of a douche balloon.
Besides, there was a man who saw all this coming way before Bernays, a
man who saw the dangers of fake freedom, who saw the proliferation of
diversions and the myopic effect they would have on people’s values, how too
much pleasure makes everyone childish and selfish and entitled and totally
narcissistic and unbearable on Twitter. This man was far wiser and more
influential than anyone you would ever see on a news channel or a TED Talk
stage or a political soapbox, for that matter. This guy was the OG of political
philosophy. Forget the “Godfather of Soul,” this guy literally invented the
idea of the soul. And he (arguably) saw this whole shitstorm brewing multiple
millennia before anyone else did.
Plato’s Prediction
English philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead famously
said that all of Western philosophy was merely a “series of footnotes to
Plato.”^23 Any topic you can think of, from the nature of romantic love, to
whether there’s such a thing as “truth,” to the meaning of virtue, Plato was
likely the first great thinker to expound upon it. Plato was the first to suggest
that there was an inherent separation between the Thinking Brain and the
Feeling Brain.^24 He was the first to argue that one must build character
through various forms of self-denial, rather than through self-indulgence.^25
Plato was such a badass, the word idea itself comes from him—so, you could
say he invented the idea of an idea.^26
Interestingly, despite being the godfather of Western civilization, Plato
famously claimed that democracy was not the most desirable form of
government.^27 He believed that democracy was inherently unstable and that it
inevitably unleashed the worst aspects of our nature, driving society toward
tyranny. He wrote, “Extreme freedom can’t be expected to lead to anything
but a change to extreme slavery.”^28
Democracies are designed to reflect the will of the people. We’ve learned
that people, when left to their own devices, instinctively run away from pain
and toward happiness. The problem then emerges when people achieve
happiness: It’s never enough. Due to the Blue Dot Effect, they never feel
entirely safe or satisfied. Their desires grow in lockstep with the quality of
their circumstances.
Eventually, the institutions won’t be able to keep up with the desires of the
people. And when the institutions fail to keep up with people’s happiness,
guess what happens.
People start blaming the institutions themselves.