Plato's Unwritten Doctrine

submitted by [deleted] from self.conspiracy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato#Unwritten_doctrines

What might it have been about? Plato said: "every serious man in dealing with really serious subjects carefully avoids writing."

Plato had other views that would probably be considered controversial today, like he was against democracy and said it would lead to tyranny, and wanted an aristocracy, rule by the best. He wanted a philospher king to rule, which to me seems naive, the rich are insane sociopaths and power corrupts but I guess to Plato the people are too stupid and need to be ruled by their betters. He also supported the Noble Lie, which meant it was ok to lie to people for their own good and a lot of people think the neocons used this philosophy to justify 9/11.

Anyways, if he did write these kinds of things down, what might have been so bad that he considered it shouldn't be written down, and only told orally to those he could trust? The wiki page seems to theorize it was something about the One and the Good and involved math but that doesn't make sense to me, like why can't you write that down?

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[–][deleted] 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

It doesn't matter how intelligent the people are. They have no way to combine their minds and rule together as one. Democracy is always kinda illusory. In most democracies people make no decisions yet take all the blame.

Philosopher king is a clever guy who dares to act, not an elected representative of the ruling class. The problem with this idea is that it's impossible to manually elect such a guy. No system can do it.

Aristocracy doesn't have to be hereditary. Noble lie is a bad idea.

Both the good and the bad are just hypothetical ways to reach the One. We start creating them once the One is lost. Most of them can't work. Our mind can be seen as a tree. With the One as the water, greed and aversion as its roots, and every other mental construct as a part of a complicated branching system. This thing is hard to explain, but I see no reason to hide it.

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

yeah no reason to hide it so I don't think that was it, it's something else that would be controversial, something evil.

[–]BulbusBeanQueen 2 insightful - 4 fun2 insightful - 3 fun3 insightful - 4 fun -  (0 children)

Well the dude thought the best way to describe humans was" featherless biped." so don't take what he says to literally.- Diogenes