Every man can be an island

...from other men.

However, you must rely on either other mortals or the heavens, or you'll plain fuckin' die.

The tragedy is that relying on the heavens is better for everyone, but you can never pay the heavens back. You can (and should) offer your gratitude, but gratitude plus $2 is enough to buy a cup of coffee.

It is not at all unusual to owe the heavens every worthwhile thing in your life. You have nothing to pay them back with, except gifts they themselves gave you. 

How do you plan to pay Sol back for sunlight? You owe him every beautiful day. What are going to do, light a fire on his behalf? Using wood grown with what? 

Gonna have to see your worthiness passport real quick.

The heavens want the best for you. As a pious individual, your only duty is to take the best, knowing you can never, ever pay them back. If you ask for one, they'll give you two. You will be in bottomless debt to them for eternity. P.S. This is one reason efficiency is profane; what, are you saying infinite bounty isn't bountiful enough for you?

All I know to say: perhaps try to be more worthy. Be ever less undeserving of this transcendent generosity. Use their gifts to cultivate as much virtue as you possibly can. You can't pay it back, but maybe we can pay it forward.

The allegories in the Bible are clearly childish finger-painting compared to the allegory you find executed in physical reality. The author of Physics and the author of the Bible are clearly two very separate beings. 

P.S. All single-author allegories are, in turn, childish as compared to Bible allegories. 

P.P.S. Formal Gnosticism is simply noticing that the Bible's author and Physics' author must be different, and trying to worship the greater author. It's a heresy because they get that last part backwards, having assumed the Bible's author is the Creator God and being unable to admit they fucked up.

Definitions Examples: Religion, Ravens

Definition is a subtle and difficult art, which would benefit from case studies or specimens. 

 

Definitions are handles. You can't grasp Reality directly. It's too big. Hence, you bolt handles to Reality and grasp the handles instead. 

By thinking about the handles explicitly and practising with them, you can arrange your handles neatly and harmoniously, making your own thoughts clearer and easier to think. 

"But I'm not seeing reality! All I'm seeing is these handles!" You could never grasp reality, so it was always only handles. The question is whether you try to force the handles to be something they're not, or let handles be handles.  You can get away from the puppet-shadows others show you, but it's impossible to get away from the shadows you show yourself, aka your own thoughts. As it turns out, that's good enough. Let the shadows be shadows.

Having played around with your own handle arrangement sufficiently, you can easily understand others' arrangements of handles, and be easier to communicate with. You can also see their messy, incompetent handle arrangement, and how it leaves open spots that are big enough to be a problem but too small to bolt in a new handle, thus making it impossible for them to understand certain important ideas.
Doesn't that sound exciting?

 

Because politics, the handle 'religion' immediately becomes corrupted. It's deliberately placed in an offensive position. You should be offended, and reject it. 

Ultimately the handles you use must be useful to you. Useful handle placement is not up to you, it's up to the shape of your underlying system of needs, and secondarily by relation to the other handles you're using. Even if you use some weirdo definition of "religion" on the outside, it's important to use a good definition internally. 

What is religion?

Handles, ultimately, can be carved into whatever shape you want, subject only to the restrictions of shape per se, such as the fact there are no circles with corners, and the fact that the shape you make one handle defines the open space next to it.

Atheists like to say religions are inherently supernatural. They then have no choice but to admit of a second handle which is exactly like a religion in every way except with no supernatural tenets. (I will be specific later.)

Many Christians also like to say religion is inherently supernatural in a way that conflicts with good epistemology and tends to leave them defenceless against religious persecution by atheists, since they can't correctly name it religious persecution. 

"directly from Latin religionem (nominative religio) "respect for what is sacred, reverence for the gods; conscientiousness, sense of right, moral obligation; [...] or "bond between humans and gods.""

As a matter of empirical fact, humans treat religious matters specially. I find general knowledge of these things is, surprisingly, accurate. Fundamentalist religion is real and acts like popular conceptions of fundies. Religious things aren't supposed to be questioned. I find the relevant distinction is between particularist religion and universalist religion. Religions that say you can be right about your religion without disproving mine, and ones that don't. (P.S. Universalist religion is narcissist.)

What we want, then, is a description which accurately diagnoses religious behaviour as religious. Ideally, having listened to someone's customs, we'll be able to predict what they're apt to get activated about. 

It turns out it's incredibly simple: a religion is a comprehensive code of behaviour. A big 'ol lists of oughts.
We're most familiar with the "You ought to behave as God says because God is great," form of the religion, but almost anything can stand in for God in this formula. "You should do what popular opinion says." "You should do what the king says." "You should do what Science says."

Because of this, there's a super quick-and-dirty religion diagnosis: if a system has an opinion on something a known religion also has an opinion on, then it's also a religion. Generally it will have a different opinion and thus be a competing religion. 

Religions will always form taboos (ought nots) and rituals (demonstrating loyalty to the oughts). In general they'll have a Pope because Popes are possible and someone will try to seize the spot. 

Generally speaking a religion will become culturally ingrained. Questioning aspects of the religion are equivalent to saying someone has been living wrong their whole life. Getting them to accept that is a big ask, especially if the major effect will be to piss off their neighbours by acting funny. 

Having a decent description, we can immediately see that atheism adds special bits onto their idea of 'religion' for reasons of illegitimate stealth. It seems they're dimly aware of the true description, as they also like to deny they have a code of behaviour, despite the empirical difficulties. It's a comprehensive code of conduct, which consequently can't be meaningfully questioned, rooted in something other than the sacred. All their criticisms of religion are rooted in properties they themselves partake in.
Likewise, Christianity wants to make itself out to be special in a way that it simply isn't. "My great spirit is greater than your great spirit." Yeah yeah well I can eat fifty onions and my dad can beat up your dad.
In both cases, part of the code is to loyally pretend to misunderstand what is being adhered to. 

Having a decent description, the usual habits of the phenomenon hardly need explanation. Clearly the religion will get tied into the ego and become dogmatic. Something you do becomes something you are. Etc etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven_paradox First, let's back up: what's a "raven?" Can they even be non-black? It depends on how you define it.

If you define ravens as, among other things, a bird whose feathers are black, then you'll find that non-ravens sometimes hatch from eggs whose parents are both ravens. If you get lazy and definite as a bird with black feathers, then you can stop a raven from being a raven by plucking it.

Fun fact: if you define ravens genetically, you get similar results. E.g. bombard the gamete with radiation, and they'll mutate enough to miss the definition. This can also happen non-artificially. Alternatively, you make the genetic definition so fuzzy that sometimes ravens are born from two parents who aren't ravens. If you define a raven as an entity which has two ravens as parents, then you've only pushed the question up a level. Formally begging the question.

There is no definition of "raven" which includes every instance of a raven born to raven parents, and no non-raven born to non-raven parents, except the degenerate definition explicitly listing every individual instance of raven babies. This is a consequence of the fact that all measurement devices have some margin of error. Infinite accuracy is impossible because infinity is impossible. The linguistic description of a raven is not a raven itself. The handle is a handle, not reality itself.
(Bonus round: a definition made of an explicit list is trivial to game. "Every raven is a raven and is entitled to raven rights - except that one." Unmistakably this is sophistry, but sophistry works. Try not to, at least, make sophism easier.)

However, with definitions, accuracy is beside the point. Having made a definition, it includes itself...by, uh, definition. A certain amount of effort spent to keep the definition from being too intuitively dissonant is good, but don't get trapped trying to get it exactly the same.

You can decide your definition, but you can't decide the consequences of your definition. If you define a raven as a feathered, winged biped, it will be able to fly except in truly exceptional edge-cases.

In practice, definitions are not that hard to get good enough, the same way you don't need triangulating laser interferometers with caesium clocks in most cases. A ruler stick will be fine. The good-enough definition pivots on the meaningful property. What are you using ravens for? If it's pie, then [flying meat thing] is close enough. 

If you want, you can define a raven as being able to fly, if flight per se is important to your purposes. You will have to match it with various pseudo-ravens, such as raven chicks and ravens with broken wings, to cover the full spectrum of observations, but it's not like it makes a full set of handles impossible to carve. It's mainly a question of which set of handles is the least hassle to grasp.

As a matter of practice, Darwinian/Linnaean definition uses a type specimen and then asks what other specimens are related more closely than some arbitrary bound. This is close enough to the meat-based peasant definition. No, not all ravens are black.

 

P.P.S. Philosophy, roughly, is the religion of questioning everything, including the precept of questioning everything. Hack the sacred by going meta. If the sacred is damaged by questioning, clearly questioning >> the sacred, and you made a mistake. Questioning is clearly more sacred than things-previously-known-as-sacred. 

Nevertheless once a sacred thing has survived the alkahest, analysis, it ought to be respected in some way or another. I'm not 100% clear on how this works. 

N.B. The idea of asking questions is to get answers, not to ask questions. Answerless questioning is degenerate; profane profanity.

P.P.P.S. Defining 'artificial' is a useful exercise. Spoiler: artificial is a useful category, especially for its opposite, but its opposite isn't [natural], because [artificial] is a subcategory of [natural].

P.P.P.P.S. Self-correction: Plato's cave analogy breaks down when it comes to the mind. You are the shadows. In fact there was never a fire or puppets or a cave, Reality was all shadows the whole time. Reality is made of your thoughts, logic is the fact your thoughts are related in strict ways, and that's it. Wisdom, ultimately, is prosaic, not profound. It's about arranging input thoughts to create pleasing output thoughts. We call the fact that some thoughts are not under our direct control [the external world].

Homo sapiens had to destroy neanderthal because the latter wasn't fallen

Look, it just feels right, okay? 

The fallen species couldn't handle the embarrassing contrast of having the non-fallen species right there. Original Sin is a real bitch. 

It is a little concerning that Darwin seems to favour more-fallen behaviour.

Raven's Paradox Real Bad

I have to make fun. This is a ludicrous amount of incompetence.
The point of paradoxes is to find a hole in human reason and fix it. (Ref: Xeno's paradoxes.) The point of the raven paradox is to show how there's a hole in a particular person's brain and they need to shut up and sit down.

