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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

#21

Post by Fishysoup »

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #8

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 a…

Eugenics isn't the logical conclusion of the "leader caste" because we know that not only is it deeply unethical, it also doesn't work. We don't really know what makes someone "better", we don't know how to do it, and we don't even know how to define "better". Stephen Hawking contributed an enormous amount to society despite having a devastating genetic condition. Note, correcting devastating conditions in newborns (somatically, not in the germline - i.e. for individuals, not their descendants) might be OK, the only issue is where you draw the line. If you correct for sickle cell anemia or cancer prone-ness, should you also correct for depression? (assuming we ever figure out how to do that).

I think you have a good point about democracy maybe not benig the full answer. It seems to be a very flexible/enduring system so far (more so than e.g. fascism or communism), but technology might poke huge holes in it regarding free will (manipulating people's emotions to vote for someone, for example). Yuval Harari talks about this a lot in "21 ideas for the 21st century".

Re: Leadership in crisis – why the West needs Plato more than ever

#22

Post by Fishysoup »

fxtentacle wrote: post #6

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.

Maybe we ought to "summon" people semi-randomly to work in politics for a few years, the way you get summoned to a jury or get drafted in a war. It's gonna suck for many of these people, but at least it's gonna make it harder for career politicians and predators to assume office.

Issue is you have to protect the "choosing" process from interference.

Re: Leadership in crisis – why the West needs Plato more than ever

#23

Post by krapp »

Kednicma wrote: post #15

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

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

Re: Leadership in crisis – why the West needs Plato more than ever

#24

Post by totetsu »

diegoholiveira wrote: post #10
hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #8

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 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.

Democracy however defined, is ongoing work for all involved.

Re: Leadership in crisis – why the West needs Plato more than ever

#25

Post by Kednicma »

krapp wrote: post #23
Kednicma wrote: post #15

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

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

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.

Re: Leadership in crisis – why the West needs Plato more than ever

#26

Post by vkou »

Fishysoup wrote: post #21
hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #8

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 a…

Eugenics isn't the logical conclusion of the "leader caste" because we know that not only is it deeply unethical, it also doesn't work. We don't really know what makes someone "better", we don't know how to do it, and we don't even know how to define "better". Stephen Hawking contributed an enormous amount to society despite having a devastating genetic condition. Note, correcting devastating conditions in newborns (…

To veer off the topic of eugenics a little.

> We don't really know what makes someone "better", we don't know how to do it, and we don't even know how to define "better".

All of your problems go away if we use a "better" definition of "better".

What makes someone a "better" leader? That they were educated and raised in a "better" way. What makes that way "better"? Well, it should be evident - it, after all, produces "better" leaders.

True, it does lead to a kind of circular thinking, but that's allright - a lot of ink gets spilled to justify subjective preferences on objective grounds, like the ones I just described. If people can feel utterly convinced that by applying such circular criteria, they can demarcate that one piece of music is objectively better than another, surely those people would feel just as justified to use such circular criteria to decide that one leader's education, and upbringing, and social background is objectively better than another.

As long as you can let current leaders pick future leaders, you will indeed have a definition of "better". You might not like that definition very much, though.

Re: Leadership in crisis – why the West needs Plato more than ever

#27

Post by nostrademons »

fxtentacle wrote: post #6

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.

The most dangerous leaders in history have been those who do it out of ideology. That group includes Hitler, Lenin, Mao, bin Laden, et al.

We want people who are attracted to politics out of a sense of responsibility. Folks who feel a bond of both trust and obligation towards the people they lead. Both ideology and financial gain optimize for the wrong things.

Re: Leadership in crisis – why the West needs Plato more than ever

#28

Post by vkou »

dwohnitmok wrote: post #16
fxtentacle wrote: post #6

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.

> 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…

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%.)

Re: Leadership in crisis – why the West needs Plato more than ever

#29

Post by vkou »

nostrademons wrote: post #27
fxtentacle wrote: post #6

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.

The most dangerous leaders in history have been those who do it out of ideology. That group includes Hitler, Lenin, Mao, bin Laden, et al. We want people who are attracted to politics out of a sense of responsibility . Folks who feel a bond of both trust and obligation towards the people they lead. Both ideology and financial gain optimize for the wrong things.

> The most dangerous leaders in history have been those who do it out of ideology.

Does this also include the founding fathers (Or Abraham Lincoln? How does he stack up, compared to the likes of Jefferson Davis, or many of the other defenders of an unjust status quo?) Were they not ideologically motivated? They certainly spilled a lot of ideologically-sounding ink, and started an ideologically-motivated revolution, and then made a lot of ideologically-motivated decisions. Or do we define ideology to explicitly consider our current orthodoxy to not be ideological? [1]

Lenin and Mao certainly had enough of a sense of responsibility. Just because you disagree with their ideology[2] (And agree with that of the founding fathers) does not mean that they didn't feel that it was their responsibility to bring about what they thought was a better future.

> Folks who feel a bond of both trust and obligation towards the people they lead.

This is, in my opinion, actually a much better litmus test then the rather subjective 'ideology' versus 'responsibility' question (Which hinges entirely on where you stand on an ideological spectrum.)

[1] That would be the 'everyone but me is an ideologue' argument. I don't think it's a great one.

[2] It doesn't need to be said that most people would disagree with their methods, so let's not veer into that tangent.

Re: Leadership in crisis – why the West needs Plato more than ever

#30

Post by dwohnitmok »

vkou wrote: post #28
dwohnitmok wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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%.)

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.

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