The very first utopian, Plato envisioned an Ideal Society ruled by philosopher kings (busts of whom would now stand in Paul Keating’s study), a society, as historian Arthur Herman writes, “run by men of knowledge and virtue instead of ignorant, grasping politicians”. That they’ve always been this way is perversely comforting.

Plato admired Athens’ fiercest rival, Sparta, whose citizens were forbidden from erecting statues or writing poetry. In his Republic, there is no private property, nor marriage. So Karl Marx pretty much plagiarised the executive summary.

Aristotle went the other way, spruiking for individualism and imagining not learned rulers but prudent, virtuous and free citizens: the original bourgeoisie.

That Aristotle’s doctrine has prevailed in the post-Soviet world is beyond question. But can his vision hold? In the West, signs of the contrary are ominous. The polis is genuinely irate, jack of a remote cabal they see expertly scrapping over public spoils.

In America, Trump’s deplorables are rightly pissed their wages have lagged inflation since Jimmy Carter was president (and that they’re running dangerously low on oxys). Australian workers aren’t poorer, they just feel poorer; feelings in 2018 being more pertinent than facts.

The ill will raging between Canberra and Collins Street is burning the brake pads on working-class prosperity. Business has blinked, as have economic liberals. At this decade’s dawn, governments were target practice for capital. The miners minced Kevin Rudd and cowed Julia Gillard, the pubs and clubs then sweeping in and crushing her on pokies. Bill Shorten was watching.

Gulping before the gallows


Financiers and clergymen now metaphorically dangle from town squares, their loathsome behaviour conceivable only by the luxury of Aristotelian leeway. The energy utilities – accused only of profiteering, not theft nor fraud – are gulping before these gallows. See, Aristotle’s fatal assumption was of human nature. In self-determination, man is inclined not to prudence but to indiscretion, not to virtue but to vice.

Neither the Academy nor the Lyceum imagined the internet, but its extraordinary effects haven’t dented Plato’s wisdom that “oratory is a device by which an ignorant man persuades an audience equally ignorant” (Exhibit A: Scott Morrison at the football). Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg and Dorsey have rendered our politics base and our polity unwieldy, throwing up a mutant wreck of the competing Athenian credos: that endowed with profligate freedom, particularly of fathomless information, man chooses the freedom to degenerate, to return, intellectually and by instinct, to his Spartan cave.

Our only hope is cultural power, which co-exists as easily with stupidity as it lances it. Nike’s audacious endorsement of NFL kneeler Colin Kaepernick encapsulates the USA’s nearness to social conflagration, sneakers literally burning at his supposed apostacy.

Hordes fell about laughing when Malcolm Turnbull innocently affirmed he and Lucy’s disposition to “Netflix and chill” (while the rest of us missed the trap). An old YouTube clip of Kath Day-Knight flunking radio trivia by failing to name Australia’s PM resonated during Turnbull’s execution in August.

And in an era when long-form reading is considered a dying pastime, Jimmy Barnes’ memoir has sold more than 250,000 copies. Booksellers haven’t even moved 2000 of Barnaby Joyce’s. Musicians hold six of the seven most-followed Twitter accounts in the world, Barack Obama the only outlier, trailing Katy Perry and Justin Bieber.

Plato’s vision of a prodigious thinker was not of Chisel rocking an RSL. But we validly lament the dire species of “muppets” exercising power on our behalf. So do we gaze at the wrong stage? With our backs to Canberra, are we already led by philosopher kings?

The AFR Magazine Power issue came out on Friday October 5 inside The Australian Financial Review.

The AFR Magazine Power issue is out on Friday October 5 inside The Australian Financial Review.

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