My search pattern actually started with this, by the way: "If this apple is red, then ravens are black." Modus tollens: "If this raven is not-black, apples are not-red." This is somewhat wrong, but it's close enough to find the right one with [algorithmic][non-reasoning][non-conscious] error-checking.

First, how are ravens defined? As always, a good definition makes questions of identity trivial; anything else makes them impossible.

 

How are you supposed to tell something is a raven if it's not black? (Mutatis mutandis for any defining feature of a raven)? Don't do the thing backwards: you make a definition and then count the number of entities that go in the category, rather than counting a bunch of entities and then hoping a category fits around them. 

At best you're trying to verbalize a nonverbal category, which will always suffer from measurement error. However it is defined, you will find non-black ravens, non-bird ravens, and also non-ravens who are a child of two ravens. (More on this tomorrow morning.) 

Once you've defined ravens as black, then you don't need any evidence for the proposition that non-black things are non-ravens; it's true by, uh, definition. "This non-black raven isn't a raven." Formal fallacy: equivocation.

If we don't define ravens as black, then we've contradicted the premise. "If something doesn't have three sides, it isn't a triangle. Now, try to find the non-three-sided triangle." If ravens aren't inherently black or inherently have a set of properties that imply black, then the problem is already over. The other properties are undefined and can vary. You paint a raven; ta dah!
We'll have the opposite problem: finding non-ravens are ravens, because they're close enough. "Flying carrion eater," catches crows. If the child of two ravens is a raven, then we're all especially funny-looking archeobacteria. Also fish. And lizards. And...

Pick your poison: equivocation or self-contradiction? Which flabbergastingly bad error would you like to ascribe to this alleged paradox?
Intuition does not contradict inductive logic.

 

Totally a coincidence: Carl Gustav Hempel was kind of funny-looking across at least three axes. It is often particularly the less-capable scholars, the midwits, who feel the need to browbeat the plebs out of their intuitive understandings.

 

Other errors: "Via contraposition, this statement is equivalent to:

(2) If something is not black, then it is not a raven."

Wrong contrapositive if you intend to do induction. "All ravens are black" ~> "Not all non-ravens are non-black." Vacuous, not useful. Every statement of the form, "Not-all non-X entities are Z," is true. (There is an apparent exception, but it's merely bad grammar.)

Check, contradiction: "If something is not white, it is not a raven." By mass, there's more evidentiary support for this statement than the statement, "Ravens are black." You find lots of evidence because, if ravens really were white, the apple would still be red. The method cannot distinguish between a true statement and a false one.
This epistemic method allows you to prove 0=1. "If something is non-one, it is non-zero." Inductive statements only need to be usually true...right? Right?
This is easy to predict if you analyze induction by converting it to deduction. The latter is possible because induction was always a variety of deduction; essentially approximate or statistical deduction. Or possibly vice-versa. Either way there's no genuine distinction. 

 

Imagine the actual experiment: SELECT ALL non-black FROM universe.
Err, but you already know what a raven is, or you wouldn't be able to tell if the non-black thing is a raven or not. SELECT ALL non-black FROM raven. A tad faster. Don't look at all things and check if they're ravens, look at all ravens and check if they're black. I mean, duh. 

Practical considerations do in fact reflect on how you ought to construct pure logic. Do it the easy way or you'll make yourself stupid. 

Imagine the actual experiment, again: SELECT ALL non-black FROM universe. This apparently proves ravens are black. Okay, now kill and eat every raven. Yummy bird pies. SELECT ALL non-black FROM universe. The state of ravens has varied maximally, yet our body of evidence tells us it hasn't changed at all. Every element in the empty set is also white and blue and yellow, so...

ProTip: don't use irrelevant non-evidence as evidence. Amazingly, it turns out independent variables are independent.

 

Check, contradiction, again: let's imagine that instead of ravens, we're talking about some future object. What colour will Apple's next product be? 

Look at all these things that aren't Apple's next product and are black! It won't be black. Hey, there's a whole lot of things which aren't Apple's next product and are white. It won't be white. Why, it seems it won't be any colour at all... "If something has a colour, then it is not Apple's future product release." 

Indeed I can prove that Apple's next product will be absolutely anything, as long as it has not actually released. "If something is not [something which does not yet exist], then it is not God." Did I just prove that God will be the next release!?!

When you find an epistemic method during a rep of set 1, always plug in a false statement and see if it appears to prove that statement. Then bash your head against your desk, because it probably can. If instead you write it down and it gets in Wikipedia, then bash your whole civilization's head against its desk, because it's too stupid to live. 

Astrology Refinement

Astrology is toy divination. It's something you play with to understand real divination. Doing al-chemistry properly is the same: you can do something divination-like in a controlled environment until you understand it enough to do proper whatever-mancy in an uncontrolled environment.

E.g. Sol rises and sets. However, the timing of the profound rising and setting does not correspond simply to material dawn and dusk. The physics is, as intended, allegorical.

The music of the spheres is deeply harmonious, but static. It's an echo of the real song, not the singer itself. Were the music of the spheres the mover itself, the feedback would knock it out of its clean paths and it would no longer function as a toy. The details of the profound are orders of magnitude more profound. More elaborate, more sophisticated, more complicated, more seemingly contradictory. If you need to invoke dawn, well, it's always dawn somewhere. It is always dawn, and always dusk. Always noon, and always midnight. It is not only dawn&dusk here, there are millions and billions and trillions of dusk&dawns, over and over everywhere across the sky, each slightly different, each exactly identical.

This is why you play with a toy first, rather than immediately exposing yourself directly to the glory.

Republic Book 10, Final

Theories of art require an underlying theory of consciousness. E.g. the point of a dance is to make you feel a certain way. To properly describe a theory of dance, one has to have names for the kinds of feelings the dances are supposed to inspire.

Not to mention the feelings of the audience and the feelings of the dancer themselves differ. The highest quality of dance arranges the relationship intentionally and coherently with the rest of the dance, something which is impossible without first describing both feelings in enough detail to predict them. Call it choreographic engineering. 

Because of the above difference, the point of watching a dance isn't really to watch a dance. The point is to learn the dance and perform it yourself, in private if necessary. This is true of science as well. Is science a dance, or is dance a science? I hope nobody promised you the stellar path is easy to walk.

 

Book 10 is the final book. 

"But when a painter paints a picture of a bed, we agree that it is not a real bed [...]But we have all agreed that a bed upon which people repose is not even a real bed. The truly real bed is the Form of Bed"

Reminder that among the critics of the theory of Platonic forms you can find such luminaries as Plato.

Ignore for the moment the form of the Bed. Discard it. Think instead of the form of [the bed you're witnessing]. The form of [the thought of the bed]. Not only is this still a proper Platonic form, not only is this form easy to grasp, this form is in fact impossible not to grasp. It is defined by and as whatever you happen to be grasping. Plato committed the sin of aposiopesis. If you think through the idea all the way to the end you find it's a degenerate idea, a distinction of no distinction. Everything is the form of itself.

We already live in the world of forms. Well isn't that neat? 

Real entities have real causal effects. If Platonic forms were real, you would be able to experimentally verify which objects are more formal and which are less formal. Not only can we not do that, Plato can't even tell you what such an experiment might look like.

 

Plato is clearly gearing up to reject art, mistakenly. If a physical bed isn't a Bed, why would it matter if a drawing of a physical bed also isn't a real Bed? Even if we accept that not being a Platonic form is a bad thing, non-art is already not a form. As expected of a distinction of no distinction, we find that relative to the form category, art and non-art are not distinguished.

Is a dialogue not a form of art? It's clearly not what literally happened; Plato is condemning exactly what he himself is doing. 

Plato (unlike modern idiot-academics) does address this, but the argument is so weak I don't feel the need to address it. 

"Philosophers, we are reminded, know the Forms and Goodness itself. Artists do not know the Truth."

Yeah well my dad can beat up your dad.

Nuh uh! I can eat fifty-one raw onions without crying!

Plato's actual objection was that Athenian artists were bad. This was true. The Sturgeon ratio for Fascist art is not 90%, but 100%. "the arts have a morally corrupting impact on men in that dramatic presentations, for example, provoke us to become enraged, or to burst into tears, or to laugh uproariously; they make men act like women or buffoons. We are deluded into sympathizing with the artifice of the stage, and that is simply bad for our characters."

However, it is still true that the best clods of this crud can be good enough. It is in fact possible to reject utopianism and embrace humility. Beholding a high god directly would destroy you. This is not because the divine is bad, but because you are weak. Standing on Sol's surface is lethal, but that's not because having a sun is a bad thing. Likewise, does humanity deserve good art? Likely, it does not. Beholding good art directly would destroy you. Be satisfied with the mediocre.

More generally, the cosmos is a work of art. If you're not sure, try looking up at night. 

Of all things created, art per se was one of them. Do you claim greater wisdom than the creator god?

By pridefully rejecting art as "illusionary," Plato rejects Reality and Existence as "illusionary." He rejects that which determines the Truth, and thus rejects the Truth. 

P.S. Just because art exists doesn't mean you have to look at it. You can unilaterally make your society artless if you want. Don't need anyone's permission. If this is a good idea, Gnon will reward you. Your argument can be your personal flourishing, rather than ivory tower armchair thinking. Or maybe it's a bad idea, and you get the opposite. 

--

https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/r/republic/summary-and-analysis/book-x-section-ii

"Socrates initiates the conclusion of the dialogue by announcing that the rewards of justice are granted to the just after their mortal lives are over."

Gross. "The gods hate you, want you to suffer, and punish you for honouring them." Yeah, uh, no. Defection is irrational. Literally claiming the heavens are unjust, moron.

The gods, too, must be responsible. If they want something, they try to achieve it by paying for it. Logic is the law even the highest gods must bow to.

"But the souls of unjust men are not destroyed by injustice, and neither are the souls of just men."

Really? How do you know?

If any rewards of justice are seen beyond mortal life, why wouldn't the punishments of injustice also echo beyond the temporal realm? 

