2400 Years, and the Logic is Still Irrefutable

2400 Years, and the Logic is Still Irrefutable

The main themes of this blog have been, since day one: Freedom, Individual Rights, Education, Personal Responsibility.

I have posted, over and over, on the topic of our failing education system and how it has contributed to our national decline.

I have stated, over and over, that our Republican form of government is the best one yet devised to protect the rights of its citizens and promote their prosperity and safety.

And yet 2400 years or so ago, Socrates accurately predicted what would happen to a nation dedicated to the ideal of freedom.

Please read How Democracies Become Tyrannies, by Ed Kaitz in American Thinker. A couple of excerpts:

Back in 1959 the philosopher Eric Hoffer had this to say about Americans and America:

For those who want to be left alone to realize their capacities and talents this is an ideal country.

That was then. This is now. Flash forward fifty years to the election of Barack Obama and a hard left leaning Democrat Congress. What Americans want today, apparently, is a government that has no intention of leaving any of us alone.

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Near the end of the Republic Socrates decides to drive this point home by showing Adeimantus what happens to a regime when its parents and educators neglect the proper moral education of its children. In the course of this chilling illustration Adeimantus comes to discover a dark and ominous secret: without proper moral conditioning a regime's "defining principle" will be the source of its ultimate destruction. For democracy, that defining principle is freedom. According to Socrates, freedom makes a democracy but freedom also eventually breaks a democracy.

For Socrates, democracy's "insatiable desire for freedom and neglect of other things" end up putting it "in need of a dictatorship." The short version of his theory is that the combination of freedom and poor education in a democracy render the citizens incapable of mastering their impulses and deferring gratification. The reckless pursuit of freedom leads the citizens to raze moral barriers, deny traditional authority, and abandon established methods of education. Eventually, this uninhibited quest for personal freedom forces the public to welcome the tyrant. Says Socrates: "Extreme freedom can't be expected to lead to anything but a change to extreme slavery, whether for a private individual or for a city."

Read the whole damned thing.

And ponder, once again, how we got here.

(Just a note, but I fully expect Markadelphia to either ignore it, or go off on a really entertaining tangent or twelve.)