Looking in on Congress from time to time, one sees them caving again and again to corporate lobbyists at the expense of the present or future public interest. The problem seems simple: the overwhelming majority of those we elect won't ever seriously risk losing luxury or privilege. Since money buys luxury and privilege, money buys them. Some countries tried to solve that problem by designating as rulers people who had a natural and automatic claim to luxury and privilege-- a hereditary aristocracy. We can sometimes achieve the same result in the U.S. by electing someone very rich to high office. But overall, none of these solutions has worked very well, and the record is dismal.
There's another odd corollary: people who can't imagine giving up their extraordinary comforts and privileges also cannot imagine that other people would ever seriously revise downward their much more modest ways of living. That interjects hopelessness into discussions of fuel conservation and sustainable living.
I think Plato had it right. The political problem is to give the leadership something to do that they like better than wallowing in luxury and exercising privilege. In a representative government, the problem becomes: giving lots of people an alternative source of motivation. But Plato ran into a terrible problem: the activity he chose, philosophic contemplation, required a 30 -40 year training period to get established. The state had to be turned into an education machine to produce rulers capable of being disinterested. And, of course, self-interested rulers have no motivation whatever to produce that sort of a system. That's the line of thought that made Plato into an implicit revolutionary, in some important ways also an implicit terrorist.
Our job as philosophers and as political actors is to find a solution to the political problem as Plato defines it in the Republic. The playing field hasn't changed in any important way.
Posted by shea0017 at May 8, 2006 9:45 AM