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Episode R3, Plato's Republic Book 3. Who Guards the Guardians?

Who watching? Who Guards the Guardians? Who watches the Watchmen?

That line was popularized in our pop culture by the graphic novel Watchmen, which spawned both a movie and a TV series.

But that line goes all the way back to antiquity, where it is found in the poetry of the

Roman satirist Juvenal. The original line reads,

Quis custodiet ipos custodes, or who will guard the guards themselves. And while juvenile there

was not talking about politics, it's a question that every political regime and even every organization has to ask itself.

Organizations seem to work best when everyone is accountable.

That usually requires oversight.

But what do you do when you climb up the accountability ladder and get to a person or group that has no supervisors above them.

Who guards the guardians? Who are our leaders accountable to? Who polices the police?

There are a bunch of memes online that will tell you that the phrase, who guards the guardians,

is a direct quotation from Plato's

Republic. And that's not literally true. The line never appears as such in Plato's work,

but the question is implied, and it's arguably the key question that drives the discussion

from the end of Book 2 through Book 3. As soon as Socrates and company agreed that the ideal polis or republic

that they are imagining will be ruled by a class of so-called guardians, the question naturally

arises. Who or what will keep these guardians in check? How do you prevent the government

from becoming an unaccountable and oppressive regime? When the founding fathers of the United States were faced with the same question,

the solution they came up with was a balance of powers.

They designed a system with three branches of government such that no one is supreme,

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