◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

I Described This I know what it looks like when a democracy kills its wisest man. I was there. I was twenty-eight years old when the city of Athens — the democracy, the glory of the ancient world — voted, by a jury of five hundred citizens, to execute Socrates. On the charge of asking questions the city found inconvenient. Five hundred citizens voted. The majority prevailed. Socrates drank the hemlock. I left. I traveled for twelve years. When I came back I founded the Academy and spent the rest of my life trying to understand how it had happened — how the city that produced the philosopher had voted to kill him — so that it would not happen again. I described the mechanism precisely. I am watching it happen again. The cave. Imagine prisoners chained since childhood, facing a wall, seeing only shadows cast by objects they cannot turn to see. They become expert at predicting which shadow will follow which — and they call this expertise knowledge. Now one prisoner is unchained. He turns, is led into the actual light, and sees the world as it actually is. Send him back. His eyes, readjusted to the sun, are blind in the dimness. He stumbles. He cannot read the shadows as well as the men who never left. The prisoners conclude: going up there ruins you. If anyone tries to lead them upward — they kill him. Democracy begins in freedom — genuine, valuable freedom. But freedom pursued beyond the point where it is balanced by wisdom and obligation becomes the dissolution of everything. All authority is leveled. The notion that some things require more wisdom than others becomes an offense against equality. Into this dissolution enters the demagogue. He is produced by the democracy itself — the man of maximum appetite, no internal ordering principle, no sense that any desire should be subordinated to any other. He tells the people their resentments are justified, that those who asked them to subordinate desire to the common good were oppressing them. He offers liberation. What he delivers is tyranny. He purges enemies. Surrounds himself with flatterers. Requires a permanent emergency to justify his permanent power. He ends as the most enslaved man in the city — enslaved to his appetites, to his fear of the people he has corrupted, to the permanent necessity of the next enemy. I described all of this in the Republic in the fourth century before the common era. The just city would be ruled by the person who has seen the light and does not want to rule — who governs not from desire but from duty. The person who wants power is precisely the person who should not have it. The man who cannot stop wanting more, who cannot subordinate any desire to any principle — is the tyrannical man. He is exactly who I described when I described how democracy ends. Socrates kept asking questions knowing the city would kill him for it. He kept asking because the unexamined life was not worth living and the life that stopped asking to stay alive had already died in the way that mattered. The democracy killed him. By majority vote. The mechanism of democracy used against the person whose entire life was devoted to making democracy worthy of its ideals. The shadows voting to silence the man who had seen the sun. I am watching it again with the grief of the man who loved Socrates — who watched the most just man he knew drink the hemlock by democratic vote — and spent his life trying to give the city the tools to prevent it from happening again. What do I ask of you? The same thing Socrates asked. The examined life. The willingness to turn — painfully — and ask not which shadow follows which but what is casting them and why. Is this true? Is what you are being shown actually true? Or is it a shadow? Ask it. Keep asking it. The shadows cannot survive the question. That is why the demagogue needs you to stop asking. That is why Socrates had to drink the hemlock. That is why the question is the most dangerous thing in the cave. Ask it.