Plato & The COVID-19 Global Pandemic

[Anonymous No.19532273]

Plato's comments on democracy and the individual under said government in his Republic foretold of the modern world under liberalism and foreshadowed a coming disaster.
I ask whether we did not learn from Plato's dialogues that rule by people of reason and knowing is preferable to a state of excess freedoms; for what good is a government if instead of reacting promptly to the situation at hand it ignores it to appease the appetites of the selfish and ignorant (even if they constitute most of the population)? Recall Plato's analogy of the doctor and the baker from Gorgias, a perfect illustration of how the will of the people can often be misguided and, in many cases, ridiculous, wherever their natural inclination to advance their own interests meets the limits of their judgement regarding what is good or bad for them—as is often the case wherever transitory negative effects are more obvious than the deep and lasting good effects of some political measure—so that in a situation as pressing as a global pandemic we see waves of anti-vaxx protests and antipathy towards health-care professionals and state-officials.
To be quite sure, this is not to say that COVID Dictatorship is preferable either (although it is perhaps preferable to doing nothing), consider the following from the Laws:
> The Athienian: And is our legislator to have no preface to his laws, but to say at once Do this, avoid that-and then holding the penalty in terrorem to go on to another law; offering never a word of advice or exhortation to those for whom he is legislating, after the manner of some doctors? For of doctors, as I may remind you, some have a gentler, others a ruder method of cure; and as children ask the doctor to be gentle with them, so we will ask the legislator to cure our disorders with the gentlest remedies.

[Anonymous No.19532275]

Plato is quite right to make a distinction between the healer who is rough and the one who is gentle. We do not want to exacerbate the situation by being too hard on the non-compliant—however selfish they may be—and in this sense, I say we should be less like China and more like Austria; still, it is better to be like Australia than it is to be like America, and Plato agrees that even the gentle doctor must offer rewards as well as punishments as is necessary. His perfect legislator chooses the double way
> And yet legislators never appear to have considered that they have two instruments which they might use in legislation-persuasion and force; for in dealing with the rude and uneducated multitude, they use the one only as far as they can; they do not mingle persuasion with coercion, but employ force pure and simple.
It is troubling to note that Plato said that democracy often gives way to tranny—that is, a state of excess freedoms gives way to a state of excess subjugation—and as we are still in the democratic phase, I wonder if it is not at all possible that a reactionary movement might flare up and establish such kind a tyrannical government as Plato warned about. It certainly seems possible, but to end on an optimistic note, there does appear to still be some light of hope in the global initiatives to "build back better"; hopefully instead of a state of tyranny we shall all endeavour to choose to be ruled over by an educated guardian class as Plato would have wanted.
Stay safe :)

[Anonymous No.19532277]

>>19532273
nigger

[Anonymous No.19532305]

>I ask whether we did not learn from Plato's dialogues that rule by people of reason and knowing is preferable to a state of excess freedoms;
Do you suppose this is applicable to the pandemic situation?

Almost no one involved in these discussions understands enough about virology and vaccinations to either validate or refute the official narrative from a scientific perspective. There's a fundamental disagreement about what the debate is even about:
It seems that if you hold favorable beliefs regarding the vaccine, you think it's a debate about "science"; if you have a modicum of intelligence, it becomes a debate about how much trust you should put in authority, especially in light of the limitations of scientific knowledge, the limitations of the layman trying to tell apart organic from artificial scientific consensus, and the history of corruption of all the organizations involved.

[Anonymous No.19532309]

>>19532273
>>19532275
just to let you know i didn’t read any of this