http://www.potus.com/
Sounds elitist like Plato in his Republic;
Automatically-without any hypocrisy of voting. Democracy means perfect
equality of opportunity, especially in education; not the rotation of
every Tom, Dick and Harry in public office. Every man shall have an
equal chance to make himself fit for the complex tasks of
administration; but only those who have proved their mettle (or, in
our myth, their metal), and have emerged from all tests with the
insignia of skill, shall be eligible to rule. Public officials shall
be chosen not by votes, nor by secret cliques pulling the unseen wires
of democratic pretense, but by their own ability as demonstrated in
the fundamental democracy of an equal race. Nor shall any man hold
office without specific training, nor hold high office till he has
first filled a lower office well (Gorgias, 514-5).
Is this aristocracy? Well, we need not be afraid of the word, if the
reality is good which it betokens: words are wise men's counters,
without value of their own; they are the money only of fools and
politicians. We want to be ruled by the best, which is what
aristocracy means; have we not, Carlyle-like, yearned and prayed to be
ruled by the best? But we have come to think of aristocracies as
hereditary: let it be carefully noted that this Platonic aristocracy
is not of that kind; one would rather call it a democratic
aristocracy. For the people, instead of blindly electing the lesser of
two evils presented to them as candidates by nominating cliques, will
here be themselves, every one of them, the candidates; and will
receive an equal chance of educational election to public office.
There is no caste here; no inheritance of position or privilege; no
stoppage of talent impecuniously born; the son of a ruler begins on
the same level, and receives the same treatment and opportunity, as
the son of a bootblack; if the ruler's son is a dolt he falls at the
first shearing; if the bootblack's son is a man of ability the way is
clear for him. to become a guardian of the state (423). Career will be
open to talent wherever it is born. This is a democracy of the schools-
a hundredfold more honest and more effective than a democracy of the
polls.
And so, "setting aside every other business, the guardians will
dedicate themselves wholly to the maintenance of freedom in the state,
making this their craft and engaging in no work which does not bear
upon this end" (395). They shall be legislature and executive and
court in one; even the laws shall not bind them to a dogma in the face
of altered circumstance; the rule of the guardians shall be a flexible
intelligence unbound by precedent.
But how can men of fifty have a flexible intelligence? Will they not
be mentally plaster-casted by routine? Adeimantus (echoing, no doubt,
some hot brotherly debate in Plato's home) objects that philosophers
are dolts or rogues, who would rule either foolishly, or selfishly, or
both. "The votaries of philosophy who carry on the study not only in
youth with a view to education, but as the pursuit of their maturer
years-these men for the most part grow into very strange beings, not
to say utter scoundrels; and the result with those who may be
considered the best of them is, that they are made useless to the
world by the very study which you extol" (487). This is a fair enough
description of some bespectacled modern philosophers; but Plato
answers that he has guarded against this difficulty by giving his
philosophers the training of life as well as the erudition of the
schools; that they will in consequence be men of action rather than
merely men of thought-men seasoned to high purposes and noble temper
by long experience and trial. By philosophy Plato means an active
culture, wisdom that mixes with the concrete busyness of life; he does
not mean a closeted and impractical metaphysician; Plato "is the man
who least resembles Kant, which is (with all respect) a considerable
merit."
So much for incompetence; as for rascality we may provide against that
by establishing among the guardians a system of communism:
In the first place none of them should have any property beyond what
is absolutely necessary; neither should they have a private house,
with bars and bolts, closed against any one who has a mind to enter;
their provisions should be only such as are required by trained
warriors, who are men of temperance and courage; their agreement is to
receive from the citizens a fixed rate of pay, enough to meet the
expenses of the year, and no more; and they will have common meals and
live together, like soldiers in a camp. Gold and silver we will tell
them that they have from God; the diviner metal is within them, and
they have therefore no need of that earthly dross which passes under
the name of gold, and ought not to pollute the divine by earthly
admixture, for that commoner metal has been the source of many unholy
deeds; but their own is undefiled. And they alone of all the citizens
may not touch or handle silver or gold, or be under the same roof with
them, or wear them, or drink from them. And this will be their
salvation, and the salvation of the State. But should they ever
acquire homes or lands or moneys of their own, they will become
housekeepers and husbandmen instead of guardians; enemies and tyrants
instead of allies of the other citizens; hating and being hated,
plotting and being plotted against, they will pass through life in
much greater terror of internal than of external enemies; and the hour
of ruin, both to themselves and to the rest of the State, will be at
hand (416-17).
This arrangement will make it unprofitable, as well as dangerous, for
the guardians to rule as a clique seeking the good of their class
rather than that of the community as a whole. For they will be
protected from want; the necessities and modest luxuries of a noble
life will be theirs in regular provision, without the searing and
wrinkling care of economic worry. But by the same token they will be
precluded from cupidity and sordid ambitions; they will always have
just so much of the world's goods, and no more; they will be like
physicians establishing, and themselves accepting, a dietary for a
nation. They will eat together, like consecrated men; they will sleep
together in single barracks, like soldiers sworn to simplicity.
"Friends should have all things in common," as Pythagoras used to say
(Laws 807). So the authority of the guardians will be sterilized, and
their power made poisonless; their sole reward will be honor and the
sense of service to the group. And they will be such men as from the
beginning have deliberately consented to so materially limited a
career; and such men as at the end of their stern training will have
learned to value the high repute of the statesman above the crass
emoluments of the office-seeking politicians or the "economic man." At
their coming the battles of party politics will be no more.
The Story of Philosophy
The Lives and Opinions of the Great Philosophers of the Western World
by WILL DURANT
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0671739166/
