Hi reddit philosophers!

I’ll admit upfront that I don’t really consider myself a philosopher and generally avoided the subject like the plague (other than an elective that I took that some friends had tricked me into thinking were easy credits, and like one philosophy club meeting I was hoodwinked into attending for the free Chinese food, which I regretted other than the Chinese food).

I also either didn’t read or don’t really remember reading Plato’s Republic (sorry if it was on the syllabus!) and I secretly suspect people are like taking old Plato’s words out of context, because I like that guy a lot, possibly because he reminds me of this colorful, funny-smelling clay substitute that I coveted as a child.

With that b.s. caveat out of the way, here’s my link to my link to my original showerthought.

So here’s Britannica’s summary of the philosopher-king concept, and here’s a briefer summary that someone else pointed me to, wherein Plato seems to be bemoaning the fact that the so-called “perfect” society can only exist if “kings become philosophers or philosophers are made kings.”

So my point is that you can just slot in (SET = everyone), having been societally educated and trained towards being “philosophers,” whatever that means, and make them mutual “kings” in terms of the decision-making function granted to philosopher-kings even in the supposedly ideal aristocracy model, which does admittedly do a pretty cool job of trying to create society-centric functions and slotting in people who are good at and inclined to perform those functions into those slots.

This philosopher-king idea also reminded me of this “wangdao” or “kingly way” concept of an enlightened and benevolent dictator that appears in Confucian Chinese philosophy, which ended up clashing with legalism for like a weirdly extended period about the fundamental nature of humans, I think mostly because it became a feud and they just wanted to fight.

Like it was pretty obvious to all involved that people could be BOTH:

• helped to be better, kinder and more excellent to each other (the real point of the kingly way proponents, in my view),

AND

• real fucking dicks sometimes, or maybe even a lot, depending on your point of view, but regardless you wanted a system that protected from that sort of behavior it (the real point of the Mohists, in my view).

Which suggests that instead of arguing about who’s incrementally more correct about human nature, we should really have been focusing on putting in place a system that both encourages people to be better and also prevents the system from abuse from bad actors (which is effectively what it ended up being irl anyway, just maybe not in like the best way it could have).

So yeah. False choice. Make everyone more excellent and give everyone a voice in any decision-making that affects them, then you can bypass the need for any kooky dictatorships (regardless of name).

Edit: Punctuation, links, etc.