Patrice Ayme's Thoughts

The big picture in 399 BCE is that Athens had lost half of her population in a terrible war, and lost… saved from annihilation by her enemy, Sparta. After a bout of tyranny from Socrates’ students, democracy was reestablished, and a general amnesty proclaimed… with one single exception… Socrates. Why? Traditional philosophy, singing the praises of Socrates-Plato-Aristotle, ignores the verdict of the jury, and the verdict of history. Why?

What feels “good” is what our brain deems to be good. Our brain, though, is the brain of Earth’s greatest superpredator ever...It goes without saying that prey frequently feels that what a predator views as good is as bad as it gets… And pretty much anything alive which we can discern with the unaided eye, is a prey for humanity… We even eat urchins, algae, insects, snails, frogs, mold and undescribable things at the bottom of the sea.

Philosophy martyr Socrates set up his definition of wisdom (“I am the wisest, but I know nothing”) in such a way that he should be admired (“I am the wisest“) but he could not be accused of anything bad… “I knew nothing” did he say when accused of the tyranny of his students over Athens -after all, he didn’t know anything.

Was such an attitude wise? Or was it what average crooks tend to do when confronted to crushing evidence?

In California more than fifty years ago, a cult developed around a drugged out crazed maniac called Charlie Manson. Some of his disciples left the desert, when to LA and murdered, in two separate attacks, seven (7) persons, including the eight month pregnant Sharon Tate. Manson insisted that “he was not bad”… And was nevertheless condemned to death for his influence upon the actual killers. Arguably, Socrates students killed through their action, hundreds of thousands of Athenians (Socrates’ Alcibiades was the force behind the attack on Syracuse, which failed and drained Athens’ military capability).

Socrates didn’t present excuses, to my knowledge, for the behavior of his students during the Pennepolese war. So how come this deep in denial Socrates person, is viewed as a pinnacle of martyred wisdom? Is denial the pinnacle of wisdom? Confusing denial of reality with wisdom is undeniably a problem. The Socrates problem is much more than just about figuring Socrates, but also how come a denialist got to be viewed as the epitome of wisdom? Because it was non-wisdom masquerading as wisdom? Some of Socrates’ discourses against war, while Athens, direct democracy, was engaged in a struggle for survival, could be assimilated to high treason. In WW1, Bertrand Russell was emprisoned, for 18 months, as deserved, for anti-war propaganda (some will scoff, but the WW1 Kaiserreich was fundamentally the same as Hitler’s Third Reich, and gave birth to it, often with the same famous actors, for example Goering or Luddendorf…)

I think here specifically of Menexenus dialogue, which Aristotle viewed as fundamental. And in which Socrates basically recognizes Aspasia’s importance as a philosopher.

The usual suspects, the plutocrats, sponsors of civilization, are behind the entire plot. Let’s explore… Socrates has this in common in appearance with Einstein that he looks a bit like those parodies of human beings made to amuse children that we call clowns. That may not be a coincidence.

Self-examination in full must master various good/bad perspectives… because it’s so basic to the human (super) condition. Someone’s bad is someone’s good, just as someone’s truth can be someone’s lie, especially if there is a mountain range in between (said Montaigne… he related both how good and evil and true and false, are relative [1]). The question then becomes: how does one adjudicate to find higher values which can help to determine which good, or evil, is the highest and most justified? In other words, most pragmatically: when does Hiroshima becomes a higher good and tolerable evil?

Full ethics require high and low to enter the dance of bad, good, true and false:’… “Super”, which means “above”, is then an indispensable technical term and concept. 

Higher pursuits are nothing new. Higher pursuits came first, and then the brain was evolved to exploit this aspect of nature. Let me explain: a brainless micro-organism will spend energy following up a sugar gradient: that’s higher pursuits in action. After all, indeed, the micro-organism is spending energy because in the long run, it will gain more. So short term bad (spending energy) brings long term good (gaining more energy). And the long term, bigger good erases the short term bad. This is what those who scream against Hiroshima don’t get. And the fact that, like Socrates, they don’t know that the nuclear bombings saved millions of lives, is no excuse: if they have an opinion on the subject, they should know. Just saying, like Socrates, that they don’t know anything is the key to complete amorality, as when Elon Musk claims that because Putin is the strongest and will win, he shouldn’t be fought…

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When Socrates stood in front of the death jury, the jury viewed him as a predator. Socrates naively, or desperately, in the guise of naivety, insisted he was not a predator, just a gadfly… which are predators! Indeed gadflies, horseflies in Americanese, suck blood, sting bad, and can cause lasting injury. As a superpredator, I kill, or shoo them away, ASAP… So the Athenian jury killed that human sized horsefly… (Aristotle in a similar situation to Socrates just fled in a timely manner, “to spare Athens another crime against philosophy….”..)

Socrates presented his thoughts as a gift to Athens. However Athens had just lost half her population in a terrible war, concluded by a tyranny of thirty mostly ex-students of Socrates… Some Greek city-states had proposed to annihilate Athens, as Athens had annihilated the island city-state of Melos.

