Through Education We Will Change The World

           Plato was a Greek philosopher who lived from 428-348 BCE. He was the student of Socrates and the teacher of Aristotle. Plato was one of the most important thinkers of his time and arguably ever. His writing is so beneficial that even though it is over 2,300 years old, it is still studied, used, and relevant today. The Republic is comprised of several books written about Socrates. Of these books there are two that I find particular relevant and I reference them quite often in my everyday life. Books II and VII of the Republic are very powerful and, when studied deeply, can depict the world we live in today.

The Ring of Gyges

Book II is about the Legend of the Ring of Gyges. In Book II Socrates asks us to imagine that a noble man is given a ring which makes him invisible. Once in possession of this ring, the man can act unjustly with no fear of reprisal. Glaucon Claims no one can deny that even the most just man would behave unjustly if he had this ring. He would indulge all of his materialistic, power-hungry, and erotically lustful urges. This tale proves that people are only just because they are afraid of punishment for injustice. No one is just because justice is desirable in itself.

Glaucon ends his speech with an attempt to demonstrate that not only do people prefer to be unjust rather than just, but that it is rational for them to do so. The perfectly unjust life, he argues, is more pleasant than the perfectly just life. In making this claim, he draws two detailed portraits of the just and unjust man. The completely unjust man, who indulges all his urges, is honored and rewarded with wealth. The completely just man, on the other hand, is scorned and wretched.

His brother, Adeimantus, breaks in and bolsters Glaucon’s arguments by claiming that no one praises justice for its own sake, but only for the rewards it allows you to reap in both this life and the afterlife. He reiterates Glaucon’s request that Socrates show justice to be desirable in the absence of any external rewards: that justice is desirable for its own sake, like joy, health, and knowledge.

This Allegory is presented for Socrates to explain what he thinks justice should be as well as how fallible man is. I chose this story primarily because it makes me wonder: what is justice?

In the Republic, there were several definitions given by several people. Polemachus said that justice is “doing well to your friends and harm to your enemies.” Thrasymachus explains justice and injustice as "justice is what is advantageous to the stronger, while injustice is to one's own profit and advantage." Glaucon says that justice is “a social contract that emerges between people who are roughly equal in power, such that no one is able to oppress the others, since the pain of suffering injustice outweighs the benefit of committing it.” To Socrates, justice was “carrying out one’s duty to one’s station.” By his definition, if one’s job is to lie, then the just thing to do is to lie.

I think that the word justice is something that cannot be defined by what it is. I can only think of defining it by what it is not. Justice is not harming another human being. If you do acts that result in someone’s harm, you are committing injustices. This definition makes it hard to be a just person. It forces you to be educated on all possible outcomes so you can decide which act is just and which acts are not.

The Ring of Gyges metaphor really makes me think whether or not a definition for justice really exists. In the Ring of Gyges, Gyges discovers a magical ring that can turn him invisible. Using this ring, he deceives, murders, and manipulates his way into becoming king. Regardless of what he does as king, using my definition, nothing he does can make what he did just.

So this begs the question, is the ring of Gyges metaphor a powerful argument for doing injustice if one can get away with it? This question has plagued my moral compass. The metaphor clearly points out that no person could be just if they had the power of invisibility. A person would become consumed with that power and would act out every fantasy. It would start with little things like sneaking into a girl’s locker room and would progress to stealing money out of a cash register. It would eventually turn into doing possibly evil things. If these are the acts that a person plans on committing then the ring is not a good argument for this.

There are other acts that may be more persuasive in convincing me that you can use the Ring of Gyges to commit acts of injustice. For example, if I was alive in 1941 and had the ring, would I be able to use the ring to kill Adolf Hitler? I would be saving millions of lives and I would only have to kill one person if I did it right. Many people could easily justify committing one murder to save millions of lives. In fact, in a class discussion I had a few years ago, one classmate defined justice by calling it “a balance.” Whatever does the most good is justice. By this definition, killing Hitler would be a just act. Or perhaps it would not. Because we have only seen the outcome of Hitler’s holocaust, we have no way of knowing what would have happened in history if he was killed. If a greater tragedy happened because we killed Hitler, it no longer stands as a just act. By my definition, this could not be just because I think you can never justify murdering a human-being, regardless of the evils they commit. I believe in rehabilitation and if I were to use the ring in any way back then, it would be to capture Hitler in an attempt to put him to trial. In this way, I think you can avoid committing the great injustice of murder and still do the right thing by saving the millions of lives.

Another example for committing injustice is the act of Robin Hood: rob from the rich and give to the poor. This is one that rocks my moral compass the most. Because I believe so strongly in the community and helping everyone survive and succeed, not just the richest one percent, I may be able to, in good conscience, use to ring to steal to help those who need it. The reason I could do this is because if I was faced with the choice of a rich person having another car, and 1,000 people eating for a month, I definitely choose the latter. But in order to be able to do it without affecting my conscience negatively, I would have to exhaust all other possible solutions. Because once I decide that stealing is the solution, where do I stop? Do I stop the second everyone has food but no shelter, do I keep going until everyone has food and shelter but no car, or do I push it to the point of Communism, where everyone has an equal share? Once Pandora’s Box is opened, I find it impossible to decide where the just point to stop is. And where am I in this predicament? Do I give myself a percentage, do I leave myself out of it, or do I treat myself like any other poor person? Where do I draw the line?

