On a Philosophical Note

When I first read Plato's Republic, I didn’t turn it into a religion or have some mystical awakening. I just thought, “Okay, this is actually a sharper framework than most of what we use today.” It was direct, precise, and it actually tried to map how different qualities need to be distributed in a functional society. I never fully bought his solution — that rulers should be people who don’t want to rule — but I agreed with the basic diagnosis: power needs internal balance so it doesn’t drift into exploitation.

Where I think he completely breaks is in the assumption that the person who has done the inner work should carry the full weight of everyone else’s ignorance for free. You can’t demand that someone who studied, reflected, grew, and understood human nature then turn around and become the emotional garbage collector for an entire population that refuses to learn anything. It’s the same martyr structure we still repeat today: dump the entire system’s failures onto the one person who actually tried.

And here’s where the modern world is even worse than Plato’s. People pretend they’re politically awake, but they don’t read philosophy, they don’t read metaphysics, they don’t study Hermeticism, they don’t touch anything that might raise their actual understanding of how systems work. They mock the exact topics that require the most literacy to understand — banking structures, media ownership, intelligence agencies, backdoor negotiations, elite networks, “New World Order” conversations, global coordination, corporate consolidation — not because those subjects are inherently ridiculous, but because they’re too undereducated to parse the difference between real institutional dynamics and the caricatures they see online. They laugh at the stuff they should be trying to understand, because it’s easier to roll your eyes than to admit you’ve never studied a single thing about power.

This is the part Plato actually got right: if the population refuses to cultivate understanding, it will always resent whatever leaders it gets. It will elevate the act of stomping around the public square with signs, which nobody at the top even pays attention to. Especially when it concerns money and power. If anything, the catharsis of modern protest is just a convenient pressure release valve, a way for the system to "cut the fat;" billionaires don't take hand-drawn slogans seriously. And because they own most of the media, the system ends up shaping how those protests are framed anyway.

 Everyone hates the corruption and greed they see today — fair enough — but nobody asks whether we have earned anything better. We’re angry that leaders don’t have wisdom, but we mock the very systems of thought that would help us develop any wisdom at all. We ridicule the only traditions that actually address responsibility, hierarchy, inner discipline, and the nature of human behavior. We attack the tools we need while complaining that our rulers are incompetent.

People want the “perfect leader” while refusing to be intellectually serious. We act like voting is the only thing that matters, while our daily level of attention, ambition, discipline, and depth has a far bigger impact on the world than any ballot ever will. A society that won’t raise its level of understanding is always going to produce leaders who mirror its blind spots. That’s not cynicism — it’s just feedback.

So yeah, Plato was smart enough to see that rulers need internal limits or they’ll exploit the position. But he tried to solve it by saying that only someone who doesn’t want power should rule, which just creates another martyr: the person who did the work gets all the responsibility and none of the support. And we’re doing the same thing now — demanding better leaders while refusing to become the kind of people who make better leaders possible.

If we don’t take responsibility for our own level of understanding, the system is going to keep handing us rulers who reflect the exact weaknesses we refuse to confront in ourselves.