The Helmsman Nobody Elects

I. The Ship

In the sixth book of his “Republic” Plato tells a parable that one never forgets once read. A ship belongs to an owner who is taller and stronger than anyone on board, but hard of hearing, short-sighted and ignorant of seafaring. The sailors quarrel over who should take the helm. None has learned to steer, and each claims it cannot be learned at all. They flatter the owner, drug him with wine and seize command. Whoever helps them is praised as a great seaman.

And the one who could really steer, because he has studied the seasons, the stars, the winds and the currents? Him they call a stargazer and a babbler, good for nothing.

Anyone who has watched a Sunday political talk show knows the ship. We described it in “Cultivated Shallow Talk of General Helplessness” without naming Plato. That is his strength: he describes an ill everyone recognises. And his danger: whoever accepts the diagnosis easily accepts the medicine Plato prescribes.

II. The Medicine

The medicine is called the philosopher king. Those who have recognised the good should rule, not those who shout loudest or own the most. Plato designs a state with three classes for this: the guardians who rule, the warriors who protect, and everyone else who works. The guardians are selected from childhood and educated for decades. They own nothing and have no families of their own, so that no self-interest clouds their judgment.

To keep the order stable, Plato recommends a “noble lie”. The citizens are to be told that at birth the god mixed different metals into them: gold into the rulers, silver into the warriors, iron and bronze into farmers and craftsmen. Everyone is to consider his place natural. The lie is noble because it serves the good, and the guardians decide what that good is.

It is worth savouring this thought: whoever knows what is good may lie to others so that they accept it. That is the sentence that has survived two and a half millennia.

III. The Test in Syracuse

Plato did not merely write his dream down; he tried it out. Several times he travelled to Syracuse in Sicily to educate a tyrant into a philosopher. On the first visit, later biographers say, the elder Dionysius had him sold at a slave market, and friends had to ransom him. Whether that is true is unknown. What is certain is that around 366 BC Plato returned at the invitation of his friend Dion to teach the young Dionysius II. The court exiled Dion, the young tyrant wanted Plato’s praise but not his teaching, and Plato left disappointed. A third attempt some years later failed as well.

What happened afterwards is remarkable. In his late work, the “Laws”, Plato designs a second-best state. There the wise no longer rule; laws do, because the perfect ruler cannot be found. The philosopher learned from Syracuse. Many of his heirs have not.

According to an often-told anecdote, a colleague asked Martin Heidegger in 1934, after he had resigned following not quite a year as National Socialist rector of the University of Freiburg: “Back from Syracuse?” The question says everything. The philosopher who believed he could guide power intellectually had been used by it.

IV. How the Prompter Whispers Today

Hardly any politician invokes Plato. And yet he speaks along in many costumes.

As technocracy. When Italy faltered in the debt crisis of 2011, the economist Mario Monti took over a government of experts without parties, in the same month as Loukas Papademos in Greece. In 2021 Italy called in Mario Draghi. In crises people call for the helmsman, and it feels reasonable. But experts who govern are usually accountable to no one except their professional peers.

As meritocracy. China does not elect its leaders; it tests and promotes them over decades, from county to national level. In 2015 the Canadian political scientist Daniel Bell defended this as the “China Model”: selection by merit rather than by votes. That is Plato’s guardian class with a party card. How such a guardian thinks we described with Wang Huning in “The Embedded Thinker”.

As rule by the cleverest. In Silicon Valley Plato has taken on his most modern form. Those who build the most powerful machines easily believe themselves called to steer society as well. With Curtis Yarvin this becomes an open demand for a state run like a company by a chief executive with full powers. We examined it in “The New Right”. Today the philosopher king wears a hoodie.

As noble lie. And finally Plato lives wherever rulers believe they must lead citizens to their happiness with a suitable story, because the whole truth would overwhelm them. Today this is called communication strategy.

V. Popper’s Answer

Plato’s sharpest critic wrote in exile in New Zealand while the Second World War raged. In 1945 Karl Popper titled the first volume of “The Open Society and Its Enemies” “The Spell of Plato”. For him the philosopher king was the forefather of all closed societies in which an elite believes it knows what is good for everyone.

Popper’s decisive objection is simple. Plato asks the wrong question. He asks: who should rule? That question always leads to the best, the wisest, the purest, and every ruler considers himself one of them. The right question is: how can we get rid of bad rulers without bloodshed?

In the language of control engineering this is the difference between open-loop and closed-loop control. Plato’s state is steered: the guardians set the course, and no one measures whether the ship arrives. Popper’s democracy is regulated: it measures the deviation and corrects it, if necessary by replacing the helmsman. The philosopher king is a course without feedback. It can go well as long as the king is good. It has no mechanism for the day he no longer is.

VI. Where Plato Is Right

It would be cheap merely to condemn Plato. His parable hits something true. A ship needs a helmsman who knows the stars and currents. A democracy that despises knowledge and hands the helm to the loudest confirms Plato every day. In the eighth book of the “Republic” he described how democracy turns into tyranny: the people follow a seducer who promises to free them from the rich and then makes himself sole ruler. Looking at the present, one does not find this description outdated.

The solution lies not in abolishing the helmsman but in who chooses him and who can dismiss him. A ship on which the owner selects the helmsman and can send him ashore again is neither the sailors’ ship nor the philosophers’. And Plato himself supplies the second half of the answer: he stakes everything on education. Only he reserved it for the guardians. An owner who understands something of seafaring himself is not so easily drugged.

VII. The Perfect Circle

Behind Plato’s state stands his theory of Forms. The things we see are only shadows of perfect archetypes. Every drawn circle is imperfect; the true circle exists only as an idea. Whoever beholds the Forms knows how things should be, including the state.

Almost two millennia later Nicholas of Cusa found a different image: a polygon to which ever more corners are added approaches the circle, but never becomes the circle. In “Outlines of a Rhenish Philosophy” we made a principle of this: whoever claims perfection deserves great scepticism.

That is the real opposition. Plato believes the philosopher can behold the circle and build the state accordingly. The Rhenish answer is: nobody possesses the circle. One can only improve corner by corner, and every corner must be tested. The danger begins the moment someone claims to have seen the circle.

VIII. Back from Syracuse

Plato went to Syracuse three times and failed three times. Afterwards he changed his mind and trusted laws more than the wise. That may be the cleverest thing he left behind, and it is quoted least often.

His heirs keep travelling to Syracuse: the technocrats in crisis, the meritocrats with party cards, the cleverest with the biggest computers. Each considers himself the helmsman whom the sailors fail to recognise. Some even are.

The question is not who can steer best. The question is who may send him ashore when he runs the ship onto the rocks.