Plato's Solution to AI Tigers Eating Bananas

As liberal democracies wane, Westerners have an array of options to replace their wrinkle-ravaged institutions. Plato’s Republic, as it has since its inception, provides a wellspring to draw upon for inspiration and possibility—including to the pressing problem of AI tigers sky diving out of airplanes while slogging down bananas and watermelons.

I do not advocate for copying any ancient political organizations. Anachronistically copy-pasting political thought experiments from 2,000 years ago makes as much sense as donning a bronze cuirass, wielding a sarissa, and marching headlong towards entrenched Russian positions in Donetsk, but Alexander’s campaigns can still offer perennial lessons in leadership, logistics, strategy, military innovation, and the intersection of religious fanaticism and cutthroat political pragmatism.

Rather than regurgitating The Republic, I will take a kaleidoscopic approach—laconic jaunts into the ideas and critiques from this classic.

Jaunt 1: Plato’s rejection of free speech.

Free speech is a cornerstone of Western liberalism, and Plato views it as a threat to the long-term health of a polis. Plato did not frame it as such, but the critique stands. The unvetted circulation of ideas and stories is corrosive and must be moderated by an informed and wise elite.

It is worth noting that the idea of free speech was not alien to him, although it existed in a more restrained form in Athens. Athenian citizens held the right of parrhesia, which was unfettered speech in the assembly. During public debates, free men could speak their minds without fear of censure or imprisonment. It did not extend to what plays could be performed during festivals or essays be passed around in private, although these enjoyed great latitude.

The case of his mentor, the pig-nosed sage of Alopece, is a grimmer reminder of the limits of free speech. Socrates was sentenced to death for the cooked-up crime of corrupting the youth. The cryptic, ascetic fixture of the city-state had stepped on too many toes with his probing questions, flaunting of long-held customs, and the sway he held over highly-positioned elites. Socrates was deemed a threat for what an American would call exercising his free speech. The sage was punished accordingly.

Growing up in this liberal milieu that occasionally exiled or executed dissidents, Plato rejected it. The openness of Athens would be its undoing—and Plato had front-row seats (literally) to witness the decay it had ushered in.

Plato’s most prescient concern is his low view of the common man, the downward pressure it put on the arts, and the knock-on effects it had for the body politic. This dim view of the relationship between the masses and the arts was not an abstraction but based on his own experience of the theater. Initially, wealthy sponsors selected judges from each of the ten regions to decide the winner. These would be men of taste and refinement that mirrored the aspirational aesthetics of the elite. After the plays had been performed, they would select the winner, who would receive accolades and prize money.

During Plato’s time, this practice had devolved into kowtowing to the mob. The rowdy and violent crowds would exert pressure on the judges to vote in their favor, and the judges, out of fear for their lives or to avoid being a social pariah, would often capitulate.

As the incentives of the plays changed, so too did the plays. Euripides and others began introducing sensationalist elements, flatter characters, and less refined moral messaging. It was the beginning of the Marvelification of this high Athenian art that would, within a few decades, be but a shell of its former self.
Plato was correct in his critique.

The solution was that the masses must not be in control. They are creatures driven by their appetites for pleasure and comfort, inured to the subtleties of taste, morality, and higher intellectual and spiritual life.

His solution was to select, train, and breed a class of philosopher-kings that would curate the media exposed to the masses. His concern, as with all things, was primarily ethical and intellectual.

The stories, music, images, and festivities the citizenry consumed shaped their soul in much the same way nutrition shapes the constitution of the body. Imbibe stories of prudence, justice, courage, and wisdom, and men will pursue these models with zeal—even though they would never achieve the same frothing ecstasy as works that pandered to the masses.

Since the masses are incapable, since they lack the faculties to separate the true and the false and the good and the bad and are driven on by baser instincts, wise men must intervene and select on their behalf what is suitable and what should be discarded or altered.

