You're listening to the Parsley Exam in Life, Episode 376, Part 2.

We've been discussing Plato's lengthy dialogue, The Laws.

We had discussed the earlier books.

Let's jump to our selection from books four and five, where we set up what the laws should, well, maybe Seth, you should start us because you were like, why are we reading book four at some point when you got into it? Because it does eventually get a lot around to, oh, there are preludes to the laws. That's the point. But there seems to be some things before that.

What I did finally was just make a note and says, you can convince people to follow the laws either by

persuasion or by compulsion. And that's, the rest of it is kind of like window dressing around that.

So essentially, the Athenian stranger introduces the idea that

laws should have these preludes and the preludes are supposed to be persuasive. And persuasive

going back to how, when we're talking about, you know, the regular doctor and the slave doctor or

whatever, like it's treating your patient as if they're part of the process or simply telling them

what to do and punishing them if they don't. And so I think that your doctor does that to you,

your doctor punishes you. I think it's your body that punishes you. Yeah, he yells at you.

You're going to die. You're going to have a heart

attack. Yeah. So, you know, I think the thinking in terms of the Republic, the question would be,

well, why do you have to persuade, you know, why would you want to persuade or have to

persuade anybody anyway? Why not just put out the laws and say, this is what needs to be done. And the

lawgiver does that. And then people. And it goes back to what we were talking about, the purpose of

the state and creating a virtuous citizenry and a participatory citizenry as opposed to one

that's simply obedient. So I gather that there's a lot of interesting conversations to be had about how this contrasts to

the Republican, but that's kind of what it boiled down to for me, and I didn't feel like I had

a huge need to delve too much more deeply into it.

I'm happy to be scolded and uprated, persuaded, and compelled, otherwise, shamed.

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