Plato, copy of Silanion, Capitoline Museums
Originally posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2014
As the great contemporary philosopher Karl Popper (teacher and inspiration of George Soros) teaches in The Open Society and its Enemies, Plato is the proto-totalitarian and a great enemy of liberty and of social welfare. Many totalitarian ideas current today, both in academe and the worlds of politics and policy, can be traced to, or at least correlate with, Plato. Totalitarian is a shocking word. It is fit for a shocking thing. The replacement by tokens of gold has a rich totalitarian provenance.
It therefore is notable that Plato, in addition to calling for holding women, children, and property in common (a value extolled in the Communist Manifesto), Plato also called for the prohibition of the ownership of gold and silver, holding citizens under his Laws to the use of mere tokens. Plato, The Laws, Book V (translation by Jowett):
The first and highest form of the state and of the government and of the law is that in which there prevails most widely the ancient saying, that “Friends have all things in common.” Whether there is anywhere now, or will ever be, this communion of women and children and of property, in which the private and individual is altogether banished from life, and things which are by nature private, such as eyes and ears and hands, have become common, and in some way see and hear and act in common, and all men express praise and blame and feel joy and sorrow on the same occasions, and whatever laws there are unite the city to the utmost-whether all this is possible or not, I say that no man, acting upon any other principle, will ever constitute a state which will be truer or better or more exalted in virtue.
Further, the law enjoins that no private man shall be allowed to possess gold and silver, but only coin for daily use, which is almost necessary in dealing with artisans, and for payment of hirelings, whether slaves or immigrants, by all those persons who require the use of them. Wherefore our citizens, as we say, should have a coin passing current among themselves, but not accepted among the rest of mankind; with a view, however, to expeditions and journeys to other lands-for embassies, or for any other occasion which may arise of sending out a herald, the state must also possess a common Hellenic currency. If a private person is ever obliged to go abroad, let him have the consent of the magistrates and go; and if when he returns he has any foreign money remaining, let him give the surplus back to the treasury, and receive a corresponding sum in the local currency. And if he is discovered to appropriate it, let it be confiscated, and let him who knows and does not inform be subject to curse and dishonour equally him who brought the money, and also to a fine not less in amount than the foreign money which has been brought back.
So lustful are philosophers — our modern day academics and nomenklatura — to become “philosopher-kings” that ideas such as these are again and again perpetrated on society. Such ideas consistently prove to make social conditions worse, rather than better, as well as infringing on human dignity.
Let those who aspire to a “state which will be truer or better or more exalted in virtue” consider the empirical record and recognize that the use of gold as a standard repeatedly proven, in the laboratory of history, far superior to all totalitarian regimes of which Plato’s work are progenitor.
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