The Intelligent Troglodyte’s Guide to Plato’s Republic, 2016a

72 The Fall of the Aristocratic City
See 543a-547a. The passage beginning at 545d is one of the weirdest in the
dialogue. “How, then, Glaucon, will our city be changed? . . . Something like this.
. . .” Most of what follows concerning perfect numbers, rational diameters, and
the achievement of procreative harmonies is presumably tongue in cheek – spoken
as it is by the Muses “in tragic tones, playing and jesting with us, as if we were
children and they were speaking in earnest.” The basic problem Socrates draws
attention to, however, is serious enough. The philosopher-rulers will make
mistakes, and to begin with, the city’s eugenics program (459d-461e), which
depends for its administration on “rational calculation combined with sense
perception,” will fail to breed the right sort of people to serve as rulers.
(Behavioral genetics, as it’s called nowadays, is still a very poorly understood
branch of natural science.) When the wrong people come to serve as rulers, they
“won’t be able to guard well the testing” of the youth. The career counseling
program of the city – assigning each person the job for which he or she is best
suited – will therefore fail, cooperation will break down, and the interpersonal
struggling and oppression characteristic of injustice will begin.
Socrates draws attention to a fundamental problem for any institution:
matching people to jobs. Getting the right people to serve as leaders is
especially important when institutions are highly structured and centrally
controlled. Because it is fully expected that sooner or later the wrong
people will come to power, the Constitution of the United States requires a
division of power and frequent elections. A certain degree of what Socrates
would call injustice is accepted in the U.S. without anxiety because it is felt
that there is a lawful way to counter it in its worst occurrences. But is this
all that should be done? Is there no way the law can be modified to see that
more of the right people get into office in the first place?
Would raising the salary of politicians – perhaps to something in the
neighborhood of what some of the better professional athletes make – be
helpful in attracting the right people to serve in positions of political