Plato’s proposal might offend the deeply ingrained market of ideas instinct that has embedded itself within the Western mind, but it makes sense with a bit of testing out and buttressed by Plato’s own aforementioned experience and the retarded chimp-outs in social media on display daily.

Children are incapable of deciding what’s best for themselves. Given the chance, an 8-year-old boy would binge on ice cream and Skibbidi Toilet until their teeth rotted and they ballooned to 150kg. It is the supervision and intervention of adults that hammers out the dross and instills in them virtue.

Is it really so wild to assume that a similar differential exists between large swathes of the human population and a restrained, intelligent, ethical elite?

A chasm of intellect and character exists between groups of adults. Sometimes the divide between the philosophical, restrained, and cultured Western elite and the dopamine-addled, obese, low-IQ slob is as vast (if not vaster) than the gap between an average adult and an 8-year-old boy who wants to blow $100 on boxes of fudge brownies.

The decisions of the elite human capital would lead to better outcomes than the decisions of the masses.

Plato witnessed this in the auditoriums during his own lifetime. The plays of the greats had devolved to pander to the mob. As in the case Euripides, it was an incentive, not a skill issue. Euripides had  talent, but the desire to win the prize (and the cash payout) forced him to dumb down his plays.

The West is now witnessing this in real time. As blogs and, later, social media displaced news institutions with journalistic standards, ethical codes, editorial review teams, and a moneyed elite who did not want to dirty their name with sensationalist articles, the quality of content has nose-dived.

Social media has delivered the death blow. The masses fritter their time away watching videos of barely-legal Colombian teens with massive, fake knockers dancing to K-Pop, 10-second skits about what happens when a man has to wipe ketchup off a countertop set to a laugh track, and AI videos of human-like tigers eating bananas. A vanishingly small number read 400-page books about the discovery of the human genome, hunter-gatherers in the Mongolian Steppe in the Bronze Age, or how to manage assets to become a millionaire by 40—and even fewer crack open a philosophy book to wrestle with the metaquestions that drive every decision, from who to vote for, whether to buy milk, or if the job in another state is worth the move.

Free speech allowed this to happen. The unfettered desires of the masses have guided the production of media, and now what is left are conspiritards arguing that aliens killed Charlie Kirk and how Israel invented porn to demoralize the West and funnel more funds into the Iron Dome and their nuclear program.

The free market does not produce the best content, the best ideas, and, ultimately, the best societies. It cannot, as the masses that hold asymmetrical power in such an arrangement drive it towards low-brow slop void of intellectual, artistic, and moral rigor. It culminates in the Marvelification and Disneyfication of everything: clear-cut good and bad, grotesque jokes, gratuitous sex, and a disregard for ideas and spirit.

The current state of the media landscape does not bode well for the West. The stagnant economy, the glassy-eyed shades dragging their feet through the world, the decrepit, craftless films and books, the flimsy ideas, and the shallow political bench are all downstream of this.

What the West needs is an elite, an aristocracy of noble character, discerning, tasteful, capable of foresight, ambitious, energetic, expansive, and couragoues to retake the reigns of national myths, the film industry, the art academies, the statues that stand erect in plazas and before courthouses, and turn them all towards the higher, the better, the noble, the beautiful, the good.

It will be imposed from the top down. It need not be by law. Musk, Zuckerberg, and Sarandos could control the content pedestaled by their algorithms and align it not with the needs of the masses but with the refined, elevated tastes of the elites.
Neither Plato nor I believes that they are equipped to be discerning judges, but they could build institutions that could provide that service within their own organizations.

These reforms, though, will not be enough. In the wild west of the internet, a purveyor of slop in Nigeria or Croatia could soon out compete the restrained whales of Meta and YouTube. To be effective, it requires state control to forcefully limit competition through laws and funding.

Then an American or a Frenchman might not have to subject themselves to the most retarded arguments or 10-second, dopamine-optimized clips every time they open their phone. Their soul, rather than being contorted by the algorithm, would be ennobled by it.