Musing

If the reason of the founding of a city is the recognition that mutual benefit, materially and in terms of security, can arise, then the basis of the necessity of noble lie must lie in the belief that the established rational basis for the allocation of power within the city is precarious against human greed and striving.

By associating the citizens of the city with a higher order, the noble lie widens the range of those whom the individual identifies with as his own to include the whole city, thereby dissipating self-interest. However, this is but a preparative to Socrates's wider goal to dispel material wants completely within the perfect city. The identities of clan and self contain tacit boundaries which exclude those beyond; in such divisions lie the source and justification of private possession, both of knowledge and of goods. Socrates significantly neglects the needs of the body in attempting to reshape the way citizens expect their needs to be met in the city; he realizes that the bodily wants, of which a majority are in a nature of private goods, reconciles human greed with human selfishness; poisons the nature of identity and man's need to belong. Socrates overhauls both the impacts of identities on men's choices and the identities themselves.

The new identities Socrates propose attach themselves along the defining characteristics of vocation and their attending class. The mode of creation, rather than consumption and need, becomes the flag to which men rally by. He lends it the allure of divine fulfillment, aiding men's necessarily selfconscious tempering of his bodily wants.

At this point however, one must consider if Socrates indeed saw moderation as a virtue worthy of huge sacrifices beyond the material, or if the impetus to turn his citizens into purely political creatures reached an end in itself. For it would be surely draconian and unjustifiable to go to such lengths, indeed, breach the limits of human nature, in the name of moderation. Perhaps Socrates attempted to align human lifestyles to divinely virtue, therefore requiring religious observance in his subjects.

The necessity of the noble lie should be debated as well. Enlightenment thinkers believed in channeling of human self interest into activities that would fulfill an alternative set of moralities and result in mutual benefit. The worker and the consumer benefits. In contrast, the noble lie seeks to limit the meaning and concept of the consumer. Socrates attempts to reverse the demand and supply driven relationship between consumer and worker; in his city, the consumer exists for the worker. Such a lie is therefore necessary, it seems, if human survival and human invirtue derive from the same source, bringing forth yet another example of Platonic tragicomedy. Nevertheless, it remains to be seen if the replacement of self-interest with self-neglecting loyalty marks any real progress.

In certain conceptions of Enlightenment societies, the "common good" does not extend beyond the sum of individual good. Society merely acts as enforcers of laws that maximize individual good. For Plato, individual benefit is sacrificed in the name of checks and balances against injustice. Therefore it must arise out of a deep suspicion of the citizens in the city; a strong belief in their potential to be corrupted and manipulated. In proposing draconian static laws, the role of institutions are diminished into enforcers: warriors, not philosophers.