More Like Suck-rates

I can totally get behind the idea of the city where people select one skill and practice it excessively until they are masters. There's something to be said for having a breadth of knowledge, but also something to be remembered about how good one can become at a task when he does nothing save that task day in and day out for decades, and doesn't bother with stuff that he knows Google can do for him, or any basic electronic with a calculator function. I'm looking at you, core requirements of art appreciation, foreign language, and math.

You'll never get a real job if you can't recite this book by memory.

In any case, Socrates does a decent job  of setting us up to understand the various necessities of a growing city, what with it requiring people with all sorts of trade-skills, entertainment values, military training, etc. No thanks, however, goes to his uselessly agreeable friends, who, when they raise the rare question, are immediately dismissed by more of Socrates' truth-bombs. When Socrates comes to the realization that a soldier cannot possibly be fierce to the enemy without being fierce to his own townspeople, his peers agree right away, and the group decides it isn't possible to be a good guardian. 

It takes Socrates' input after a few seconds of silence to realize that a dog is capable of loyalty, so a person should be, too. Really? I know he's one of the original thinkers, but come on. Maybe if the guy had some smarter friends who talked with him instead of just bobbing their heads, he'd have remembered sooner what a dog is.

How I imagine everyone Socrates is talking to.

Then he talks for several pages about precisely what literature and stories these theoretical guards should be exposed to so that they mentally develop the correct moral and ethical values to be adequate guards, and become as god-fearing as possible. With our luxurious city of agreeable philosophers guarded by sufficiently terrified soldiers, we move on to Book III.

Book III begins by continuing to talk about stuff the soldiers can't read, and then Socrates decides to become the over-protective mother of a religious high-schooler and begins to make (the first ever?) a challenged book list. This list consists mostly of edits he would have made to famous texts so that the characters within them find death a perfectly suitable fate, and thus, our soldiers having read these texts, will no longer be afraid to die, making them more courageous - and therefore, better - warriors.

 Just a few quick edits so we don't scare the soldiers.

The rest of the book can be summarized fairly simply: there's some talk about what poetry and songs a person must be versed in to be a well-rounded person, so that they are gentle but firm like our guards. Then there's some talk about how people need not show too much emotion, because fear is not a good trait, nor violent laughter, nor practicing things without moderation. So our "utopia" (if we're calling it that yet) is basically just a normally functioning city where everyone does the bare minimum to get by, the guards are basically educated through edited versions of epic poetry, and people generally agree with Socrates because he talks too much for everyone else to have time to think properly.

To: Socrates. From: the folks you're "conversing" with.

It’s by no means a bad plan for a city, and he’s right on many accounts, but I can’t help wanting to hear another side of this. Plenty of things (for example, the description of an ideal guardian needing not to fear death or a master craftsman not wasting time with any other practice) are subjective, or at the very least open to debate, which we don’t receive from Socrates’ passive friends, who serve only to enhance his intellectual masturbation. I’d argue that it’s fine to fear death if one’s fear of death is lesser than his will to protect his people, but Socrates doesn’t leave any room for that side of the coin. Furthermore, he doesn’t really touch on the fact that editing texts only for the guardians is basically lying to them, so that they have no chance to make up their minds about things, because they’re only shown what we choose to show them, which makes sense for Socrates to suggest, because as we know, he doesn’t need the input of others, only their confirmation. I'd be much more inclined to agree with him if he acknowledged ideas that weren't his own.