Only a fool believes that, King Prout, a self-delusional person who is living in a second reality. For when we speak of "right," we are speaking of justice. And justice is not a human creation.
In the end, all the "mighty" fall:
OzymandiasAnd when the "mighty" fall, they often do so with a very great crash. Plato instances the case of the great Pericles, of whom Socrates says in the dialogue Gorgias:
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed,
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.-Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792-1822
...what I am going to tell you now is not mere hearsay, but well known both to you and me: that at first, Pericles was glorious and his character unimpeached by any verdict of the Athenians -- this was during the time when they were not so good -- yet afterwards, when they had been made good and gentle by him, at the very end of his life they convicted him of theft, and almost put him to death, clearly under the notion that he was a malefactor.Socrates is speaking ironically here; for he believes the great Pericles was a moral failure, actually a "bad man"; for he flattered the Athenian citizenry, conferring all kinds of goodies and subsidies on them, making them dependent and weak and accustomed to receiving unearned benefits from the State, instead of making them into better men. So Callicles asks, "how does that prove Pericles' badness?" To which Socrates replies:
Why, surely you would say that he was a bad manager of asses or horses or oxen, who had received them originally neither kicking nor butting nor biting him, and implanted in them all these savage tricks? Would he not be a bad manager of any animals who received them gentle, and made them fiercer than they were when he received them?Sounds like what happens in a modern "welfare state."
Socrates warns Callicles:
You praise the men who feasted the citizens and satisfied their desires [e.g., Pericles], and people say that they have made the city great, not seeing that the swollen and ulcerated condition of the State is to be attributed to these elder statesmen; for they have filled the city full of harbours and docks and walls and revenues and all that, and have left no room for justice and temperance. And when the crisis of the disorder comes, the people will blame the advisers of the hour, and applaud Themistocles and Cimon and Pericles, who are the real authors of their calamities; and if you are not careful they may assail you ... when they are losing not only their new acquisitions, but also their original possessions; not that you are the authors of these misfortunes of theirs, although you may perhaps be accessories to them.And Callicles later on warns him back:
How confident you are, Socrates, that you will never come to harm! you seem to think that you are living in another country, and can never be brought into a court of justice, as you very likely may be brought by some miserable and mean person.Meaning himself as it turns out. To which Socrates replies:
Then I must indeed be a fool, Callicles, if I do not know that in the Athenian State any man may suffer anything. And if I am brought to trial and incur the dangers of which you speak, he will be a villain who brings me to trial -- of that I am very sure, for no good man would accuse the innocent. Nor shall I be surprised if I am put to death.When Socrates says that "in the Athenian State any man may suffer anything," he is telling Callicles that the order of the Polis (the State) had been utterly destroyed by the "might equals right" theory of morals (together with the institutional supports that inevitably arise in support of it, e.g., political patronage, "vote-buying," popular subsidies, graft, bribery, nepotism, etc.) and the whole society ends up suffering at the hands of "strong men" who act with impunity to gratify their lusts.
Anyhoot, the Athenians almost murdered Pericles in gratitude for his beneficence. So here we have a "mighty man" who almost ended up being the victim of the mighty mob.
But I digress. Socrates insists that when it comes to injustice (the right), it is far, far better to suffer injustice than to commit injustice. For to commit injustice leaves indelible marks on the soul, and the worst of all possible evils in the world for a man is that he should die with a soul corrupted by injustice. The reason for this -- ta-da! -- Socrates tells in a myth -- an aletheinos logos type of myth, which means a "true story": That the immortal soul is subject to divine judgment in an eternal afterlife. The good man goes to the Isles of the Blest. The bad man to eternal pains in Tartarus. In either case, the judgment is forever.
So here we see that traditional Christian morality had been anticipated and articulated some 400 years before the birth of Jesus Christ.
Now Callicles is truly a bad man, a man of bad faith, a narcissist who believes as you suggest that "might makes right." That the "noble" man takes what he wants from life with impunity, and all the gods and morality and judgment are simply fairy tales that weak men use to try to restrain the exercise of the libido dominandi of the strong man. But for the strong man to submit to any moral categories whatsover would turn him into a "slave," as Callicles claims. Somehow, I think this attitude is alive and well in our own time, and seems to be factor in the "God is dead" movement: Kill morality, for it enslaves man.
Of course, for Plato and for Aristotle, too, morality is what truly liberates the human person. Christianity also holds to that understanding.
For again, under both classical metaphysics and Christian theology, man is psyche-in-soma, an embodied soul. See my tagline, quoting Socrates in the Gorgias: The soul is immortal, though the body perishes at death. Thus death is not the end of the human person, but the beginning of a new future in eternity, which will either be blessed or tormented, depending on how he lives his life -- i.e., on his moral actions which are constituted in divine justice, and will ultimately be judged by divine justice.
As for Socrates, he tells Callicles:
... [n]o man who is not an utter fool and coward is afraid of death itself, but he is afraid of doing wrong. For to go to the world below having one's soul full of injustice is the last and worst of all evils.Perhaps the foregoing is disappointing to you, King Prout, because it is not in "dialogue" form. Actually, I don't think the forum here can support an authentic dialogue, which is an active back-and-forth between/among the correspondents in real time.
Anyhoot, just my thoughts on the theme you raised and the example I gave.
Thank you so much for writing!
no one would bother with gods if they did not fear consequences in life and in the afterlife.
try again.
As things change the more they stay the same..
"Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you."-Pericles (430 B.C.)
Note: The founders of the United States knew that democracy was MOB Rule, pure and simple.. Pity that, that knowledge is submerged in worship of democracy today.. Amazing the U.S. republican leaders are advocating a democracy for Iraq rather than a republic with Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish States.. You know.. the American Constitution has three words OMITTED on purpose.. 1) democracy.. 2) democratic.. and 3) democrat.. Also, amazing that 99.9 percent of Americans do not know that.. or regrettably CARE... Or do they know the difference between "A" Democracy and democracy.. Little wonder the current political climate is not civil, since "civics" is not taught anymore..