So let’s imagine this. While your country, say, suffered from being at war with, and then invaded and ruled by Nazism, the Nazis’ wisdom adviser comes and informs you that he stings your society, and your society should be grateful? While a general amnesty was put in place… Only Socrates was excluded… I have not read how that happened exactly. However, Socrates’ student and lover, Alcibiades, had persuaded Athens to attack powerful Syracuse, was supposed to direct the assault, but then was accused of defacing idols, got ejected from his command, switched to Sparta, where he provided secrets and advice against Athens… And that was just the beginning. At Syracuse, Athens lost its army and its fleet. Alcibiades has been described as the “biggest jerk of antiquity“ (quite remarkable, considering the competition!). Alcibiades’ blatant lack of moral compass, aside from serving himself, is not just a question for the entire philosophical ecology of Socrates-Plato-Aristotle… But perhaps its very symbol!

Much criticism of Socrates against Athenian democracy was justified. However, after the catastrophe, Socrates should have laid low, be it just by respect for the lives lost and the democracy ruined. It was a major disaster which spanned millennia: democracy has not recovered fully yet (Rome had carefully studied Athens, so Roman direct democracy also got hit when Athens went down). 

Socrates did not present his excuses, because he was unable to consider the evil his actions, thoughts and feelings, directly or not, wittingly or not, had caused…

So implicit in Socrates’ behavior was the pretense that there are clear notions of good and evil. Socrates, Socrates told the world, was an intrinsic good. Besides, evil does not exist, so how could Socrates be no good? No excuses needed. Socrates’ actions may have bled democracy raw, but that was good because Socrates was right to go around stinging people: generals, Socrates said, had to be experts, just as shoemakers were experts. Right. However, in democracies and republics, the commander in chief is elected. In Syracuse, which Plato admired so much he got entangled in politics there to the point of being condemned to death… the tyrant was not elected: was that what Socrates wanted?

Socrates criticized, but he didn’t provide solutions (the Middle Ages found them: democratic institutions such as guilds and secular schools, universities…) Socrates should have self-examined enough to realize he was in the thick of the catastrophe that befell not just Athens, and her empire, but democracy itself. And that he was a core element. 

This is all quite troubling, because the fundamental thesis of Socrates about wisdom was that wisdom was first humility: ‘I am wise because I know that I know nothing“. This notion of wisdom as humility was sheer hypocrisy, though, because Socrates preached a lot ex-cathedra weird certainty. For example, that knowledge was innate (as demonstrated by having a boy discover geometry on his own). In the end the jury determined that Socrates’ wisdom consisted in “corrupting the  youth” (drinking, feasting, sexing, and dominating the wealthy kids he pretended to teach… wisdom to…) 

Socrates has this to say, in the Protagoras, about good and evil:

“No one who knows or believes there is something else better than what he is doing, something possible, will go on doing what he had been doing when he could be doing what is better.”

Thus, according to Socrates, individuals do not suffer from akrasia, i.e., no-power, weakness of the will, nor are they bad, by acting against their best judgment. Socrates thinks instead that people are doing exactly what they want to do, but are doing it because of bad judgment. Doing bad things is, therefore, a matter of ignorance (in the sense of amathia), not malice. However, the concept used, amathia, is more akin to intelligent stupidity… (So amathia has an element of ill will!… Will to not understanding…)

To believe that humans act from judgment always denies mental inertia, which is what motivates minds most of the time: most of the time, people do what they do because that’s what they are primed to do (a sort of generalized Hebbian mechanism). Also Socrates got drunk: what happened to best judgment when Socrates got drunk? So how come if Socrates wanted to be good and badness only arose from bad judgment, Socrates engaged in inebriation? He didn’t exert good enough judgment to realize no best judgment would come from inebriation? Or was he acting out of malice?  Stoics, who later claim to follow Socrates, used wine, but without getting drunk, they insisted. 

When one considers Alcibiades’ life, claiming Alcibiades never acted out of malice, or was not acted against out of malice, is just ridiculous. Among other exploits Alcibiades ran on the platform that subjugating Sicily would increase the Athenian empire, then communicated all Athenian war plans to Sparta, then slept and impregnated the Spartan queen, then went over to Persia, etc… Socrates and Alcibiades had been lovers for… ten years. Alcibiades was called back to Athens once democracy had been thrown out by his olygarchic friends…  

One can be very good, yet start an avalanche and people die: then sorrow and excuses are in order. Not making lousy jokes on how good one was, contributing to a magnificent disaster, as Socrates did. But then maybe Socrates himself believed that Socrates deserved the death penalty? This seems to be the case; he refused to flee and assimilated his own death as the cure of a disease…

Catholicism, which evolved for centuries inside the Roman empire, even with direct imperial intervention, close and personal, before congealing around 400 CE was centered, like the general Roman mentality, around the possibility of human malice, and the quasi-irresistible temptations it wrought. Rome controlled malice with the law. Catholicism with its heavens and hell theory.

