Tyrants are Made, Not Born: How to Lose a Republic

Last updated on: May 7, 2016 at 8:54 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

Tyrants are Made, Not Born: How to Lose a Republic 2016-05-07T20:54:24-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Eswsplatoexample_opt We don’t need to guess about how republics fail: we have history and philosophy to guide us. Republics end with tyrants, but that is an odd thing since a republican will hate tyrants by nature.

How do we get tyrants?

One wise man wrote on tyranny and the human soul and he tried to understand how tyrants were made. He knew that nobody was born a tyrant, but tyrants exist. He saw a so-called democracy advocate torture and murder the best man in the city, Socrates. How can we avoid tyranny and tyrants? If everyone is born rational and free, how are tyrants made? Plato thought about this question and proposed an answer Americans should consider just now.

Plato isn’t the inerrant word of God, but he is a thoughtful man who saw liberty used as an excuse to applaud sexual deviance, madness, and a hatred of wisdom.

If you have the time, go read Republic Book IX.* If not, start by considering what Plato had to say about the birth of a tyrant.

It begins with lawless fathers who have rejected any idea that their desires and pleasures should be moderated. Sex? Let’s have it. Food and drink? Let’s consume it. Money making? Isn’t that the very best thing?

Of course, liberty misused is soon liberty lost. The next generation goes a step further:

Then you must further imagine the same thing to happen to the son which has already happened to the father: –he is drawn into a perfectly lawless life, which by his seducers is termed perfect liberty; and his father and friends take part with his moderate desires, and the opposite party assist the opposite ones. As soon as these dire magicians and tyrant-makers find that they are losing their hold on him, they contrive to implant in him a master passion, to be lord over his idle and spendthrift lusts –a sort of monstrous winged drone –that is the only image which will adequately describe him.

Yes, he said, that is the only adequate image of him.

And when his other lusts, amid clouds of incense and perfumes and garlands and wines, and all the pleasures of a dissolute life, now let loose, come buzzing around him, nourishing to the utmost the sting of desire which they implant in his drone-like nature, then at last this lord of the soul, having Madness for the captain of his guard, breaks out into a frenzy: and if he finds in himself any good opinions or appetites in process of formation, and there is in him any sense of shame remaining, to these better principles he puts an end, and casts them forth until he has purged away temperance and brought in madness to the full.

Yes, he said, that is the way in which the tyrannical man is generated.

Don’t imagine that a lawless life is becoming a gangster. Plato is talking about moral law as well as the laws governments make. People might do the speed limit, but tell the decadent man to moderate his desires and he will go crazy. If anything gets in the way of fun or ease, he will reject it. A good man doesn’t need to be told what to do and this decadent man cannot be told what to do.

Slave owners have always understood (as Frederick Douglass explains in his autobiography) that the way to make a slave is to set loose his passions. He will associate liberty with a hangover and eventually will need a daddy to tell him what to do and to solve his problems. He is not a free man anymore, but the coddled. If you suggest his passion is unseemly, he will mock you. Why? He loves his desires more than goodness, his taste more than beauty, and his opinions more than truth.

A good people reject a tyrant, because they are good. If we have a higher law, something good, true, and beautiful, we do not need a tyrant to tell us what to do. If we keep God’s law, then man’s law can be small. If we cast off God’s law, then we will end up seeking a king, a lord, a tyrant to tell us how we should live. A slave can be given treats, but cannot be happy, because human happiness requires a flourishing body, soul, and heart. The indulgence of the decadent will eventually destroy some or all of his being. Generally, he will become immune to reason because reason might say: Stop. Think about it. Don’t do it.

To be happy, we need the laws of nature and of nature’s God. Reject those laws and soon we will find the sound of the demagogue, the promise of the tyrant that we can use hillbilly heroin, drop out of school, work less hard than our neighbors, loot our bank, lie on our job application, and still prosper. If we do not prosper, there must be an enemy out there somewhere that can be blamed.

We are no longer free because we will ignore any character defect, any decadence, to get what we want.

Put another way:

Where there is no vision, the people are unrestrained,
But happy is he who keeps the law.

______________________

I don’t always like his conclusions in his interpretive essay, but I love the translation of Allan Bloom.

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