Let's play a game. The game is called Plato or the Bible.

Here's how the game works. I'm going to read you a passage and you have to guess whether it's from the Greek philosopher Plato or from the Hebrew and Christian scriptures.

Ready? Here's the passage. The just man will be whipped. He'll be racked. He'll be bound.

He'll have both his eyes burned out and at the end when he is undergone every sort of evil. He'll be crucified.

If you guessed that that was a passage from the Gospels or the Hebrew Bible, you guessed wrong.

If you guessed that that was from Plato, great Greek philosopher of the fourth century BC, you guessed right. This is book two of the Republic, which is one of Plato's masterworks on political philosophy.

We are working through it on Young Heretics book by book. So a while back, we did book one. Now we have moved on to book two, which is kind of where the whole project really gets going.

Book one is like a prelude or a setup and we talked about how in it the sophist throzimicus gets thoroughly spanked.

Kind of raises this relativist argument that justice and good and evil are just the will of the stronger imposed upon the weaker.

And Socrates exposes him as sort of incoherent and ignorant. He freaks out and he is dismissed from the conversation.

But then in book two, Glaucom and Adamantus, who are brothers of one another end of Plato, sons of a riston, they say, you know, we're not satisfied.

Even though we can see that throzimicus was kind of a hack.

We still don't think that this problem has really been addressed. The problem of what justice is and whether it's actually any good to be just.

And so they are going to do what's called in modern terms, steel manning the argument. So a strong man obviously is when you're in your like thought bubble on Twitter and everybody agrees with you and you just talk about those guys out there, like they the evil leftists or whatever they believe this.

And of course, doesn't help because then you make up this weak version of the argument and you don't learn how to convince people and Glaucom and Adamantus want an answer to the strong version of what you might call the anti justice argument, the argument that actually bad to be just justice is just a convention that the weak impose on the strong or that we kind of muddle through together with this convention of the we can build society.

But really it's the best thing is to be unjust. That's what they're going to argue in this second book of the republic. So just to recap, right.

This book is composed somewhere around 380 BC and it looks back to time when Socrates, kind of grandfather or godfather of Western philosophy was still alive.

Before the great catastrophe that Athens underwent when it lost the Peloponnesian war, when it lost to Sparta, its rival in that war, Sparta installed a kind of oligarchic pro Spartan government, a kind of puppet government called the 30 tyrants and the 30 tyrants were brutal.

They exiled and they murdered people whom they suspected of being insufficiently sympathetic to their regime. They cracked down in horrendous ways and they were led among other people by this guy, Cridias, who had been a student of Socrates.

After the 30 were deposed, they were deposed from exiles who had fled Athens and came back to pose the 30 and Socrates was suddenly under suspicion because he hadn't been sent away, hadn't been exiled. So it was suspected that he had collaborated with the 30.

And this was the occasion of what in Plato's view was perhaps the greatest injustice done by the Athenian state in his lifetime. I really believe that this was a seminal moment in Plato's life that he was always looking back on it and wrestling with it, the fact that the Athenian state executed Socrates, the man who in Plato's view and in the view of history really was this incredible visionary genius.

He killed by the state who are supposed to be executives of justice, whom we are supposed to trust to enforce justice, to know what justice is, the leaders are supposed to be the people who know what justice is.

...