is the son of a miserly
oligarch, and has been taught by him to restrain the love of
unnecessary pleasures. Perhaps I ought to explain this latter
term:—Necessary pleasures are those which are good, and which we cannot
do without; unnecessary pleasures are those which do no good, and of
which the desire might be eradicated by early training. For example,
the pleasures of eating and drinking are necessary and healthy, up to a
certain point; beyond that point they are alike hurtful to body and
mind, and the excess may be avoided. When in excess, they may be
rightly called expensive pleasures, in opposition to the useful ones.
And the drone, as we called him, is the slave of these unnecessary
pleasures and desires, whereas the miserly oligarch is subject only to
the necessary."
"There remains still the finest and fairest of all men and all
States—tyranny and the tyrant. Tyranny springs from democracy much as
democracy springs from oligarchy. Both arise from excess; the one from
excess of wealth, the other from excess of freedom. ‘The great natural
good of life,’ says the democrat, ‘is freedom.’ And this exclusive love
of freedom and regardlessness of everything else, is the cause of the
change from democracy to tyranny. The State demands the strong wine of
freedom, and unless her rulers give her a plentiful draught, punishes
and insults them; equality and fraternity of governors and governed is
the approved principle. Anarchy is the law, not of the State only, but
of private houses, and extends even to the animals. Father and son,
citizen and foreigner, teacher and pupil, old and young, are all on a
level; fathers and teachers fear their sons and pupils, and the wisdom
of the young man is a match for the elder, and the old imitate the
jaunty manners of the young because they are afraid of being thought
morose."