Erik, as the late American philosopher Russell Kirk put it, we never learn anything new. We simply relearn. It seems each generation, some more than others, must relearn the lessons of reality. Today, your professor burdened his wife with an application of Plato's "cycles of government" from his classic study The Laws. Simply, Plato observed that self-control is always better than external controls. When people lose self-control because they abandon time-tested values, society reaches a point where it has a choice: collapse into anarchy and risk conquest, or restore order good and hard through a dictatorship. If we continue to unravel, degenerate, we risk reaching this fork in the road: collapse or dictatorship. Plato noted that external control is always of poorer quality than internal self-control. Sadly, the Macedonians conquered Greece shortly after Plato's death; Aristotle, the pupil of Plato, became the tutor of the future Alexander the Great! Aristotle "went with the flow" and accepted the end of his country's independence. Greece did not recover its independence until the 1800's almost 2,000 years later. It can happen. How does Plato's analysis help us to better understand present trends and where they may be taking us? Are we following his model, scenario?
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