Not anticipating human malice is not only stupid, it’s immoral. The Nazis, or Putin, had given clear signals of their evil nature (the Nazis in 1933, their first year in power, Putin in 1999, when he destroyed Chechnya)… So those who persisted in making them stronger did so, not out of bad judgment, but out of malice, because, by becoming collaborators to criminal enterprises, they augmented their own prosperity… As he hung around Athens’ golden youth instead of taking care of his family, Socrates was arguably doing the same, on a much smaller basis.

Nearly any serious human self-examination will find malice, either in action, or potential. To pretend otherwise is an ever greater order of malice.      

According to Plato, Socrates said during his long defense before the Athenian judges: And now, Athenians, I am not going to argue for my own sake, as you may think, but for yours, that you may not sin against God by condemning me, who am his gift to you. For if you kill me you will not easily find a successor to me, who, if I may use such a ludicrous figure of speech, am a sort of gadfly, given to the state by God; and the state is a great and noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life. I am that gadfly which God has attached to the state, and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you.   

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy spends nearly half of its entry on wisdom discussing Socrates’ views on wisdom before rejecting most of them, only retaining obvious parcels of it … including of the so-called Socrates Method… which does not seem different to me from the most basic debate technique. Then SEP switches to Aristotle’s approach to wisdom as knowledge…

Wisdom as humility was Socrates’ unlikely claim: “The Oracle said that I am the wisest of men, but I know nothing” enabled Socrates to claim superior wisdom while ignoring… the potential consequences of his acts… simultaneously. meanwhile, he had a merry life at the top of society, while he seems to have been ignoring his three sons… In

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Fundamentally though, wisdom is the ability to proceed with superpredation, as an individual or as a group. This is why the name of the superpredator is Homo Wisdom. The woke are not awake enough to have figured that one out.

For example the Russian Czar decided it would be wise to kill his main opponent in 2024, while making it even more obvious that he killed him, than last time he killed his main opponent or the time before that… Putin believe that instilling in all the notion that his opponents will be killed will bring more respect: Navalny was killed the same day as the French and German Republics made a military alliance with Ukraine. The message to the three leaders is unmistakable: if you oppose me too much, I will kill you, and make the world know it was me who did it.

Such is wisdom, the Kremlin’s way. Whereas Socrates thought it was wise to please the wealthy elite which supported him and made him famous, an advancement of his simple eating, drinking, sexing and boasting… Putin feels it’s wise to recover Russia at its greatest extent, and to militarize Russian society as much as possible; in Putin’s view that serves historical justice, or so he claims, using partial and biased versions of history. But the real motivations of the Czar may be even more sinister. Considering statements he made twenty years ago, Putin’s motivation may be to unite Europe… under the Kremlin’s rule (he then said it would be “natural”).

In other words, if we want to study human psychology on the grandest scale, we live in the grandest times. It is a question of survival to psychoanalyze the leaders. Socrates was a leader of group of golden youth, crazed military adventurists, spies, and tyrants. Psychoanalyzing a party animal with pretense to wisdom from 24 centuries ago is useful, but only as a low dimensional case study. Putin is the real thing, and Hitler just a training device.

Only the biggest predation will reveal the debates of the most significative wisdom. This is why classical English and French authors wrote down theater about some of history’s most famous figures. However they could hardly write about the tyrants under whom they were living. But we can.

We have a greater object of admiration than Socrates at the ready, and Socrates himself provided her: ASPASIA… a female thinker to whom Socrates attributes the Socrates method, among other teachings. Aspasia’s Direct Democratic credentials are second to none: she was also an immigrant and invented explicitly the concept of Open Society (narrated by her lover Pericles).

Socrates as a so-far unexamined fascist is not a new theme: I have developed it before, and other classicists increasingly arrive to the same conclusion. Looking at the most significant facts, that conclusion should be obvious. Let’s progress. The war with Sparta was not caused by Socrates, and its mismanagement had not started with Alcibiades. Pericles admitted partial culpability. As Athenian democracy slowly recovered from the catastrophe, it tolerated Aristotle and related influencers too much, not taking the warnings of Demosthenes against Macedonia as seriously as it should have. The end result is that, in the crucial battle against the Macedonian king and his son Alexander (Aristotle’s student, who won the battle with a cavalry charge)… Sparta was not present (that would have ensured victory).

Aspasia was sort of cancelled by the male chauvinist pigs (but not Plutarch). With queen Bathilde (who outlawed slavery in 657 CE) and Emilie du Chatelet (who discovered energy after she found Newton had confused it with momentum), she belongs to the highest reaches of human thought. Let the all-knowing wisdom of these women stand on Socrates’ decomposing humility!

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Michel de Montaigne: “Quelle vérité que ces montagnes bornent, qui est mensonge au monde qui se tient au-delà? repris par Blaise Pascal parrot: “Vérité en deçà des Pyrénées, mensonge au delà“