I think if the Ring of Gyges existed, it would be too much for any one person to handle. Even if they were the noblest person without a selfish thought in their brain, they would not be able to handle the great powers and responsibility of the ring. Would they choose to kill Hitler, or let him be? Would they steal from the rich to give to the poor, or let the “free-market” decide where the money goes? What would they weigh in as pros and cons? And once they have the ring and see the great power the ring holds, would they still be so noble, or would they allow it to consume them like it would a normal person?

As noble as I think I am, I would be afraid to see what kind of person I would become if I had possession of the ring. I would be unable to resist committing atrocious acts. I could only hope that watching unknowing women undress would be the worst of my crimes and I would use the ring towards more noble things. I know that death is not a penalty anyone should receive for any crime. But because it is such an easy solution, I may become consumed with certain goals that I may see it as just a means to an end. When I am the only possible governor, will I ultimately do what is right?

The Allegory of the Cave

In book VII, Socrates and Glaucon discuss education through the metaphor of a cave. Socrates tells the story as a what if scenario. In his story, a group of people lived in a cave their entire lives, never seeing the outside world. These people are chained in such a way that they cannot look anywhere else but directly in front of them. In front of them is nothing but a blank wall and behind them are fire and a partial wall with different people carrying different kinds of statues on it. Some of the people converse as they move the statues and different noises are made. The only thing the people in the cave can interpret is the shadows the statues make on the wall and, because this is all they have seen, this is their reality.

One of the prisoners was then freed from his chains and is forced to see the fire and the statues. It pains him and he refuses to accept it at first but eventually does. He then is forced outside of the cave and into the real world. He is only able to adapt piece by piece. First, he is able to see the shadows, then reflections, then able to see the people and animals. It progresses that way until he is finally able to see the sun and understand the world around him. To me, this story is religion.

I was raised Christian in a Christian society. I chose to go to church on my own every Sunday and listen to the pastor, my best friend’s father, speak his sermon. This is what everyone around me and I perceived as truth. I continued to perceive it as truth until I was about 16 years old. I started to see the statues and the fire. I started to question my faith. It started out with little questions like “When did the dinosaurs live if the world is only a few thousand years old?” This got me to start looking into the possibilities of other beliefs. I continued question little things at a time all the way through high school until I finally saw the sun. With all the ties of politics and religions I knew that Christianity could not possibly be the truth because, how Anne Lamott put it, “you can safely assume that you’ve created God in your image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” I continue my personal evolution as I learn more and more about all the bad things religion shoves down peoples’ throats. I have reached the point of the Allegory of the Cave where I would rather go through suffering then to go back to swallowing the hate speech.

This was just my personal relationship with this book, but it relates to so much more. Our Society as a whole tries to keep us in Plato’s Cave. Our political system, religion, media, our education, social norms, etc. are setup to keep us ignorant and as I always say, education is the cure to everything. People may claim that I am a conspiracy theorist, but we are slaves to the elite and we are too ignorant to see it. With our public education system, The Powers That Be do not want us to really learn. They dumb down everything, have us teach to the tests, and completely forbid any real open discussion. Politics and religion are the easiest ways for them to divide and conquer. They keep us fighting each other and we don’t see who our real enemy is. “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful” (Seneca the Younger). The media is just the icing on the cake. It keeps us entertained and informed enough to make us feel good about ourselves. “Fox News: Rich people paying rich people to tell the middle class people to blame poor people” (Unknown).

The Powers-That-Be, as I like to call them, are the holders of the Ring of Gyges. Whether they felt just at the beginning or not is unknown, but they have become consumed by the powers that the ring possess. The ring in this instance is power and money. They use their ring to manipulate the media and the political system to pass legislation and to propagate the ideas behind them. They destroy our environment, healthcare, and our education system to line their pockets through privatized prisons, the Military Industrial Complex, Big Oil, Big Tobacco, Big Alcohol, and Big Pharmaceutical. They use this ring so well that they have us thanking them and voting against our best interests. They have locked us in a cave behind the boob tube and the American Dream.

The Allegory of the Cave and the Ring of Gyges are metaphors that still fit society today. We are living in the cave. Whether it is the hidden agendas of religion or the Oligarchical-Plutocracy masked behind the false image of Democracy we have in America, we are blind. The only cure for that is to face the pain of exiting the cave and bare the light of the sun.

How we do that is the obvious problem. The people in the cave are many and the Powers-That-Be outside the cave are few. But they possess the ring that puts a boulder in front of the entrance of the cave. To solve this issue we must take our first step. We must turn away from the shadows on the wall and see them for what they are. We must work together to move the boulder out of our way. As Morpheus said in the famous Matrix movie (based on Plato’s Cave), “The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters-- the very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system; that they will fight to protect it.” This tells me that the battle cannot be over an adult mind. Sure, we can get some to crossover and free their mind but the battle must be fought and won with our youth.

We must unite for education reform. If we can create real change in our system, we can change everything. If we can teach our children to read, analyze, and question everything, they will have the tools to escape the cave and destroy the Ring of Gyges for good.