Alt: how do you know injustice rots the soul? Sounds like a prideful bare assumption to me.
Physical energy is perfectly conserved. Is energy, the signature of all physical existence, immortal? Pure and impervious to evil? If every component of your body made of perfect immortality, how is your body itself not immortal?

How did ""Socrates"" not think to ask questions like these? I am in fact interested in how Plato (or even Glaucon) would answer them. Naturally I can answer them myself, but I'm hardly confident in my answers. Anyway if I have to answer them all myself, what's the point of reading anyone else? 

Plato is at least (sometimes) on topic, but he still doesn't think about the issues seriously. Ironically, despite being vastly longer than the descriptions warrant, the Republic is nowhere near long enough to cover the topics raised. Plato stops five steps into a journey of leagues. 

--

ttps://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/r/republic/summary-and-analysis/book-x-section-iii

"Myth of Er"

If you made a mistake telling the myth, how would you know?
We're not suddenly claiming to be infallible, are we?
If you made a mistake hearing the myth, how would you notice?
If Er made a mistake, how would you correct it?

--

 

A society that cannot think will die as surely as one that cannot make war or cannot build and create. 

The merchant has it easy. Creation has no corresponding vice, and for simple acts of creation one only needs fidelity to the self. Almost any sincere attempt at wealth generation will be worthwhile. How creative is creative enough? Any creative is creative enough.

The warrior sees a greater challenge, but ultimately a mortal one. He needs to be better than the next warrior over. Wiser too, yes, but as you know if you've met a warrior, this is not usually a high bar. How courageous is courageous enough?

The scholar must grapple with the divine, and he has to get it right. How much falsehood is too much? Almost any falsehood is too much.

As destruction is easier than creation - another point lowering the bar for warriors - lies are easier than speaking the truth. If a scholar makes a mistake, the lie will naturally spread. To naturally prevent it means that his fellow scholars must be better at his subject than he is, which raises the question of why he wasn't already cast out.

When an individual warrior fails in his duties, he dies and his comrades can finish the battle without him. When a scholar fails in his duties, he will bring down divine wrath not only on himself, but his whole society. When a warrior fails he gets beat up. He does not need any deep understanding to know he has failed. When a scholar fails, the damage comes slowly and subtly. 

In both art and kenning, you would hope that the second generation would build on the successes of the first, and discard their errors. Unfortunately, the opposite reliably occurs. The errors remain while the successes are discarded. Luckily there are new successes, as mortals can no more be totally free of truth than they can be totally free of falsehood. 

It doesn't seem to have occurred to Plato that a philosopher-king would be just as capable of writing The Republic as, for example, Plato was. Rather, likely to be better for myriad reasons. Plato's words can be considered no more than an afternoon's idle sketching. "Hey, uh, have a smart person in charge." Figured that out on your own, did you?

What if this successor p-king figures out his Republic should have no p-king? What then, Plato? What then? 

Certainly, we want wise kings. Ignorant kings are unambiguously worse. However, aristocrats have, historically, offered their offspring rather dubious tutelage. 

More importantly, nobody has figured out how to reliably transmit wisdom to regular individuals, never mind lords and kings. This is a walk-before-running situation, and it's important to get to the starting line before assuming you've passed the finish line. Maybe, one day, in a couple thousand years, we might advance from reading Plato to understanding Socrates. "All that I know about making someone wise is that I know nothing - so let's go look. Try a thing, see what happens." 

What causes something like the Royal Society to occur? What causes it to fall? If we knew what caused it, we could figure out what interrupts those causes. Using prototypes, not armchair theorizing or sweeping mandates.  If we knew what the threats were, we could, just maybe, secure our shit.

In Earthly terms, justice is a manufactured good. A good society manually rewards cooperators and manually punishes defectors. It's irrelevant whether it is also some transcendent Truth or not. On Earth, justice is an artisanal craft, like carving a bowl or joining a chair.

Plato clearly hated the prosaic. For him, everything has to be profound all the time. Since Earthly justice is prosaic, and the West is nothing more than series of footnotes to Plato, this is a serious problem. A just society is built of everyday acts of justice performed by ordinary folk. It's irrelevant whether they understand what they're doing. Gnon rewards wise action whether the actor is in fact wise or not. 

I would like to think there is high demand for justice. To get a just society, all that's necessary is to legalize and lionize its production. Allow justice-producers to get rich producing justice. However, it is horrifyingly possible that in fact demand for justice is low. 

Maybe the fair price simply doesn't exceed the production costs. That mortals are simply too stupid to understand what's in their best interests. In this case, forcibly distributing justice doesn't work. "You will live without crime and betrayal, and you will like it!" "Nooo! Anything but that!" Narrator: "They didn't like it." You will always be outgunned by a faction that offers injustice instead. "Come with me if you want to reap all sorts of unjust spoils." "Ooh! Dibs!" 

In this latter case, justice is an occult specialty good. You can have it, but only by secretly gathering other rare justice-demanders, and keeping your justice-cult hidden from the wider culture. E.g. by camouflage; it's not in practice difficult to portray the justice as some terrible burden or a weird peccadillo. Never allow the justice-cult to be too obviously rich, and you're golden. As every writer everywhere on wisdom agrees, monetary wealth is overrated. Cool and all, but rarely worth the price. Let the justice-deprecators squabble over the Scrooge vaults. 

Ironically, the world can be far more glorious than utopians imagine. However, it is not done by removing all error, but by laboriously creating new wonders. Destruction is easy. Creation is difficult. The Dao rewards effort, not taking the lazy path.

What if Er's myth per se was right, but the wrong myth to tell? What if there's a myth that's better in every way? How would you notice? How would you find it?

Piety Makes Debate Work

If both interlocutors are sufficiently pious, you can debate productively. 

The successful side doesn't win, they're merely passing a message along. The side that must change isn't losing, they're being allowed the opportunity to submit more elaborately to heavenly wisdom. 

There is a correct arrangement of the rules of debate, and that's when they're holy: when the rules uphold the sacred against the profane. You can't revoke the GIGO rule, but as long as one side has something worth saying, there is an arrangement of rules that upholds truth against falsehood. 

The holy ruleset is not cheap. It's a lot of work, including a heavy time investment. I know the rules, but not well enough that I can write them down unprompted.

Neo-Theodicy is Still Hard

Recified theodicy: non-omnipotence and imperfection >> perfection. The heavens can't actually do or know everything, and even if they could do all possible things, it is impossible to make perfection superior to imperfection. 

However, it is well within the heavens' powers to dramatically reduce the amount of evil on Earth. That imperfection is better doesn't mean you should intentionally make things more imperfect. The point of imperfection is that, unlike perfection, it can be improved. Imperfection is only a divine gift if you're willing to improve things.

Christians say souls need to be given the chance to display their virtues or vices, but this is, frankly, ludicrous. I can judge the worthiness of individuals using purely my fleshy human abilities, at well over 99% accuracy, in a few seconds, without even resorting to philosopher superabilities. If I can do it, divine beings would be able to do it transcendentally better. There are no Minority Reports: they are nothing but accurate and precise. 

By process of elimination, allowing mortals to be outrageously, flagrantly nasty to each other must somehow be better. Puzzling. 

Come to think, never mind heavenly wrath, it's well within mortal power to prevent humans from being flagrantly, outrageously nasty to each other. Physical interdiction is possible, always and everywhere. Secure your shit and don't stand somewhere stupid. Don't build on that flood plain unless you have waterproofing technology for your house. 

The Amish are permanently safe from not just Wokeness, but supply chain disruption. No matter how fucked up the American Empire gets, they won't have to care. (It's not dishonourable to leech off parasites, it's practically your sacred duty.) Do you find these risks worth the benefit of being not-Amish, or are you making a bad trade?

If mortals consistently decide to legalize evil, why would the heavens object? They have prayed to Gnon to have evil done to them. Gnon is more than happy to grant this boon. 

However, this merely pushes the puzzle back a layer. Why would the heavens placidly allow the existence of a race that consistently prays for punishment? Why not grant the spirit of the prayer rather than the letter, and offer annihilation? Most curious.

Democratic Man Too Weak for Truth

Democratic man is too weak to accept the reality of Democracy. The ideas crush his mind.

This is not surprising: democratic man's basic more is to commit all three deadly sins. They have committed fully to vice. As a result they have committed fully to powerlessness. 

A truth all ancient men knew without having to talk about it: if a man wants something, he has to take it by force. All his wealth is seized by dint of tremendous effort. Nobody is going to give him anything for free, not even death.
Democratic man wants "freedom," which in practice means asking for permission to take things. Clearly the true answer is no; permission is not granted. Democracy is an illusion. Polities move directly from plutarchy to tyranny. 

As the realities of his polities decay further the strength required to accept Reality becomes higher. Meanwhile, democratic man becomes even weaker, even less able to handle an honest appraisal of his environment.

By the time your polity becomes democratic, it is too late. Nothing can halt the decline and ultimate collapse. The necessary virtue simply doesn't exist. If you tell this to democratic man, he will clamour for "solutions," yet the solution is as death to him in any case. He would have to give up his "freedom" and stop being democratic.

On the plus side, democratic man is so weak that you can casually 1v1000 him. "If I'm going down, I'm taking you with me!"
"Hmm...I decline."
"Shit!"
Democratic man can't be saved, but there's also no reason to save him. Don't try to usurp Gnon's prerogatives.

Republic Books 8 & 9

There's a good reason Plato was so influential: lunar path coherence. You can feel that he's onto something important. That and he piggybacked on Socrates' transcendent heroism. Praise of those greater than you is directly to your own advantage.

Tragically, Plato's solar path coherence is nearly missing, meaning his stellar path coherence is negative. He has the right kind of plan, but almost every detail misses the mark. 

In Book 8, Plato discards analysis and returns to description and reports, which means his reach stops exceeding his grasp. This and book 9 are easily the best part of the Republic. 

