Easy Way Out

In all brilliant theories that have ever been conceived by respectable philosophers or thinkers lie excellent critiques of the nature of structures and institutions and draw our attention astutely to certain natures of man that have been left out by those structures and institutions. Plato drew our attention towards the lack of objective justice when "might is right" and believed that man lives best when he is well placed in the divine order dictated by objective truth and justice. Hobbes raised very important concerns about the necessity of peace in order to merely survive as dignified beings, and so touches on the need for a 'Leviathan' to prevent man from falling into a state of anarchy. Locke criticized the stifling nature of the state in preventing us from being free, independent and equal beings. Marx attacked the alienating nature of industrialization and capitalism, drawing our attention towards the fact that we are, ultimately, social beings.

The inevitable flaw that accompanies every brilliant theory, though, is in its attempt to rationally propose a strategy based on its critique for man to follow and attain some form of ideal end. Even worse is our glaring incapability as human beings to carry out grand strategies, because an ideal end requires sacrifice and the tendency for self-interest can never be completely pushed aside. The greatest 'flaw', if I were to indulge in a loaded word, of our nature is in the tendency for some men to even use the proposed theory to their self-serving advantage. We've seen this play out with all the thinkers I had mentioned. Their good intentions eventually provided the legitimacy for various forms of tyranny to occur, such as totalitarianism, fascism and rampant corporatization, to name a few.

Were we never meant to achieve ideal ends? Are utopian goals an evil in itself? Why has there never been a theory that can work perfectly? It seems like, as beings torn between knowing and not knowing, and having intelligence but being of limited perceptibility, the best of us are capable of providing sobering accounts of how drastically wrong we were and illuminating what we are as human beings, but are never quite capable of proposing a game plan that can cover all the loopholes that our nature can exploit.

If there was a theory I would consider 'most right' though, it would reside among the circles of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and later St Thomas Aquinas. They were primarily concerned with the 'shaping of the soul' from young. What this essentially means is that people should be taught virtues and should be allowed to interact based on shared morals that were derived from objective principles of truth and justice, rather than on rules and laws. When the sensibilities of society are already well established, a population made up of enlightened and compassionate citizens should fare better than any other population that has to depend on rules and regulations to correct evils.

The problem with this plan, of course, is its immense difficulty in implementation, far greater than any other easier-way-out ideology that exists for states to utilize today. And even then, the concept of states and sovereignty itself is a recent and proximate phenomenon, borne out of Hobbesian and Machiavellian prescriptions.

Greek Political Philosophy Ranting

One should forgive me for my constant and perhaps almost irritable pining for the intellectual past when one understands how I, in specifically my own capacity, learn that 'academy' comes from the Greek root words of aka-demos, which means away from the people.

Anyone training for intellectual profession in the pure sense as defined in the past did so in small clusters isolated away from big city areas and common folk. And it wasn't elitism that came along with it but instead a very deep and profound respect for wisdom.

How wonderfully ideal!

The modern layman may wonder why anyone should care so much about the training of these wisequacks; in fact our faculties in Singapore dabbling with wisdom along these lines - philosophy, politics, religion - struggle to get funding if they don't bundle such forms of education with some other economically-viable packages with the appeal to other 'more important' institutions, such as corporations and the government.

But therein lies the answer. Knowledge and wisdom in the ideal past was a valuable resource worth investing in, because knowledge ensured that society gets its due back from the investment placed in these scholars and intellectuals and their years of mastering wisdom. With that kind of respect for wisdom, you'd expect to find a society that wants to live in harmony, because that is what the best wisdom provides. But we don't get that anymore because in our modern world, knowledge and objective truth is irrelevant. Money and power is the be all end all. Intentionally or not, this is the kind of world capitalism gives rise to. There is no justice - laws as we see them today across the globe are not meant to restore equity in the balance but are instead enacted to preserve the power of the ruling elite.


