KK> My reading of the 'democracy' in Athens is pretty superficial, but
 KK> several times I got the impression that it was the people who kept
 KK> pushing Athens into one disastrous war after another.  If this is so, I
 KK> dunno if it was out of an obsession with honor or glory or tribal hatred
 KK> or whatever.  But someone like Plato could have made himself handy by
 KK> getting up and saying "Look, you idiots, this isn't the goddam Super
 KK> Bowl, and it may involve the killing of a lot of people, like Athenian
 KK> people for example, and might I encourage you all to meditate upon that
 KK> ancient Greek word Hubris, etc."  
 KK> "The people" are prone to making horrible mistakes, but these are of the
 KK> preprogrammed mammalian kind, so their masters are just as prone to
 KK> making those mistakes.  And in many ways the people are smarter than
 KK> their masters want them to be.  You cannot rule people without
 KK> presupposing that they are incapable of ruling themselves.  Any modern
 KK> Platonic Republic would instantly become an aristocracy/oligarchy of the
 KK> privileged, with the additional advantage of a seeming historical
 KK> justification.
   All substantially true and, as a matter of fact, Plato knew that.  But 
ven
before he abandoned the "philosopher-king" as a viable possibility he had had
Socrates tell the two young men who had representatively questioned the
possibility of the "Republic" that "by the dog, while it may not exist on
earth, it exists as a paradigm in heaven and the philosopher will live in 
hat
polis and no other...."  In the _Laws_ the paradigm abandons the
philosopher-king, not because it lacked reality as the basis for political
stability and order but because there weren't enough philosophers to ever 
ake
it work.  The "next best polis" then is drawn out in the paradigm of a more
mundane "Athenian stranger" and his two companions who, while making their 
ay
toward the sun on old Crete devise a constitution for a new colony in full
recognition that it was the best that could be done and would be subject to
the vicissitudes, draining of substance and reversals of all human efforts.
   It was this "second best polis" that Simon Bolivar, the Liberator of South
America and child of the enlightenment actually used as his model for a
constitution for Bolivia if you can imagine a backward area such as that 
fter
three centuries of absolute rule under a church-dominated Spanish Empire
trying (grin) to even UNDERSTAND the concept of the Nocturnal Council!!
Bolivar, while genuinely admiring and saluting the founding fathers of the
United States left South America for the last time muttering to himself "he
who makes a revolution PLOWS THE SEA!!  
   I think we owe to the irrepressible march of EMPIRE throughout the lands
bounded by the oceananus both the resistance of the Greek philosophers and
that of the Judeo-Christian prophets who attempted to preserve meaningful
cultures.  That is why I sometimes wonder what things will look like in the
world 5,000 years from now.  I personally hope to slip away LONG before
somebody forces me to live a cocoon existence on some other planet.  Shucks, 

think mandatory seat belts and air bags are already an unconscious intrusion
upon the dream of freedom once held so dearly by Americans and most of them
don't even RECOGNIZE it for the deadly backward state of affairs it
represents.  
Sincerely, 
                                     Frank
                                                                              
                                                       
--- PPoint 2.05
---------------