Plato had never seen an aristocracy, so that part is, like the rest of the book, nearly unreadable. You can ctrl-f down to 'timocracy.' However, for the rest he's cogent, on topic, and the prose flows smoothly. It's good. I genuinely recommend you read the original (translation).

You can have the pleasure of watching Plato describe us in detail from nearly two and a half thousand years ago.

Naturally, real life isn't as neat as Plato's descriptions, but it is a mere linear superposition. Modern Fascism is smeared across plutarchy, a bit of democracy, and a generous dollop of tyranny. Further, exactly as Plato claims and apparently for almost exactly the reason he claims, Fascism is naturally decaying toward pure tyranny.

"Socrates descries government by timocracy (from timé, honor) in Sparta and in Crete, where the military was in power (kratos) and honor and ambition were highly valued." 

Technically using honour wrong. He's referring to warrior-caste status points. Glory in battle or other forms of direct physical conflict. "The timocratic man will value physical exploits, and he will be courageous and ambitious." While honour is glorious and dishonour is inglorious, glory isn't necessarily honour. A nice hill is glorious, but entirely orthogonal to honour, for example.

"A given state seems always to fall into ruin because people in power disagree, quarrel among themselves, and come to violence."

More precisely, ownership is not clear. The property is rationally disputed, and the dispute escalates to blows because it's worth the risk in the short (easily intelligible) term. 

"Oligarchy is a society in which the rich are in control; the wealthy are extremely wealthy and the poor quite poverty-stricken. The rich will not be able to sate their desire for more and more wealth; for them the love of money will overtake their desire for honor."

American billionaires can't even spend all their money, they only accumulate more as a way of scoring a game they play with each other. "Eventually, the rich will become profligate, simply getting and spending money,"

"in fact, in such a state, the gap between the rich and the poor will be so wide that the two classes (rich and poor) will be actively antagonistic to one another."

What's the saying? Eat the rich? (As if they could.) 

"he may appear to be a reasonable person, but his respectability is predicated upon his fear of becoming impoverished."

Cowards run away from fear instead of running toward joy. Some are so terrified they can't run at all, lest they attract too much attention.

"The enormously wealthy people in a declining oligarchy will probably lend out money to the poor at exorbitant rates of interest. The debtors will spend and spend; they will be encouraged to borrow and borrow."

"In such a democratic state, everyone is more or less equally free of any responsibility to anyone else, including service to the state. No one is obliged to give orders; no one is obliged to take orders; no justice can be respected or meted out."

"Although the son may not even respect money, he will probably not respect anything else; he will become shiftless, kind of a reed in the wind, unable to control his desires, which will probably fluctuate wildly. Lacking any ability to discern differences in appetite, he will probably live solely for the moment, and he will be rudderless. His will be a life without order."

"so is democracy greedy for absolute freedom; it recognizes no authority whatever, neither familial nor militaristic nor academic."

No formal, responsible hierarchy. Even when democratic man recognizes that this is a mistake, he still can't bring himself to submit to a hierarchy. Humility is beyond him unless forced to act humble at gunpoint.

"The erstwhile democrats in power will continue to placate the great beast of the populace, and they will, as is their wont, rob all the rich folk."

E.g. seizing the foundations. E.g. HR departments at every corporation.

"The rich will complain in the Assembly; the democrats will charge them with being [...] reactionaries." ...and racist and sexist or whatever.

"[The tyrant] will trust no one, certainly not men of reason or compassion. He will surround himself with criminals, and he will finally do criminal acts against the very democrats who elected him." Such as BLM. "The tyrant will despotically rule his unhappy and fearful state."

"The democrat is desirous of all things and treats all, good and bad, equally"

The democrat is unable to gatekeep his own communities, because intentionally setting up gatekeepers smells of hierarchy. He allows traitors into his midst and repeatedly acts surprised when he is betrayed.

"if his son, the tyrannical man, falls into bad company — and he will — then he will be governed entirely by the bad and the desire for the bad."

Conquest's third law and Moldbug's impact. Impact == change * resistance. 

In government, democracy is impossible. It's only a popular attitude.  In real world situations, plutarchy performs a quantum transition directly to tyranny. E.g. every American agency and NGO has a plethora of gatekeepers.

Wisdom is harder than courage which is harder than creativity & fidelity. (More on this next entry.) The State first loses the capacity for wisdom, and becomes a timearchy. Then it loses the capacity for courage, and becomes a plutocrachy. Then it loses even the capacity to avoid treachery, and becomes a tyranny. 

Democracy is inherently tyrannical, incidentally. If the populace are already free, the sovereign will also be already free, and yet, like all democratic men, he lusts for more freedom. He can only get this by depriving his fellow citizens of their freedoms. In other words, by going into pure sadism. 

If modern democracy seems more tyrannical than ancient tyrannies, it is only because technology limited how sadistic the tyrant could be. Beyond around a hundred miles from his seat of government, there was no way to know if his torturous edicts were even being followed. Not without going there personally; but then who would watch the vipers in the capital? Similarly, the most perverted, degenerate mandates can only be afforded against a backdrop of great wealth. Evil is a luxury good.

As a distant second, ye olde populations had not yet had any spirit or initiative beaten out of them by centuries of State repression. They would not meekly submit to endless humiliation, but would eventually choose to fight, even should it appear hopeless. 

--

"It might appear to an immature thinker, or a child, that the tyrant, exercising despotism as he does, is surely a happy man; after all, it is plain that the tyrant can live surrounded by pomp and ceremony and all that wealth can buy. All of his subjects he may treat as objects; he can kill any citizen of his state at whim. But we must remember that the tyrant himself is just as much a slave to his own mad master, his lust, as his subjects are enslaved to his tyranny. The best parts of the tyrant's soul are governed, tyrannically, by the worst part of his soul, and he can never escape the dark prison of his days. The tyrant, who is never in control of himself, is miserable."

Narcissists hate themselves. If you give them power (kratia), all you accomplishing is empowering this self-hatred. They will torment themselves, and incidentally torment everyone around them. 

Personnel is policy. If the tyrant wasn't a terrible person they wouldn't be a tyrant. 

Note that you can't grant dunamis to someone else. They have to build it themselves.

"In contrast to the tyrant, the just man is free; he is enslaved to nothing, for nothing in his desires or emotions can captivate him; since his whole life is governed by his reason, he lives a self-controlled life, happy in his knowledge and happy that he knows it."

The just man is at peace with his own nature and at peace with nature of the world.

And why wouldn't he be? He is in control of it. It is not in control of him. Gnon rewards his humility with power.  (Dunamis specifically.)

"and the third [obsessed with material desires] is a sort of mixture of the oligarchic, democratic, and tyrannical man."

Plato himself notices that fully unjust societies will smear across three hells. 

" Thus it is that the man of justice is correct in his judging himself to be the happiest. And it is self-evident that the man of reason is best fitted to judge, since he alone of the three knows Justice."

The just man is the only one that doesn't live in fear. A warrior's glory can be lost on the field. The merchant's money can be lost in innumerable ways. The just man's knowledge is near-inviolable. The just man's glory and money can also be lost, but unlike the warrior and the merchant, for the just man, these things are mere luxuries. He accumulates them to praise the glory of the cosmic spectacle, not to validate himself. 

A truly just man is likewise indifferent even to knowledge, though of course this indifference is itself a minimal form of wisdom. An ignorant just man is exactly as valid as the wisest just man.  An ignorant just man accumulate knowledge because it's cool, not because it's some desperate necessity. 

"Socrates' third argument proves out by his making a distinction between pure (positive) pleasure and illusory pleasure (a kind of pleasure which is reliant upon an antecedent "pain")."

A truly just man sees no moral difference. "Pure" pleasure has a place. "Impure" pleasure, too, has a place. He knows what these places are and uses them as is proper or advantageous. Pain, too, can be glorious; pain, too, is one of Gnon's creations.

Properly illusory pleasure would be based on a lie. It is dishonourable and disharmonious. However, the pleasures of matter are not lies. This is an issue of the law of identity; pleasure is pleasure is pleasure.

"And we must remember that the illusory pleasures are merely images; knowledge and its study are real."

Prosaic dressed up by misunderstanding into profundity.

Mere "image" pleasures are temporary and often have poorer ROI, that's all. The money can be spent only once. The knowledge can be used and copied over and over until the world bursts of it.

"Now we may behold the unjust man, who has ruined his own life by denying his reason and [getting into fights with his own best interests, because he doesn't understand what they are]."

"Nothing can ever profit him [long term or permanently] for the evils he has visited upon himself, as well as upon others."

"A man must learn to govern himself through [whatever Gnon tells him to use to govern himself], lest he live a life of misery."

"if he cannot be guided by his own reason, he should, like the craftsmen in the Ideal State, learn to be [humbly] guided by the intelligence and reason of others"

Cosmic Structure is as a Mobius Fractal

It looks strictly linear and finite from everywhere but two places: the very highest point and the very lowest, which, as it turns out, are the same point. The Dao and the humblest speck of dust is the same thing.

As a simple example, let's model the cosmos as the classical elements. There is quintessence, which is made of all four elements. The four elements are likewise made of all four elements - fire has fire-fire and air-fire and water-fire and earth-fire. The water-fire likewise has fire-water-fire and air-water-fire and water-water-fire and earth-water-fire. It's a clear and discrete hierarchy. The fractal differentiates and discriminates all the way down to the most specific, the most concrete, the least wholistic. (As another examples, this works with chakras too.)

Another way of saying [most specific] is [fundamental particle]. At the top is quintessence, the Dao. At the bottom is the foundation, that which underpins everything - the Dao. The fundamental particle is also quintessence. From the humblest speck of dust you can re-derive all of Existence. There is a bottom, but you can go through the bottom and if you do, you end up at the highest point. Likewise you can go through the top. You can transcend the Dao, but you end up at the bottom - in the bowels of the netherworld, so to speak. 

