>> We already employ the rationality of artificial intelligence. Math is
>> an artificial intelligence.
> 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
DURANThttp://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0671739166/
