#203: Plato: “No Political Fool”

“However, Plato is no political fool. He knows that this “rule of the best we know,” the rule of aristos, would be hard. Knowing what human beings are, aristocracy would give way to timocracy ... and many would prefer to be ruled by honor and reputation, just as Glaucon first insisted. Then, timocracy would give way to oligarchy, ... because some timocrat’s son would discover that the only thing that talks is money. Of course, oligarchy would easily fall prey to mass-rule, ... when the thrifty oligarch has a son who needs to be free. And, when everything is “simply bursting from freedom of all kinds,” in the rule of the masses, we find the ripest ground for tyranny from the son of the masses, who begins as the “champion of the people,” and ends as “absolute tyrant without any guiding principles whatsoever.”

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Uemura, Joseph Norio. Uemura’s Reflections on the Mind of Plato (pp. 98-99). Saga Egmont International. Kindle Edition.

Joseph Norio Uemura - “Age 89, of Burnsville, passed away March 3, 2016. ... Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Hamline University and retired United Methodist minister.” | from https://www.startribune.com/obituaries/detail/126210/
Also see: https://www.apaonline.org/page/memorial_minutes2016#uemura
“His remarkable life had two major aspects. The first is recorded in words and visual images in his autobiography published under the title The Insatiable Search for Truth [IST] (edited by Steve LeBeau, Autobiography, Inc., Saint Paul, Minnesota, 2015). His account of the experience of the Japanese-Americans who suffered so much and so unjustly in the twentieth century ... The second aspect spawned his career as a professor of philosophy and a mentor to dozens of us who were fortunate to be his students.”