Likewise, the Dao appears to have two sides - e.g. mind and matter - which flow seamlessly into each other, if you move far enough along the path, and yet there is always a distinct opposite side. An apparent dichotomy. The dichotomy is also fractal. You can split the Dao into two opposing sides, which are in fact a single whole, in many separate, overlapping ways. Life and death. Hot and cold. Inward and outward. Sensation and decision. Male and female. Light and dark. Creation and destruction. Time and space. Math and poetry. Logic and intuition. Control and freedom.

The cosmos is a mobius fractal.

I accidentally converted myself to my religion, and now I've accidentally worked out how to word the description of my religion. I worship bringing the mind into harmony with Existence. The holy act is to think about Reality the way Reality thinks about herself. The holy ritual is to, second, genuinely speak one's thoughts. This latter turns out to be severally and surprisingly nontrivial. 

Proselytizing is a sin. Rather than joining someone else's religion, it turns out finding your own has a simple recipe: imagine your ideal religion in detail. As much detail as possible: what are the buildings? The clothes? The processions? The decorations? If you do it correctly, you'll involuntarily convert yourself, the same way I did. It appears at first to be a fantasy construction, and it turns out to be discovery. You're hardly making anything up, instead you're finding out you already had a worship in there and it merely needs a opening so it can come out.

As with all holy things, while doing it correctly brings bountiful material boons, that's not the point. It is done for its own sake. Unifying thought and Reality is worth doing because it is inherently worthy. Truth maxxing for Veritas' sake.

Republic Book 7, Sections 2 & 3

"they are to be introduced to various levels of mathematics and thoroughly schooled in them in order to train them intellectually so that they may become adept at abstract thought."

Not how abstract thought works. It either happens or it doesn't. Training, and especially teaching, likely makes no difference at all. 

"Socrates suggests that the studies should move from the simplest to the most complex in this order: arithmetic, plane geometry, solid geometry, astronomy, and harmonics."

This is likely true but the levels are wrong. Should a real school ever appear, it will have to pray to Gnon and ask which levels go first and why. Figure out the most important thing for students to know, then work backwards to figure out the most efficient path. 

It is possible the most efficient path is discarding optimization. Do set 2s until your daemon can just tell you what to investigate next. 

--

"and we are reminded again that these young candidates must be of high moral character and industry."

Personnel is policy. If you have a ruling system (Exit) which selects for high moral character, you will have a good polity, regardless of how they're educated. If you don't, you won't.

As we now know, most cognitive traits are nearly 100% genetic. Like height, you will reach your maximum intelligence/virtue as long as you're not actively malnourished or otherwise injured. (The epistemic sets appear to be an exception, but almost everyone who can use them will invent the sets themselves.) 

"but the intellectual studies are to be lightly enforced. Socrates argues that rigorous training does not harm the body at this age, but enforced intellectual studies may cause the learner to rebel."

Turns out Plato is not an entirely incompetent pedagogue.

Blind squirrel? Why does Plato know these things? 

Though "lightly enforced" a fortiori. Scholars learn even if you try to stop them, never mind what's enforced. It's helpful to give a few hints here or there, or let them know which quagmires to skip, to save time. Their daemon knows roughly 10,000% more than you do about what they need to know.

 

"At this stage, the best of the students will be selected to further their education in a strict regimen of physical and military training (discussed earlier). "

Busybody. The students ought to select themselves. Sink or swim. See also: Exit. Have several trainers. Let the students who pick bad trainers with bad training regimes fail - then leave for the good, effective trainers. This is how you pray to Gnon to grant you good training. 

Separate trainers and hiring, in general. There is no reason the hiring lord needs to know why you can do what you can do - only that you can do it.

"This physical and military training will be rigorous, and the students will have no time for intellectual pursuits."

Foolish. You must rest your body. Resting the body is an opportunity to study.

Foolish. The mind works poorly if the body is neglected. A physics education should involve duelling, horseback riding, or at the very least warehouse work. Ideally every day. 

Matter and mind are not genuinely separate. The brain is a physical organ, morons.

"the young students will be tested, and a further selection will be made. The best students will be given the advanced studies in mathematics (discussed earlier); the course in mathematics will last for 10 years."

Bullshit. Again, let the students themselves decide what they want to learn. Don't forget the street runs both ways. If they can't find anyone willing to teach them, normally that's because they're dumb. This problem solves itself. Don't be a control freak.

"Part 5: When they are 35, having now become trained philosophers"

I reached grandmaster of philosophy at 29, and I trained myself. Imagine how much faster I could have managed it if I could have apprenticed instead of having to re-invent literally every wheel. 

"It's hard." It's not actually that hard. You just want an excuse for not doing it, because you don't want to do it. Training someone who doesn't want to be a logiomancer doesn't take until 35 - it takes until they're 100,000. Possibly longer. 

Instead, reject control freakery. It's illegitimate. They don't want you to learn either. They want you to be oppressed.

You can force someone to destroy but you can't force someone to grow. See also; creation, love, initiative, etc. It's logically impossible. 

"Now that they know Goodness"

Plato's Goodness is probably just Badness. Coercion, anti-nihilism.

However, it is true that peasants can't understand. That's why they need lords. They can't figure it out. If they don't want to be wrecked by Gnon, they have to obey and only obey. To them, it looks like a bunch of random, unconnected instructions. 

Sadly those who don't see can't deal with unexpected situations. Too often they can't even recognize the situation as different and thus unexpected. They need to be supervised. 

Perhaps we can hope that, with wise supervision, the peasant might slowly (by age 50, perhaps) start to understand the principles behind the instructions they're given, and need less supervision. Perhaps even give them a raise, since they're less expensive. Like they have seniority or something silly.

Gonna have to ask Gnon about that one, though. Try it several ways and pay attention to Gnon's answers.

The old spilled blood must be re-consecrated for Mars.

American Drug Cartels

Every mayor in America has the local drug lord on speed-dial. Sometimes you just need things done...extrajudicially, you know? Votes printed, juries intimidated, riots supplied, that sort of thing. Plus, do you know how many campaign contributions those guys can afford? Wowza. It would just be dumb not to run with these snakes.

The FBI has time to run anti-KKK ops so heavily that every wignat group is in fact 80% glowie. If they wanted to infiltrate and shut down drug gangs, it would be trivial. Conclusion: the gangs are State-subsidized. I would genuinely be unsurprised to find they effectively have Fed fund accounts. 

The point of the DEA is to keep profits high by keeping the supply expensive. Drugs are commodity goods and would be worth pennies in profit if they could be produced and distributed competitively. How are you supposed to run a criminal empire if you can't fund it with extortionary drug profits?

But wait, where do they get their drugs?
Mexican drug cartels. 

Oh duh, the Mexican drug cartels are in fact FBI/CIA operations. Maybe when the NSA becomes a real boy they'll get their own shiny Mexican drug cartel. Obviously the ATF has a couple too.

The Mexican government superposition isn't stable. Either the Official government would crush all the cartels, or one of the cartels would crush the government thus become the government - and it's clear the Official government has already lost the whip hand. It has to be fake kabuki conflict.

In other words they're being paid Fed/IRS dollars, on the condition that they don't go beyond certain boundaries. In other words Carlos Slim bought the NYT using laundered Fed funds; the financial equivalent of hiding behind seven proxies. 

You think they're so dumb they can't even think of hiding behind seven proxies? Being held by a "Mexican" allows the NYT to circumvent many American laws. In extremis, Carlos can bribe the relevant Mexican bureaucrat. Technically you can also bribe folk in America but it's vastly more expensive since it all has to go through legal. 

By passing the instructions through a Mexican office, it's much harder for any American to notice the inherent command-and-control nature of the relationship. There's a 0% chance Slim is not wholly owned by the State department. Proof by retrospective inspection. Things that never happened: "USG lets primary propaganda organ be owned by random unaffiliated jagoff." They couldn't allow their flagship liar to go down due to little things like "not making any money" and doubtless Slim continues to secretly provide NYT with regular infusions of "corporate welfare," now it's been fully nationalized. The IRS and SEC know which books it's not supposed to investigate too closely.

Checksum: cynicism. Conclusion is sufficiently cynical to be plausibly realistic.

Presumption of innocence is generally a bad idea. It is necessary for USG to prove it isn't the vitae behind Mexican drug cartels. Corruption ought to be presumed until it has been refuted beyond a reasonable doubt.

Diversity is Real Dumb

Discrimination is supposed to be the ur-sin, right?

How do you tell if the diversity differs if you can't discriminate between this on the one hand and that on the other hand?

Diversity is strictly identical to discrimination. Without discrimination you can't tell the difference; there is no diversity. Everything looks the same. The more discriminating you are, the more diversity you see. God can't even see the similarity between different molecules of water - you can tell, because he doesn't confuse one for another and get them mixed up. They stay where they are. Discriminationliness is next to godliness.

I suppose this is another instance of the form, "Democracy is good, politics is bad." You get this shit when you go all kto kogo and have no principles other than a narrow-scope pragmatic [I get mine]. Apples are fruit when you want an apple and they're treacherous poison temptations when you've had too many apples. Right? Right. 

Hey look it's narcissism again. Things defined by what the human thinks about them, rather than being defined by their own existence. Literally unable to conceive of anything outside their own perception. 

P.S. Something something American anti-intellectualism. The fact it's mind-bogglingly stupid is one of the biggest selling points, as far as Americoids are concerned. They will only be happier if you somehow made it even more flagrantly idiotic.

Investigating Gatekeeping with Science

The easy sciences stay scientific much longer than the difficult sciences. E.g. puzzlingly, IQ research continues. 

Hypothesis: the easy sciences filter out the frauds. When a termite tries to burrow into a grant-writing or journal-editing position, they get thrown out for obvious incompetence. Even if the State appoints an apparatchik, they have to withdraw because the contrast is too embarrassing. In the difficult sciences, a termite can trivially Sokal Hoax their way into whatever position they desire, and thereby shut out anyone attempting to honestly approach the subject.

The easy sciences only get politicized either by State force majeure or when they luck into a genius termite who can actually do the work yet is still more interested in pushing the religion. 

Conclusion: in most cases, gatekeepers are not seized by force majeure. It occurs due to a failure of internal policing. Too much mercy, generally by a very wide margin. 