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It is also fascinating to learn that the modern English word 'enthusiasm' comes from the Greek word 'enthusiasmos', which refers to a state of being 'infused with the gods'. To comprehend why there is an important distinction between the modern 'enthusiasm' as we know it and the 'enthusiasm' as the ancient Greeks understood it, one must realize that they believed that there was a deep connection between themselves and the gods. There is a relationship between oneself and the kosmos, and one can either rupture it by severing oneself from divine order, or respect it and participate within it. When an artist produces a grand work of art, he often attributes it to having been taken over by divine inspiration; the work did not come from him alone. This wasn't a blind and mindless faith to religion, but rather an enlightened understanding that there is something greater than the self. It was a great respect for the divine which pervades into all other great things, such as nature and order.


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In many ways, political systems are all reflections of the hierarchical relationship between man and God - the hierarchy of the ruler down to the smallest man is a replication of the cosmological (divine) order and the existence of political order is a reflection of our participation in the divine order.

That's why Lee Kuan Yew's quip that in any political system, it is the quality of the ruler that is the most important, is so importantly true. The king is supposed to be the figure of God on Earth, and only from his goodness can the rest of society under his political system be in harmony.

It then seems less puzzling why there's the universal traditional notion of the divine right of kings, or the mandate of heaven.

Absolute Power And Invincibility

I'd better get some thoughts from my first political philosophy class down before I go for my next one tomorrow to smother them into oblivion.

As Brian Mooney went on about universal symbols of the divine popping up whenever we analyze political systems, the discussion eventually led on to the concept of a ring of invincibility. The question he posed the class was, "if there ever was an invincibility ring, where the wearer will be free to do as he pleases and not suffer any repercussions whatsoever, and you had the chance to wear it, would you wear it?"

He needed the simple layman reply of generally "yes" in order to lead on to his next point, but I'll come to that later. Meanwhile, his solicitation of an answer didn't generate much response, save for about 10% of the class raising their hands. I kept my hands firmly down - I had a conviction as to why I wouldn't want to have an invincibility ring. Dissatisfied, for some reason he fixated on me and pressed me as to why I wouldn't wear the ring of invincibility. In a stroke of inspiration I managed to articulate to some extent what I felt about the non-social consequences of wearing such a ring and stubbornly refused to believe that I would succumb to such an endowment of power. While that wasn't quite the answer he was looking for in order to prove his point later on, my response turned out to be part of his explanation why such a ring philosophically doesn't exist.

The idea is very interesting, and it goes something like this. On my part, I wouldn't accept the ring even though I would no longer be accountable to anybody because there is something quite intuitively scary about absolute power. I may no longer be indebted to anybody around me, but the fact that I have lived 23 years of my life dealing with people and knowing how people are and that they can be harmed is enough to generate a conscience that makes me feel guilty and thus accountable, if not to anyone, then to myself. I would only accept the ring if I suddenly existed without knowledge of anything about people, but was still intelligent enough to make decisions, because only then I am freed of the burden of a conscience. It is in fact the self to which the conscience is accountable which is the most important point. With consciousness of people from past experience, I will be unable to contain the monster that comes with unaccountable absolute power even if I no longer need to bother about people any more in a real and present sense. The conscience, to me, is the key: the ring will lead to a non-social consequence where my conscience makes me accountable to myself and therefore the decay of the soul becomes possible. Furthermore, because of the unlimited nature of such a power, there is no end in sight - the neverending decadence of the soul becomes a living hell. I would refuse the ring for the reason of conscience alone.

Brian Mooney went on to further state that this is why such a ring doesn't exist, because realistically we are a species bounded by human interactions. Our nature demands it, and the fact that we are indebted whether we want to or not to other humans makes us conscientious. For those who contend that power is all that matters, is everything or is the only currency in this world are choosing to detach people from their very nature. And we see this unfolding in history, as we observe how people such as McNamara and Hitler have committed atrocious war crimes in the pursuit of power - they have practically detached themselves from the fabric of reality in which human connections are essential in order to execute war plans that are devoid of humanity.

But he also goes on to say that the ring of invincibility is an important construct in political philosophy because it is what every idealistic sociopolitical system that has been conjectured is structured around: how to keep tabs on a society whose men are expected to desire such a powerful ring. That was the 'statistical evidence' he needed from the class response to show that such a desire generally does exist and that it should be a consideration for anyone trying to develop a theory for utopia.

I get goosebumps just anticipating my next political philosophy class.