Leadership in crisis – why the West needs Plato more than ever
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Leadership in crisis – why the West needs Plato more than ever
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Re: Leadership in crisis – why the West needs Plato more than ever
#2Good 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
Re: Leadership in crisis – why the West needs Plato more than ever
#3I 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.
Re: Leadership in crisis – why the West needs Plato more than ever
#4We 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.
Re: Leadership in crisis – why the West needs Plato more than ever
#5Good 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
Take his ideas on procreation, and you'd also end up with a Brave New World.
Re: Leadership in crisis – why the West needs Plato more than ever
#6I 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.
Re: Leadership in crisis – why the West needs Plato more than ever
#7> 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.
Re: Leadership in crisis – why the West needs Plato more than ever
#8The 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.
Re: Leadership in crisis – why the West needs Plato more than ever
#9I 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 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.
Re: Leadership in crisis – why the West needs Plato more than ever
#10The 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 a…
> 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.