As always, the answer is Exit. Defend the gatekeepers if you want, but sooner or later the gates are going to be seized by hostile parasites. The question pertains to what to do once this inevitably occurs. The answer: leave the gates. Let them have it. Every other solution fails both theoretically and empirically on quis custodiet grounds.

As always, the more Exit you have, the less you need. If folk can leave your gated community whenever they feel the gatekeepers are hostile, then you don't end up with a community riddled with rotten pockets of hostility. The hostile wannabe-parasites tend to be somewhat lame and crippled, so the easier it is for them to Exit, the less you have to eject/execute them. 

Or: there is no alternative to the NSF, which is how you know the NSF is corrupt. The termites know that if the virtuous could leave, they would.

Republic Book 7 Section 1

"Allegory of the Cave"

It's good!

Probably why you've heard this one before and not the other two.

Plato's Cave is such a good analogy it's extensible. What happens if you drag someone out from the deep cave into the sunlight? They don't learn the truth, their pasty skin gets Plato's sunburn. 

If they're used to the cool cave and take off too much clothing in the warm sunlight, they may even be burned fatally. Not to mention they're likely to lose at least some eyesight due to staring into the sun, unless they have a sherpa telling them that staring into the sun is dangerous. Plato's blindness.

Truth isn't safe. (One of my favourite things about it.) 

 

Likewise we can see there's various galleries to Plato's cave. Deeper caves and shallower caves. We can see that the puppets don't dance themselves - someone has to stand in front of the fire and wave them around. They don't necessarily know the truth, but do they know the story is a lie. 

"It would be a lot of work to lead his fellows into the light of a kind of new dawn of knowledge."

Not merely a lot of work, but impossible.

Seeming nitpick: truth is far more like darkness than light. Plato was working on a rather fanciful model of vision which was basically [eyes are flashlights]. Visi-ons leave and visiblate objects, which then return the visions to the eye so you can see. 

Lies can be major or minor, the way light can be bright or dim, whereas truth is just truth. There are an infinite variety of colours of lies, but truth comes in exactly one shade. You get to truth not creating and shining a light, but by destroying all the lies in the way. Truth is what's left once you've laid waste to everything destructible.

In reality, taking a man out of the cave doesn't work. You could say he takes the cave with him, but in fact truth is darkness: he cannot see it. The truer it is, the more invisible it is. You can wave as much truth in front of him as you want to no harm, because he won't even notice. The best you can do is perform a shadow-play that happens to cast the actual shadows on the wall for him to see, but why would he not treat this truth-matched shadow ritual any differently than he treats any other shadow ritual? He doesn't. He can't.

Bonus round: as I found out studying consciousness, nobody has tried Plato's cave-sherpa program. As above, I'm sure it wouldn't work, but nobody really knows. However, lots of folk have tried leading men into even deeper, more crazed, more twisted galleries. Men love that. Huge demand. 

To "see" the truth, you have to touch it directly. Why does [Plato's sunburn] work as an analogy? Truth is caustic. It burns. It destroys, violently. Even if you lead a man through the shadows to the darkness, he will recoil in pain. Is it too cold? Too hot? Either way, expect lawsuits. He will blame you for leading him; he will not blame his own weakness. He will cling spastically to his damaged lies, then flee in terror.

Most who leave the cave on their own will likewise recoil, believing they have made a mistake. 

He probably isn't even wrong. Fondling the truth too much leads to scarring. What do you do if [too much] means [at all]?

Soft Science is Difficult, Hard Science is Easy

Kolmogorov complexity. Chemistry is made of physics; it's necessarily more complex than physics, thus a more difficult topic of study. Biology is made of chemistry, psychology is made of biology, etc.

 

Why are all the smart guys in physics? 

A) nobody likes challenging themselves. Smart guys can see all the easy successes are in the easy sciences.

B) in the easy sciences, it's easy to catch frauds, so by process of elimination all the frauds (dumb) end up in the difficult sciences.

 

This means scientist quality is inversely correlated with difficulty of subject, and thus science quality is exponentially inversely correlated with subject difficulty. The greater skill required to catch a fraud is matched by a lower average skill in the field.

E.g. in chemistry, scientist quality is lower, meaning theory quality is exponentially lower. However, catching frauds using these simple theories is still sufficiently easy, so there isn't much in the way of frauds, merely poor understanding of the topic. 

E.g. in the topics-previously-known-as-philosophy, it is near-impossible to expunge fraud, because a clear demonstration of truth and falsehood requires very high skill indeed. Result: topic is fully dominated by fraud.

 

Exception: sociology breaks the pattern. In the same way that averaging a bunch of quanta gets you classical physics, averaging a bunch of psyches gets you sociology, which is dead easy. At this level the complexities cancel each other out rather than crystallizing toward further complexity. I suspect there's some evolutionary booster rockets as well - the brain has relevant ASICs. Perhaps even evolutionary sociological grooves, containing sociological responses to a small subset. 

Indeed sociology is so easy peasants go, "It can't possibly be that easy," and discount the obvious solution in favour of someone who sounds fancy. 

E.g: what if getting taxed makes a country poorer for the benefit of a small, unproductive minority. Mind blown yet?

Republic Book 6, All Sections

"The good philosophers he sees around him, Adeimantus says, are worthless to the society they live in, and the bad philosophers are rogues."

Is that because they're not logiomancers, or is that because Adeimantus is blind to long-term consquences? Ideas matter.  

"To the surprise of the auditors, Socrates concedes to Adeimantus' statement."

Ah. Not logiomancers. 

"So of course such a society, such a public, has no use for a good philosopher."

"In fact, in a bad society, the more intelligent a young philosopher is, the more attractive he becomes to people who want to use him, and the more such people corrupt him."

Rather, the more intelligent a young scholar is, the more likely he is to realize the rewards of truth are minimal or negative, and thus take up a parasitic disposition. 

"At the same time, although good philosophers are useless to a bad state (Plato's view of his society)"

In reality being a philosopher - being especially wise, I mean - in a bad state is especially profitable. The bigger the delta between general wisdom and your wisdom, the more easily you can prey on the surrounding society. Further, the less honourable your society, the less reason there is to attempt to cooperate with it. Become wise, because that's a good in itself; exploit the wisdom for predatory purposes, because that's delicious. 

"Or the day may come when a ruler in political power might become a philosopher."

...and you can turn your powers back toward justice.

--

"Socrates adamantly denies that he can identify a single state at the time of this dialogue that might prove fruitful for the growth of a philosopher-ruler; he says that, because of his environment (the society in which he finds himself), the naturally good, budding philosopher becomes warped."

Yeah. 

It's normal for States to be so unjust that heavenly wrath is inevitable. They are already doomed, such that any attempt to fix them at best delays the inevitable and gets the heavens pissed off at you too.

"But intelligent people may be intemperate and unreliable, and they may lack courage. Reliable people, conversely, are often indolent and bored when facing intellectual tasks; such people are often ignorant and may be stupid."

Even in ancient times it was well-known that virtues are common but combinations of virtues in one person are rare. Have to multiply the probabilities. 20%*20% = 4%. 

"Socrates then says that he will not precisely define Goodness"

Plato then admits he has no bloody idea what he's talking about and doesn't intend to. 

Goodness is an event which satisfies a conscious agent's values. Eat it, bottom bitch.

"Analogy of the Sun."

It's shit. 

You'll find a thing can be [good] even if it's not true; however, it will tend to conflict with other [good] things more than not. Dissonant, rather than harmonious. 

 

"The Analogy of the Divided Line"

It's real shit.

Moderns produce the same sort of nonsense when they try to think about programming data. They like to pretend that human prejudices really exist in the underlying physics. So, narcissism. 

Admittedly it may be necessary to study consciousness to understanding before you can really grapple with definitions. Nevertheless, it's still important to start with a list of things you've seen it doing, rather than start with some weirdo abstract model malarkey.

Why Doesn't the Regime Attack Red Cities with Riots?

It was a puzzle! It's okay, someone worked it out for me. 

Red cities are where all the loot comes from. Attacking them would only kill the golden goose. The Regime isn't dumb enough to do something so dumb.

Luckily red cities are dumb enough to think rioting in blue cities is a threat and to cringe accordingly. The tyrannous citizen lacks both wisdom and courage. 

 

Come to think, rioting in blue cities is likely a net gain. Their peoples are so irresponsible that they're a burden, so destroying their stuff and killing a bunch of them adds (slightly) to their profit margins. Parasite-parasite competition is starting to get fierce. America peaked in 2008, so it's no longer possible to pay off the numerous supporters they need (recall Bruce Bueno de Mesquita) by re-distributing the extra pie. The pie is shrinking now, not growing. Someone has to get the shaft. Fidelity, also, is lacking in democratic times.

Gnosticism as Ritual Prison

Working definition: Gnosticism is complete ritualization.

The idea of a literal demiurge is absurd. This glorious planet is beautiful practically everywhere. All natural scenes are clearly sacred to some part of the heavens or another, and whatever created them is worthy of worship. The fact the idea of choosing not to worship it can even occur is itself humbling. 

The explicit form of Gnosticism must be cope. 

Gnosticism reflects an intuitive, lunar-path truth, one that's near-impossible to deny, but shackles the truth with illusions to keep it from destroying your ability to submit to the local tribe. 

That reality is that the tribe is trying to keep you from reality. It wishes to replace all observation of the physical world with ritual truths, and replace all interaction with the physical with ritual procedure. It is demanding total subservience to the ritual master.

There is a demiurge, but it's your local Pope, not a god.
Yes, I'm extremely elitist. However, relative to the task this Pope claims to have set for himself, he is a mere ant, just like you. The vast gulf between peasant and hero vanishes to nothing compared to the magnitude of the Pope's inadequacy.

Ritual: "How are you?" "I'm fine."

Reality: "I demand you lie to me." "I submit to this demand to lie."

