Everything Is F*cked(60)

Plato’s Prediction

English philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead famously said that all of Western philosophy was merely a “series of footnotes to Plato.”23 Any topic you can think of, from the nature of romantic love, to whether there’s such a thing as “truth,” to the meaning of virtue, Plato was likely the first great thinker to expound upon it. Plato was the first to suggest that there was an inherent separation between the Thinking Brain and the Feeling Brain.24 He was the first to argue that one must build character through various forms of self-denial, rather than through self-indulgence.25 Plato was such a badass, the word idea itself comes from him—so, you could say he invented the idea of an idea.26

Interestingly, despite being the godfather of Western civilization, Plato famously claimed that democracy was not the most desirable form of government.27 He believed that democracy was inherently unstable and that it inevitably unleashed the worst aspects of our nature, driving society toward tyranny. He wrote, “Extreme freedom can’t be expected to lead to anything but a change to extreme slavery.”28

Democracies are designed to reflect the will of the people. We’ve learned that people, when left to their own devices, instinctively run away from pain and toward happiness. The problem then emerges when people achieve happiness: It’s never enough. Due to the Blue Dot Effect, they never feel entirely safe or satisfied. Their desires grow in lockstep with the quality of their circumstances.

Eventually, the institutions won’t be able to keep up with the desires of the people. And when the institutions fail to keep up with people’s happiness, guess what happens.

People start blaming the institutions themselves.

Plato said that democracies inevitably lead to moral decay because as they indulge more in fake freedom, people’s values deteriorate and become more childish and self-centered, resulting in the citizenry turning on the democratic system itself. Once childish values take over, people no longer want to negotiate for power, they don’t want to bargain with other groups and other religions, they don’t want to endure pain for the sake of greater freedom or prosperity. What they want instead is a strong leader to come make everything right at a moment’s notice. They want a tyrant.29

There’s a common saying in the United States that “freedom is not free.” The saying is usually used in reference to the military and wars fought and won to protect the values of the country. It’s a way of reminding people that, hey, this shit didn’t just magically happen—thousands of people were killed and/or died for us to sit here and sip overpriced mocha Frappuccinos and say whatever the fuck we want. It’s a reminder that the basic human rights we enjoy (free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press) were earned through a sacrifice against some external force.

But people forget that these rights are also earned through sacrifice against some internal force. Democracy can exist only when you are willing to tolerate views that oppose your own, when you’re willing to give up some things you might want for the sake of a safe and healthy community, when you’re willing to compromise and accept that sometimes things don’t go your way.

Put another way: democracy requires a citizenry of strong maturity and character.

Over the last couple of decades, people seem to have confused their basic human rights with not experiencing any discomfort. People want freedom to express themselves, but they don’t want to have to deal with views that may upset or offend them in some way. They want freedom of enterprise, but they don’t want to pay taxes to support the legal machinery that makes that freedom possible. They want equality, but they don’t want to accept that equality requires that everybody experience the same pain, not that everybody experience the same pleasure.

Freedom itself demands discomfort. It demands dissatisfaction. Because the freer a society becomes, the more each person will be forced to reckon and compromise with views and lifestyles and ideas that conflict with their own. The lower our tolerance for pain, the more we indulge in fake freedoms, the less we will be able to uphold the virtues necessary to allow a free, democratic society to function.

And that’s scary. Because without democracy, we’re really fucked. No, really—empirically, life just gets so much worse without democratic representation, in almost every way.30 And it’s not because democracy is so great. It’s more that a functioning democracy fucks things up less often and less severely than any other form of government. Or, as Churchill famously once said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others.”

The whole reason the world became civilized and everyone stopped slaughtering one another because of their funny hats is because modern social institutions effectively mitigated the destructive forces of hope. Democracy is one of the few religions that manages to allow other religions to live harmoniously alongside it and within it. But when those social institutions are corrupted by the constant need to please people’s Feeling Brains, when people become distrustful and lose faith in the democratic system’s ability to self-correct, then it’s back to the shit show of religious warfare.31 And with the ever-advancing march of technological innovations, each cycle of religious war potentially wreaks more destruction and devastates more human life.32

Plato believed societies were cyclical, bouncing back and forth between freedom and tyranny, relative equality and great inequality. It’s pretty clear after the past twenty-five hundred years that this isn’t exactly true. But there are patterns of political conflict throughout history, and you do see the same religious themes pop up again and again—the radical hierarchy of master morality versus the radical equality of slave morality, the emergence of tyrannical leaders versus the diffuse power of democratic institutions, the struggle of adult virtues against childish extremism. While the “isms” have changed throughout the centuries, the same hope-driven human impulses have been behind each movement. And while each subsequent religion believes it is the ultimate, capital T “Truth” to unite humanity under a single, harmonious banner, so far, each of them has only proven to be partial and incomplete.