Aye Aye Galleh. This is what I was missing for the month; Mental juice. You
should bottle it and call it Mensanol. I'll get the first proprietary bottle.
God bless. Haruna.
In a message dated 3/16/2008 9:29:29 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:
Socrates and the Cave Dwellers
By Baba Galleh Jallow
Thousands of years ago, the people of Athens committed a crime that is being
decried to this day. Their trial and condemnation to death of Socrates,
their city’s greatest thinker, acknowledged to this day as the world’s greatest
philosopher, was the result of the common propensity to falsely accuse lovers
of truth and justice that continues to plague human society. Socrates, who
had spent all his life teaching the virtues of wisdom, truth and justice, and
striving to raise the common people from the dungeon of ignorance to the
tower of wisdom, was accused by the powers that be of corrupting the youth of
Athens and not believing in the gods of the city. Both charges, of course, were
false.
In ‘The Republic,’ his classical treatise on political society and the
nature of the Good, Plato, a student of Socrates, sets out to prove the falsity
of the charges for which his teacher was forced to drink poison. The basis of
Plato’s defense of Philosophy against the charge that it undermined political
society is the fact that throughout The Republic, the philosopher, in the
person of Socrates, seeks only what is best for a healthy political society. He
is constantly engaged in the arduous task of enlightening society, teaching
the requirements of justice, truth, wisdom and all the virtues that make for
a good person and a good society. Socrates is particularly concerned with the
proper education of the youth. He decries immoderation and excess, and
emphasizes the need for the predominance of reason over sprit and desire in the
human soul. To have a good society, he teaches, you must have a good
individual. It is an aggregate of good people that make up a good society. Thus, there
is nothing in what Socrates teaches that, objectively speaking, does not
promote the well being of society. It was for this good crime that he was killed.
Socrates teaches that the chief function of the State is the education of
the youth to become good human beings. Therefore, he advocates a strict
supervision of what is taught in schools, what parents teach their children, what
peers learn from each other and in general, the need for children to learn
discernment, discrimination and unshaking loyalty to the State as an institution
(e.g., The Gambia), as opposed to the rulers, among other virtues.
It is in the quest for this proper education that Socrates advocates
censorship in The Republic. He points out the numerous dangers of teaching young
children the stories of the gods according to the ancient poets Homer and
Hesiod. These two poets, among others, portray the gods as if they have all the
shortcomings and evil propensities of human beings. He proves to his audience
that the gods, being good and perfect, should not be portrayed as capable of
bad things or transforming themselves into something less than perfect.
Accounts of the gods weeping and wailing over their misfortunes, taking human or
animal forms to rape women, doling out evil fortunes to human beings or
practicing deceit, Socrates argues, should be purged from the poetry taught to
children because they have the potential to corrupt their young impressionable
minds by not teaching respect for just authority and harmony among the powerful,
among other virtues.
Socrates further argues for the purging from contemporary poetry of all
details likely to cause young people to prefer slavery to death. Death should be
preferred to slavery, particularly slavery of the mind. Dark and horrendous
accounts of Hades (the world of the death in Greek mythology) as a place of
torment and misery, Socrates argues, are likely to cause young people to fear
death and instill in them a spirit of cowardice and timidity. Poetic accounts
of death must be such as to make the young eager to die for the nation, truth
and justice when the need arises. Poets, Socrates argues, must not be
allowed to extol tyranny in the city because it would make this worst form of
government look appealing to the minds of the young. Socrates advocates that
children must be taught to be reasonable and disciplined, to love truth, wisdom,
justice, courage, honesty and moderation, and to shun excessive laughter,
drunkenness, sexual indulgence, and all forms of immoderation, deceit and
injustice. As he says in Book Three of The Republic, future leaders must, from
childhood on, “ . . . pattern themselves after men who are - among other things -
courageous, temperate, reverent and free.” By giving them the right kind of
education, Socrates argues, “ . . . we could protect our guardians from
growing up in the presence of evil, in a veritable pasture of poisonous herbs where
by grazing at will, little by little and day by day, they should accumulate
a huge mass of corruption in their souls.”
Plato perhaps makes his case for the philosopher most poignantly in the
allegory of the cave. Society, including the philosopher, is imprisoned in a dark
cave where everyone is chained to a chair facing a wall across which shadows
move. They cannot turn their heads to see the source of the shadows and so
they believe that the shadows are the reality. Released from his shackles and
binders, the philosopher is forced out of the dark cave and forced to look
upon the light - to see the good and appreciate the beauty of knowledge, truth
and wisdom. Thus enlightened, he is duty bound to descend back into the dark
cave to try to convince those prisoners that what they see on the wall in
front of them are mere shadows and fake images of reality. Of course, Plato
argues, the philosopher would be hated and ridiculed by the shackled cave
dwellers, particularly their leaders, because he would be challenging the very
foundations of their entire existence. Life in the cave is defined by a common
perception of reality on which the honor and prestige of many are based. The
philosopher thus faces not only the difficulty of convincing the prisoners, but
also the danger of being accused of denying the most fundamental beliefs of
the cave dwellers and corrupting the minds of the young among them.
Plato seems to suggest that while the charge against philosophy is,
objectively speaking, untrue, it is, in a sense, true. Socrates’ ideas, he grants,
are inherently subversive of the status quo because he teaches that the
existing educational structure is the prime source of individual and social
injustice in the city and advocates its dismantling and replacement by a curriculum
that would teach men to be just. He exposes the corruption of the Athenian
regime and calls for the use of reason and wisdom and the practice of justice in
the art of governance. Socrates was killed because he advocated a radical
paradigm shift, a total overhaul of existing corrupt structures of power and
privilege. He was killed because he taught truth and courage, and challenged
the regime to act in the interest of the people rather than in their own
selfish interests.
Today, part of the Socratic role is played by the media. Most people living
under dictatorships are comparable to the Socratic prisoners living in a cave
in which shadows are made to look like reality.
Which is why tyrants and despots are so hostile to the media and all who
advocate contrary ideas and opinions. Those who rule in their own selfish
interests, those who would keep the people shackled in the dark cave of ignorance
and mental poverty, those who would be lords and masters rather than servants
of the people, power-drunk despots enslaved by their greed and base desires
- those people will do anything and everything within their means – including
the murder of innocent persons – in order to snuff out the light of truth
and justice, to keep the light outside the cave, to perpetuate the myth of the
shadows as representations of reality. They may succeed in snuffing out the
lives of individuals, in blocking the flow of truth in the form of media
information to the people, but they can never snuff out the light of truth and
justice because this light is of the essence of God and cannot be touched by the
soiled hands of power-crazed despots. Eventually, the light will filter
through to the eyes and minds of the cave dwellers, and the power of knowledge
will triumph of the darkness of ignorance and lies. Socrates has long been
vindicated and he will continue to be vindicated till the end of times. So will
all those media dedicated to the propagation of truth and justice, in spite
of the doomed efforts of tyrants to prevent this from happening.
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