Westward Ho!

Were Plato alive today, and not in jail for extremism, I wonder what he and his cronies would be talking about in the boozer. Socrates, certainly, would by then have suffered pretty much the same fate as he did, and the conversation – transcribed for posterity by some dissentient soul on Elon Musk’s X – would lack some of its former brilliance, but still its likely drift intrigues me.

An issue of perennial relevance, yet one that could probably be raised more forthrightly now than way back then at the drinking tables of Athens, is why evil persists in masquerading itself as good. This it plainly does to this day, and the abiding need to masquerade may be read as a hopeful sign. I can compare it to the “new” black cabs of London, which were built to replace the “old” kind some years ago. The new taxis looked exactly like the old ones, with the doors still designed, in an age of denim, Starbucks and baseball caps, to accommodate a gentleman’s silk topper and a lady’s evening gown.

Let us ponder an extreme case. Totalitarian Korea’s official name is “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” with at least two words of the five underscoring its leader’s wish to be seen as what the Americans call a good guy, an Edwardian gentleman, perhaps a Roman senator. If that in itself is not passionate homage to democracy and recognition of its potential for optimizing human happiness, I don’t know what is.

A scoffer may say that Kim Il-sung’s Juche, as enshrined in the foundational tract entitled Ten Principles for the Establishment of a Monolithic Ideological System, outweighs those two words on the scales of public relations; while the famous United Nations assessment, to the effect that “the gravity, scale and nature” of his regime’s crimes against humanity “reveal a state that does not have any parallel in the modern world,” shows that nobody’s been taken in. Rubbish! Totalitarian despot Kim Jong-un is North Korea’s “president,” even as his countrywide concentration camp boasts a “Constitution,” a “multiparty electoral system,” a unicameral “parliament,” and even – wait for it – “three branches of government.” Why roll out all that Jeffersonian farrago unless it makes you feel you are a good guy?

“Despotism,” says Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic, “uses force or fraud to plunder the goods of others, public or private, sacred or profane, and to do it in a wholesale way. If you are caught committing any one of these crimes on a small scale, you are punished and disgraced; they call it sacrilege, kidnapping, burglary, theft and brigandage. But if, besides taking their property, you turn all your countrymen into slaves, you will hear no more of those ugly names; your countrymen themselves will call you the happiest of men and bless your name, and so will everyone who hears of such a complete triumph of injustice; for when people denounce injustice, it is because they are afraid of suffering wrong, not of doing it.”

Does anybody seriously think that the world’s opinion of North Korea would change for the worse if one day Kim Jong-un were to say, “Enough is enough! Out with this stupid charade! Let us begin by lining up members of parliament, of that preposterous People’s Assembly of ours – yes, all 687 of those loudmouth losers! – in Kim Il-sung Square, and start running tanks over them, a thousand or two of our swift Pokpunk-hos and Chomna-hos, one after another. That’ll be a parade they’ll long remember in Washington!”

No, nobody thinks so. And the reason Kim Jong-un does not say or do this is that even when quite alone, in front of the mirror plucking his eyebrows, he regards himself an exemplary democrat and considers his country a well governed republic.

What holds true of the extremes in the case above is as, or even more, true of the fair-to-middling totalitarianisms in which the world abounds. Russian or African or Chinese, every evil plays at being good according to the rules, however arcane and incomprehensible, laid down centuries ago by Athenian worthies, English lawmen, French philosophes, and the rest of democracy’s founding fathers. Now tell me if that isn’t a hopeful sign, just like those black cabs in London.