Sublime

Plato proposed that societies should be ruled by philosopher kings who earned their wisdom by studying. Their intent was not merely to reimagine how people are chosen to lead; it was to pave the way for new social orders that rewarded individuals for agency and ability.

Men who would kill on his orders were useful. Men who refused were a threat.

When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important. It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyers, or to hold show trials without judges. Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor.

Across a staggering number of studies, feelings of power have very negative effects on a person’s character. Power reduces empathy, makes us hypocritical, and causes us to dehumanize others. To a degree, there’s a good reason for this: people in powerful positions need to make hard decisions that may be bad in the short term but good in the long

How’s this for rapidly altering frontal function—take an average heterosexual male and expose him to a particular stimulus, and his PFC becomes more likely to decide that jaywalking is a good idea. What’s the stimulus? The proximity of an attractive woman. I know, pathetic.[*23]

To dispose a soul to action, we must upset its equilibrium. And if, as Napoleon wrote to Carnot, “the art of government is not to let men go stale,” then it is essentially an art of unbalancing.

None of them had the guts not to play into his delusions—ghouls and gangsters, ghosts and the mob. They would have let him get away with murder, I imagined. “America’s finest,” the prison guards of the civilized world, those police.

As the great Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn insisted, the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.

Aristotle argued that justice based on fair treatment of the individual leads to a fair society, whereas Plato, looking at the big picture, thought fairness to society was of primary importance and individual cases were judged in order to achieve that end.