Republic VIII: From Oligarchy to Democracy

What I found most interesting in book VIII of Plato’s republic was his account of the transition between an oligarchy and a democracy and how unfettered freedom has a disastrous effect on a society.  I think his insights have much to speak to our culture today. 

The oligarchy is ruled by those who have wealth.  The oligarchic soul is characterized by the love of wealth and one’s willingness to suppress all unnecessary desires and be ruled only by the ones necessary to pursue an orderly life and increase wealth.  One can see that the United States, although perhaps formed under the pretense of democracy, was founded as a kind of oligarchy as Plato describes it.  Only white male landowners could vote, securing the rule to be with the wealthy.   Wealth was the chief aim, and the cotton trade and commerce were pursued even in the face of self-evidently immoral behaviors, from the elimination of Native Americans to the treatment of African Americans.  A love for wealth characterized the primary goals and aims of the society, which arguably lasted from America’s founding through the current baby boomer generation.  But over time there has gradually been a transition from this white male landowner ruled society to a true democracy, where every man and woman, rich and poor, has a free voice.  Now “freedom” in American has come to be “define[d] as the good” (562b).   America people, now that they have “full freedom and freedom of speech” and “license to do what [one] wants”; it has become a place where one “arrange[s] his own life in whatever manner pleases him” (557b). “Tolerance” (568b) is now the key word, where acceptance and equality of everyone has become the chief aim.  Affirmative action programs, the LGBT movement, the sexual revolution, and the shameless actions of celebrities and cultural figures (e.g. Miley Cyrus) all show the moral erosion which happens as a result of valuing freedom as the ultimate good.  Unlike the baby boomer generation and its protestant work ethic, whereby people were willing to be ruled by “necessary desires” in pursuit of the American dream, all desires are now given equal footing.  Socrates says, “For if someone tells him [the democratic man] that some pleasures belong to fine and good desires and others to evil ones and that he must pursue and value the former and restrain and enslave the latter, he denies all this and declares that all pleasures are equal and must be valued equally” (531c).  This effect of putting every desire on equal footing has become so pervasive, it is not just limited to the masses or uneducated; we even see desire-fulfillment theory held up as ‘the good’ in metaethical philosophical accounts of morality!