Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

19 6 DEBT
the circumstances.x6 The old man cheerfully shrugs the problem off
and heads off to attend to some ritual, leaving his son to carry on
the argument.
The son, Polemarchus, switches gears: clearly his father hadn't
meant "debt" in the literal sense of returning what one has borrowed.
He meant it more in the sense of giving people what is owed to them;
repaying good with good and evil with evil; helping one's friends and
hurting one's enemies. Demolishing this one takes a little more work
(are we saying justice plays no part in determining who one's friends
and enemies are If so, wouldn't someone who decided he had no
friends, and therefore tried to hurt everyone, be a just man And even
if you did have some way to say for certain that one's enemy really is
an intrinsically bad person and deserves harm, by harming him, do you
not thus make him worse Can turning bad people into even worse
people really be an example of justice) but it is eventually accomplished.
At this point a Sophist, Thrasymachos, enters and denounces
all of the debaters as milky-eyed idealists. In reality, he says, all talk
of "justice" is mere political pretext, designed to justify the interests of
the powerful. And so it should be, because insofar as justice exists, it
is simply that: the interest of the powerful. Rulers are like shepherds.
We like to think of them as benevolently tending their flocks, but what
do shepherds ultimately do with sheep They kill and eat them, or sell
the meat for money. Socrates responds by pointing out that Thrasymachos
is confusing the art of tending sheep with the art of profiting
from them. The art of medicine aims to improve health, whether or not
doctors get paid for practicing it. The art of shepherding aims to ensure
the well-being of sheep, whether or not the shepherd (or his employer)
is also a businessman who knows how to extract a profit from them.
Just so with the art of governance. If such an art exists, it must have
its own intrinsic aim apart from any profit one might also get from it,
and what can this be other than the establishment of social justice It's
only the existence of money, Socrates suggests, that allows us to imagine
that words like "power" and "interest" refer to universal realities
that can be pursued in their own right, let alone that all pursuits are
really ultimately the pursuit of power, advantage, or self-interestY The
question, he said, is how to ensure that those who hold political office
will do so not for gain, but rather for honor.
I will leave off here. As we all know, Socrates eventually gets
around to offering some political proposals of his own, involving philosopher
kings; the abolition of marriage, the family, and private property;
selective human breeding boards. (Clearly, the book was meant
to annoy its readers, and for more than two thousand years, it has