What Happened to Man?
What happened to Man—and why is it that, throughout his long historical journey, societies have almost invariably been governed, if not by the worst among them, then certainly by people of no exceptional intellectual ability and few genuinely humanistic virtues?
The absence of such qualities, among other things, diminishes or even entirely eliminates an individual’s inner resistance—the moral condition determined above all by a failure to conform to the ethical values and principles of Nature.
If we turn to the pages of History, we can easily see that the names handed down to us—those who, at critical moments in the course of societies, took responsibility for their fate—were not merely not the best, or even the most capable. More often than not, it was the worst among them who took charge of managing crises and determining the way out of them.
The Spartan siege and the catastrophe that followed the subjugation of ancient Athens to oligarchic rule came as a consequence of Pericles’ reckless policy. He not only failed to foresee that the predatory treatment by the great power of the time toward its friends and allies would inevitably provoke resistance and conflict; despite repeated warnings, he continued to behave like an arrogant ruler convinced that he was master of the world.
And yet, even amid the crisis and the grave danger of the complete destruction of the once-leading and victorious power of the Persian Wars, it was not the prudent Nicias who ultimately took the reins of the city, but the erratic and self-absorbed Alcibiades.
Let us make a huge leap forward in history, into the modern and contemporary era, and pause at two great revolutions that have shaped the course of the world down to our own days: the French and the Russian Revolutions.
Here again, the fate and eventual course of these two earth-shaking moments in human history were ultimately entrusted to the worst.
There was Robespierre in France, whose paranoid conduct would inevitably pave the way for the ascendancy of another figure consumed by hubris: Napoleon.
Russia, years later, and its post-revolutionary course, were sacrificed upon the altar of the ambitions and madness of Stalin.
Only a few decades ago, another deranged and bloodthirsty figure, Hitler, once again led the world toward catastrophe.
And so we arrive at our own time, when once again the fate of our world is held in the hands of two supremely self-important and profoundly arrogant leaders: Putin and Trump.
Both behave as though they have completely forgotten the tragic lessons humanity learned from the two great wars of the twentieth century. And they threaten, with precisely the same reckless arrogance, that if they do not get their way, they can—and, if necessary, will—once again plunge the world into bloodshed.
There is no simple answer to the question with which we began.
And that is precisely because a vast web of causes, simultaneously complementing and cancelling one another out, conspires to ensure that the course of history is shaped and determined not merely by paranoid or mediocre leaders, but, in any case, not by the best.
The wisest are the very ones who refuse to risk the wisdom they have acquired by becoming involved in the “business of power.”
A curse, certainly, such an attitude.
But could it have been otherwise?
Could this not be the logical consequence of prudence itself—a prudence that understands that the fundamental instrument of exercising power is violence?
The very violence that the rational and the wise reject as a mode of conduct.
If this is so, then Plato’s dilemma—“Should philosophers rule, or should rulers philosophize?”—is little more than a brilliant aphorism by the great Athenian philosopher.
For let us not forget that Plato himself always thinks and reasons from within the need for the “security” that, in his view, only the existence of power within the polis can impose and provide.
But is such a need truly real?
Or is it merely an artificial construct?