The Age of the Philosopher King

The ship has sailed, the barn door is open, the genie can't be put back in the bottle---use whatever metaphor you like. The government knows more about us than we had imagined, and soon, with ever-faster processors, ever-increasing storage capacity, and ever-more-powerful analytical tools it will know everything. If people didn't see this coming ten years ago, they weren't paying attention. But that's beside the point. They can't stop it.

When individuals have enormous power at their disposal, we try to make sure they do not misuse it by imposing physical safeguards (e.g., ICBM's) and legal restraints (e.g., a declaration of war is made by Congress, not the Commander-in-Chief). Systems of control, however, are as imperfect as the human beings who designed them. While improper behavior should be detected and corrected, the first line of defense must be to install people who have a strong ethical code, the right set of priorities (e.g., country before party, other people before oneself) and good judgment.

The American founders did their best to design a political system that did not require its leaders to have a moral character superior to the rest of society. However, when we consider the damage that could arise from the "wrong people" being in charge of, say, nuclear weapons or the Federal Reserve, then the corrective of replacing the government after four years seems woefully inadequate.

We are left with the solution that Plato proposed thousands of years ago, that of entrusting leadership to the philosopher-king:

we must make our guardians philosophers. The necessary combination of qualities is extremely rare. Our test must be thorough, for the soul must be trained up by the pursuit of all kinds of knowledge to the capacity for the pursuit of the highest--higher than justice and wisdom--the idea of the good.

"The idea of the good" is nowhere to be found on the Civil Service application for a job at the NSA. In fact the opposite behavior may well have been evidenced by the IRS. And that is why a lot of people are scared. © 2013 Stephen Yuen