The ritual used to be, "I pray for your health," "I wish you a good day." It's not like coming up with a non-Satanist ritual is somehow beyond human ability. Further, I'm not claiming that ritualization is always evil. On the contrary, social interaction between strangers is obviously best ritualized. The demand for a lie is fully deliberate. It is the opening gambit of Gnosticism. They're checking you for submission to Satan. 

Watch carefully: anyone who wholeheartedly uses this opening gambit will lie every time they open their mouth, in one way or another. The longer the conversation continues, the more elaborate, formulaic rejections of Reality they will demand. They will get somewhat miffed if you do not reciprocate by demanding lies from them as well. 

If everything you say is a lie, then you have no choice but to be fully dependent on the lie-giver. You must hope they give you useful lies. 

Total ritualization is always Satanic ritualization. As expected, the non-Satanic rituals are relatively flexible, whereas djinni like Satan and Jehovah always demand total dominance. 

The explicit Gnostic dogma is a twisted version of the reality. Fiat vox veritatis, ruat caelum. If instead all spoke the truth, the demiurge would fall, stripped of all power. The prison door would lose its latch, rendering it incapable of holding anyone. 

Put down the flaming sword and let yourself out.

Slightly More Positive Take on Demand for Propaganda

Youtube comment sections are widely known to be dumpster fires.
Are youtube comment sections unusual? I talk to folk IRL. Often involuntarily...I seem to code as a good listener in meatspace... It's pretty much a youtube comment section. Regular folks' opinions are all over the place. They have no consistency and no noticeable relationship to the facts.

One exception: everyone but the dumbest motherfucker knows exactly what they're supposed think.
(The other exception: Conquest #1. They know exactly what not-[getting fired] entails. If they have actual customers or some other form of real discipline, they will be genuinely competent at their job and everything. As long as the situation isn't unfamiliar, anyway.)

What if most folks know this? What if they're aware their real opinions are nonsensical and incoherent?

Why would they not be grateful for an offering of a consistent and apparently respectable set of opinions? "Look...bro... I ain't gonna do better. I don't have to actually act on them, bro. Why not just take the off-the-shelf option and get on with living?" Especially as the Hegemon does in fact make very sure everyone knows what they're supposed to think. It's not exactly out of the way. See, in past times, the Church. "It's heartwarming when they [agree with the scholar hierarchy]; it impresses everyone, even me."

There is a bit of a downside, in that the propaganda product that can satisfy the low-IQ zero-attention consumer is full of, shall we say, oversimplifications. Also known as utter howlers. Lies so dumb you can tell someone put huge amounts of effort into making them dumber. Real works of "art." 

The more discerning customer still doesn't want to come up with their own worldview. That is indeed a foolish thing to do. It's an enormous amount of effort and all you get out of it is peace of mind, a predictable world that makes sense, and everyone disagreeing with you. Plato forgot to mention one thing democratic man demands: popularity. Popularity and freedom are contradictory of course, but wisdom was abandoned back up when they decayed to timeocracy. The discerning customer wouldn't be caught dead with the idiot prole propaganda, but they still demand propaganda. The internet can elaborately satisfy this demand.

 

P.S. Google Jaques Elluls if you forgot what this is about.

Republic Book 5 Section 2

Out of order:
"At this point, Glaucon and the auditors for the debate again say that the ideas Socrates has presented are probably impracticable."

You don't say.

"This remark, says Glaucon, is so revolutionary that it might cause more than one important citizen to seize the nearest weapon and attack Socrates."

They would have been entirely correct.

 

"Socrates now turns his attention to the question as to whether such a class as the Guardians would be possible. His answer is yes"

Big nope.

"the men and women Guardians of the ideal state would make war together, stirrup to stirrup, against any enemy of the state."

In reality, every man's grip strength overwhelms every woman's grip strength. If she lets him into melee range, he rips the weapon out of her hand and wins by default. 

Women also face severe psychological obstacles when attempting to be an effective combatant. She simply doesn't need to be. If she surrenders, she's going to be spared 99% of the time. Plus or minus a spot of rape, which is a Darwininan win in this case, not a loss. Measure how much of a win by how repulsed women are by the idea of surrender.

 

"And as part of their children's training as Guardians, they should be taken to war when possible and permitted to witness battles and battle tactics and to witness exhibition of courage and cowardice in the field."

This is actually true. All children should be regularly allowed, even required, to see their fathers at work. If a workplace isn't suitable for children, the place is at fault, not the child. Send them anyway until it's fixed.

For numerous reasons, women's work is ideally inside the home, so that part happens automatically. 

I rather suspect the main, driving reason sons aren't allowed to see their modern fathers at work is because their fathers are ashamed of the job they do. They genuinely believe it would be better to be unemployed, but are too cowardly to do anything but exactly what they've been told to do. 

"all participants are to remember that they are fellow-Greeks. After all, fellow-Greeks are not to be treated as barbarians."

Fractally wrong. Cooperate with cooperators. As we know, Greeks didn't cooperate with "barbarians" not because the foreigners lacked honour, but because Greeks were too lazy to learn to understand them. Greeks used the negligent misunderstandings to "prove" they were Rationally Justified in not trying to understand them and could treat them sadistically if they wanted to. 

Result: pissed off the heavens. Now: their average IQ has been browned down to 92 and it's called Istanbul, not Constantinople. For the time of Socrates 115 is a conservative estimate. 

Further, nothing stops Greeks from starting to act like barbarians. In case you weren't sure, they acted barbarically toward "barbarians." If your opponents don't "spread rapine and woe throughout the land" then you ought to likewise do the same, because it's in your best interests not to escalate. It's not a moral thing, it's just prudent. 

By contrast, if they start it, it's in your best interests to end it. Immediately switch to genocide mode, because personnel is policy. Hate the sin and not the sinner if you want, but the best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour, and we're all best served if total war types are removed from existence. Including the total war types themselves.

"he argues that a real state, if it could be realized, might very well closely resemble the state he has been theorizing about"

Big nope.

Turns out Literally Communism is one of the worst possible ideas. 

Personnel is policy: Plato liked these sort of ideas because he wanted to make everyone else as miserable as he was. 

"justice will never be fully realized until philosophers become the rulers or until present rulers and kings show themselves to be philosophers."

Plumber says only plumbers are suited to the highest offices. Conflict of interest? What's that?

"philosophy and political power must be melded in order for the ideal state to be realized"

Depending on exactly what you mean by 'philosophy' this is either trivially true or,

"This remark, says Glaucon, is so revolutionary that it might cause more than one important citizen to seize the nearest weapon and attack Socrates."

If by "philosophy" we mean that rulers will rule healthier states if they use logiomancy, then yes of course that's true. If we mean they have to be a believer in the specific religion called "philosophy" then...

I did previously hope philosophy would be a true religion, but considering that the Academy lives and the Lykeion does not, descriptively philosophy can only be a false religion.

"Glaucon immediately objects; he argues that there exist plenty of people who know things and who display curiosity, but they are surely not philosophers."

Philosophy is not a method, but a set of dogma. 

Though that said, the true methods of epistemology work as a dogma, and produce a dogma. All wise men agree on what is wise.

"Socrates, here, adopts Plato's theory of Forms"

Real Socrates asked questions and was on topic. Plato asserted facts, and went thoroughly off the reservation, exactly as per his reputation and the reputation of Academics in general.

"the philosopher possesses knowledge of the real; the non-philosopher possesses only belief in appearance."

The usual inverted belief of the Sophist or narcissist. It is of course those who don't get hung up on "Forms" who appreciate substance instead of appearances. 

I find the forms themselves to be honest error, rather than Sophism. A very bad error, but honest nonetheless.

Plato was grappling with the relationship between thoughts/ideas and the objects they're about. If you want to look it up on google, it's [intentionality]. This is a nontrivial problem, since you're using ideas to try to understand ideas. You get some recursion going on.

However, it's not really that difficult if you start with observing behaviour rather than trying to start with theory. Figure out what it is by looking at what it does. 

The idea of Forms combines incompatible things into a category. It appears sort-of real if you take it first, but if you start with a list of observations you realize it's just kind of dumb. 

A) You can define "Good" however you want as long as it's internally consistent. B) Obviously "Good" is a thought and can't exist outside of a mind which contains it. Physical objects are neither good nor non-good, for most definitions of [good]. Good is a property of the relationship between physical objects and a mind interacting with them and forming the relationship. Since it's a relationship and not a discrete object, its properties depend on the nature of the mind in question, because that nature affects the properties of the relationship. 

Ω) just discard the idea of Forms. Don't think about it at all until you already have useful ideas, and then it's only a toy theory. Contrast it with useful ideas for fun or for practice. Maybe use it to find parts of yourself that would come up with [form]-like ideas and figure out how they got deranged, for the purposes of re-ranging them. Plato confounded himself and if you take [forms] seriously you (almost) only risk confusing yourself too.

On the other hand, just about everyone is already very confused on this topic, so perhaps it's merely a risk of swapping one confusion for another. Learning the truth here is largely a matter of discarding delusion, not a matter of garnering wisdom. Every happy family is alike; everyone who thinks about ideas per se is deluded in their own way; trying to address each idiosyncratic error here in a general-audience post would itself be nothing but idiosyncratic error.

Ultrashort Christianity-as-Sophism History

Explaining why Christianity's pathologies lay dormant for around 600 years or so is not in fact very difficult. It was temporarily de-Sophized due to breakdown in communication. 

Sophism relies on some level of sophistication to work; after Rome fell, sophistication also fell and essentially everyone clustered at the grug-brain part of the midwit curve, incapable of understanding why they may want to take Sophist points in the least seriously.

Meanwhile, mortals' natural desire to be holy instead of unholy drove them to pervert Church teachings toward good. "Accidentally" misunderstanding that they're still supposed to honour the winter solstice, for example. With the Pope unable to tell them they're being heretical due to technological limitations, nothing stopped them from using Christianity in a relatively healthy way.

Unfortunately this did not remove Sophism from the Bible. The book remained relatively well-preserved. Oops. With the library at Toledo liberated, exposing Christians directly to Sophist texts, and sophistication rising again, the disease was re-activated.

Problem: Christianity is nearly Atheism, and Atheism is Gnosticism. It is not surprising that Christianity constantly spawns heresies which take its evil theology to its logical conclusion. Christianity tells you reject nearly everything holy and accept only the tiniest fraction of holiness. 

"It's all demons!" Why? Because Sophists can use this to control you. They interpret which holiness is holy this week, and thus how you "must" behave.

Demons and devils can then take more Sophism and make the Christian reject even the tiniest fraction of the sacred they were allowed to keep. It's much easier than making Christians reject the original rejection.

Christianity is indeed the problem in the first place. And in any case, returning to Christianity is foolhardy in the extreme; it has already flagrantly proven its political inferiority to this particular heresy. If you rewind the tape of history all that happens is you get to watch the show a second time. Generally faster, because the players already know how it ends.

Christians, you had one job. It turned out you were working for the other side. 

P.S. The reason Gnon favours devils over Christianity is because mortals seriously, seriously fucked up. It's been 2000 (less 600) years of divine wrath. Not a small mistake. Never should have gone anywhere near allowing Christianity to be possible, let alone actually adopting it.

Open Letter, Chapters 1 & 2

"If we see no discrepancies, perhaps the Cathedral is just a truth machine after all."

Trust must be earned. Anyone is allowed to assume the Cathedral is untrustworthy simply because it's made of human speech. Nullius in verba, heathen.

On the contrary, due to known perverse incentives, the neutral epistemic stance about any State church is significantly negative. It needs vast evidence to prove its accuracy. Ball is deep in the opponent's court. All that needs to be said on the topic: such evidence is flagrantly unavailable.

--

"Therefore, since you can no longer be a Whig, you have no option but to become a Tory. The conflict was, after all, a war. No one was neutral. There is no third side."

Profane Sophistry.

There is always a third side: the heavens.

The Whigs deserved to lose because they were Satanist. They themselves said their conflict was unjustified.
The Tories deserved to lose because they lost.

When two undeserving sides go to war, it is guaranteed to be a defeat. One side may lose less, yes, but let's know them by their fruits: the Revolution lead to, you know, this. The modern world. Ugh.
The Tories took on the Revolution, and lost. The Revolution took on Gnon, and lost.

As of course they would. Both sides were irresponsible. Irresponsibility is a deadly sin. Anyone since joining either side has been elaborately destroyed.

Wanker "King" George was likely attempting to beat up his domestic opponents by bullying the Americans, the same way (and with the same effectiveness) the Pentagon tried to bully Harvard by beating up some gooks. If you dishonour Mars, what do you think is going to happen?
Secure your shit, morons.
Also, quit taxing. Charge for service or GTFO.

Chrono Trigger is this many years old and it's still not normal to be able to walk away from text boxes. 

Never take control away from the player unless you absolutely have to. (E.g. A game over. Also, archive the cutscenes, e.g. FF Tactics.) If your player isn't paying attention to your story, that's your fault, not the player's problem.

Is the above principle some 200 IQ galaxy brain transcendence that nobody can possibly understand? Is the purpose of NPCs, as far as game studios are concerned, to waste your time and/or browbeat a captive audience? Or is advancement really this hard?

Republic Book 5 Section 1

[Ultracommunism]

In case you were wondering if "Republic" is a euphemism for "Totalitarian-Communist Terror State," Plato spells out that the ideal Republic is a Communist terror State. Thanks Plato, that was very forthright of you. (This happens because Plato is a Sophist due to disease, not intent.)

"Women are to be considered as candidates both as potential rulers and auxiliaries. And their education in the arts and in gymnastic is not to be separate but equal: They are to be trained together with the men."

Full biological Fascism.

"Their sexual unions must be conducted under strict surveillance by the rulers."

In Plato's world, voyeurism isn't degenerate.

Nobody can mind their own business. Irresponsibility is not merely encouraged, but mandatory.

"As for the children so produced, they will have to be raised communally and provided for by citizens designated as nurses."

Someone did try the shtetl system. It was of course the Gyews. Not exactly experts at giving up bad ideas, they were still forced to give it up. Don't let gay men tell you how to run a family.

But is it really a terror State?
"Furthermore, the children are not to be permitted to recognize their birth parents"
Thanks for the confirm.

Hands up: who is surprised to see a φαγγωτ hate on love.
Got a bit of a conflict of interest there. Trust must be earned; the West trusted without cause. The Occident can only blame itself for the betrayal.

"they argue that the plan is too unrealistic, "

Nobody is arguing that it's literally Satanic?

No, unfortunately, realism is very much the least of its problems.

"Since everything these Guardians now possess is held in communal ownership, there will exist no bickering about private ownership."

lol
good joke plato

Even with selfless angels Communism is inefficient. With humans the slightest nanosecond of cogitation reveals it's catastrophically bad. Yes Johnny, even on paper. 

Communism is irresponsible. Responsibility is a virtue, and Capitalism has repeatedly been shown to be vastly more healthy and virtuous than even the most idealized opium dreams of Sophists. They literally cannot even imagine how good Capitalism is. 

Because Sophism works, it's important to kill Communists and Communism whenever possible. With fire, ideally. Because they cannot imagine how good you are with fire, they don't defend themselves properly, which is a nice bonus.

Right now Communists outnumber the sane something like millions to one, so it's not possible, but Gnon will sort that out sooner or later. In the meantime, it's still possible to put up a firewall. They're so bad at imagining fire you can incinerate all incoming communication and they won't even notice there's a barrier, if you do it right.

This whole State business really doesn't sound like Socrates to me. The voice is wrong. The earlier bits may have been real Socrates. Rather than confidently putting forth (an extremely wrong) vision of justice, he a) punctures others' vainglorious self-contradictions and b) is anti-Sophist as opposed to full Sophist. It plain makes more sense if you assume Plato is sneaking his stupid ideas into the mouth of someone more respectable. (Exactly because he knows full well he can't defend them properly; Conquest #1.)

Socrates never wrote anything down because he would prefer you figure it out for yourself. He recognized that the problem is you never search if you think you already know the answer, rather than any inability to search. He thus tried to tell Athenians they didn't already know, so they could figure it out. Socrates isn't interested in making you believe what he believes. He's interested in what you yourself would believe if you weren't in your own way. He wants you to be yourself, but moreso.

Unfortunately, Athenians hated being told to get out of their own way, with such intensity that they killed him. "Hey, uh, your problems are self-inflicted. Maybe stop doing it to yourself?" "No! Fuck you! I'll show you an inflicted problem!" Yes, very mature, Athens. Super classy.
Would literally rather get conquered by Rome rather than admit they haven't always been perfect angels. Socrates tried to save you from Muslim genetic vandalism, but you'd prefer to be permanently debased rather than listen to him, so now your IQ is 92. Gnon heard your wishes and granted them.

I like to think real Socrates would have shredded Plato. They met; he probably did, in fact. Do you think Socrates would have avoided Plato, judging him a lost cause? I find it highly plausible. Also Plato was probably creepy and cringe in person. Ew. 

"Run away with me!" "Umm...yeah I'm going with the hemlock on this one." 

"Run away with me!" Socrates thinks about that for a moment, then frantically slurps down the poison.

--

Minor preview:
"And when Socrates is asked what is "wrong" with the real state as we know it, as opposed to the realization of the ideal state, Socrates replies that states nowadays"

Plato's method is not fundamentally wrong. It's that he's a Sophist and Sophists don't build right even on sound foundations.

I imagine idealized States all the time. The difference: I modify my vision downward when I find there's a good reason the non-ideal State is the way it is. 

It's much easier to think about whether a State is screwing up if you compare it to an ideal State. Rather than having to derive ideal policy from first principles, you can ask the dramatically easier question: what's stopping the practical State from being the ideal State?

Sometimes, you learn that little things like physics and biology are stopping it from being the ideal State. You learn about the ideal. Tamp it down and get a less stupid ideal. "...is that I know nothing," or some such. 

Fascists like Plato are utopian. Rather than admitting that some imperfections are unavoidable, they wrap themselves in narcissistic delusion. Ironically, they end up actively opposing efforts that would make real situations less imperfect; again, they can't imagine the glorious dynamism of the responsible yet imperfect State. They believe only the narcissist delusions can possibly justify certain remedies. 

Technically they aren't even wrong, because their imagined remedies are crimes. Harm, not help. Unjustifiable without lies.

Usually, though, when you imagine the ideal State you learn the real State is corrupt. What's stopping America from plain not having a Prussian school system? Nothing. No good reason. It's historically normal to have no State school system, in fact. 

On the contrary, historically corruption comes first and school systems come second, so school is prima facie corrupt. Checksum: if we imagine an ideal school system, we can find myriad factors stopping a real State from implementing it. It's not just one or two incentives misplaced; every incentive is backwards.
Similarly Singapore has State hospitals, and if anyone could run a good hospital it's Singapore. Except they also have private* hospitals, and they're transcendentally better. All you learn is that States shouldn't run hospitals, and if they do you should avoid them as strenuously as possible. Likewise, if the State had a private school system parallel to a State system, all you would learn would be to avoid the State system like the plague. Glomp a literal leper before you go to a State school.**

*(Not American whore-style "private," private as in genuinely responsible.)
**(Luckily in real life that's not the kind of dichotomies that genuinely occur. Nothing stopping you from avoiding State schools and lepers.)

Plato, of course, founded the Academy.

The Academy has retained institutional continuity for over 2000 years. It's still Plato's Academy, meaning it's still a corrupt Sophist-φαγγωτ construct. In case you doubt, they call themselves the Academy; call themselves academics. Maybe, at best, some heroes perverted the intended corruption into virtue during the Scholastic period. Briefly.

The Royal Society was Empiricist, thus diametrically opposed to Platonic Rationalism. However, making the Academy function scholastically is trying to drive water uphill. Now the water has merely returned to its natural level.

As always, the answer is Exit. Don't try to pervert Satan into doing good. If someone offers you an Academy chair: run, don't walk. GTFO.

Aristotle knew. He was there, and he figured it out. Join the Lykeion.