Who will Guard the Guardians?
“That a guardian should require another guardian to take care of him is ridiculous indeed.” – Plato in Republic
Back when I was working in Italy, I took pride in being a true Renaissance Man. Even though my job was to be the lead air planner for my NATO unit, I was often chosen to lead other groups, especially when we didn’t posses a certain expertise on our staff. I was at one time the lead negotiator, HR rep, supply and logistics head, and the designated public speaker. Of all the roles I took on during this time, none was more fun than being the political advisor (POLAD in military jargon). As POLAD, my job was to help the unit coordinate with other government representatives outside of the military for support.
I think they chose me as the POLAD for two primary reasons: I spent about half of my time reading history books at my desk about other NATO nations, and I was by far the best English speaker on the staff. My first job as the POLAD was to accompany my boss to Rome to speak to a group of volunteers at the Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali Guido Carli (LUISS). For the uninitiated (and why would any American understand Italian college culture), LUISS is the primary political science private university in Italy - basically their version of the Harvard Kennedy School.
My job was to meet and prep a group of political science grad students that had volunteered to take a field trip to the South of Italy for a month and be part of our military planning exercise. For the students, this was a chance to get some real-life experience on their CV before graduating and heading off to Brussels to work for the EU. For me, it was an excuse to take a few days off in Rome and get a good night’s sleep away from my infant.
Once my proteges arrived at our base in the South, my job was mostly to keep them busy all day. I would assign them some work in the morning, and then make sure to take them to coffee, then lunch, then coffee, and coffee again. The grad students really took to me because I was an American officer, and I had credentials from both Annapolis and MIT. For this group, I met the bill of a credentialed gentleman who could be trusted to discuss the better points of life, whereas my military colleagues were mostly beneath their contempt.
At this point, I should probably give some relevant background on modern Italian culture to better understand the dynamic. Modern Italy doesn’t really have a common national identity, and there are serious cultural differences between each of the regions. In Italian, the word for city and country are the same thing, and Italians never refer to themselves as an Italian, but by their local identity. For instance, most of my office was local to Taranto, so they were Tarantino first, Pugliese (the region) second and Italian somewhere down the list. However, you can broadly divide the nation between north and south, with Rome being the far edge of civilization to both sides. The northerners call the southerners “terroni” which roughly translates to dirt people. The southerners think of the northerners as basically Germans who are cold and rude. Italy also has the legacy of a feudal society, and the class attitudes between the upper and lower classes are openly derisive.
The Italian Navy is mostly based in the South and staffed by Southerners of the local working-class populations. For a group of rich, Northern aristocrats, the military men and women were mostly to be avoided. So the group mainly stayed together and talked only to me. I got to be pretty good friends with my group of mentees and took them out drinking on Friday nights in Taranto. The group later took me out whenever I came to Rome. As part of one of our Friday night discussions, one of the students brought up his frustration with how the Southerners fought against European integration. We talked at length and finally I asked him - How are you going to make this country European if you don’t even agree to be Italians first? He answered that the people would just have to accept Euro integration because the county’s leaders knew what was best for everyone. I realized at this point that I wasn’t talking to a person, but a reflection of the Platonic archetype of the entitled shithead.
I have always found Plato’s ideas to be very interesting, but completely incorrect at the same time. Plato clearly lays out his vision for what the ruling class of a society should be. He calls his leadership caste the Guardians, who are trained as enlightened philosophers and appointed to benevolently, yet despotically, rule society. Italy was not my first encounter with the Platonic impulse toward enlightened despotism. As a graduate of Annapolis, our mission reads like something Plato’s editor left on the cutting room floor:
“To develop Midshipmen morally, mentally, and physically and to imbue them with the highest ideals of duty, honor, and loyalty in order to provide graduates who are dedicated to a career of naval service and have the potential for future development in mind and character to assume the highest responsibilities of command, citizenship and government.”
This is quite a screed but gets to the heart of the matter quite well. The service academies see their purpose as explicitly developing the next generation of guardians to lead the nation. We were forced to memorize and recite the mission on command during our boot camp, and we spent the next four years in regular seminars discussing the need to reflect these ideals to the world. We also happened to invade Iraq at the end of my freshman year, so you can understand why a working-class realist like myself was ranked last in my company in living up to this credo three times in four years. As I look back now on the last 20 years of government failure, I believe it is the Platonic worldview that has led us into the societal disaster that we are currently enduring.
COVID really does provide the clearest example, and since it has been the most catastrophic failure, we can start our analysis there. In the minds of our modern guardians, the complexity of the modern world requires a series of experts to make decisions for society. When we are faced with any type of difficult situation, we must call on the guardians to lead us and direct a response. In early 2020, when a novel virus came to our shores, the guardians of public health were activated. This group was staffed with the best credentialed group of experts in the country and they were given nearly unlimited power to meet the goal of protecting public health. Unfortunately, that is an awfully open-ended goal, and it was quickly decided that public health would be best protected by limiting the spread of the virus.
In systems engineering, this is what we call the system level need (meaning the entire system is designed to achieve this goal). In engineering, we prioritize the system level need above any competing priorities, so there is no conflict in what is considered most important. For guardians of public health, this type of thinking made clear that limiting spread was the clear need for every area of society. This also led to an interesting issue due to the mindset of our leadership class. Since we were in a public health “crisis,” no one could possibly have more expertise than the designated public health experts. Therefore, total deference was given to this small group of leaders with a single minded goal to reduce the spread, regardless of the broader social costs of this thinking.
As a result, the guardians of public health implemented a series of controls: lockdowns, social restrictions, and (my personal favorite) public masking. The experts told us that each of these measures would limit the spread of the virus. At the same time, the remaining political leadership nationwide ostracized and punished anyone that dared question this single-minded focus. What was the result each time? The virus came back with a new wave every few months, infecting many more victims than the last one. None of these policies achieved the goal of limiting the spread, but our public health leaders never waivered in their advice nor did they consider the clearly rising cost of unintended consequences.
So why, when facing the clear evidence that none of the interventions worked as advertised, did our political caste continue to pursue the same policies? I think the answer is found in the nature of the Platonic worldview itself. All leftist ideologies, which are the natural descendants of Plato’s benevolent communism, have a vision of reality that reflects how they think the world should be. In Plato’s convention, reality is not the world we see with our eyes or feel with our senses. Instead, there exists a perfect version of everything he called an archetype, and what we experience on earth is an imperfect reflection of these perfect archetypes. Republic lays this out clearly with both the Allegory of the Cave and Socrates’ dialogues on how to educate the guardians to rule society.
These guardians are to be the highest trained experts in all areas of life, spending their youth gaining the philosopher’s understanding of the realm of perfection. Once qualified, their role is to create policies that bring the reality of earth every closer to the perfection of the archetypes. In a modern public policy sense, this means our leadership does not care in any meaningful way about the results of their decisions. That’s because as the anointed stewards of society, they understand better than anyone else possibly can how to bring about the society we should have. Real is then what should happen because of their chosen policies. In our example, the solution to a public health crisis is whatever the anointed public health experts decree to be the answer, and this is true no matter what actually happens.
All this is to say that the platonic worldview has no natural correction mechanism for when the guardians are wrong. When a very failed podcaster, a goofy journalist, and a couple of MDs point out the obvious failures of COVID policies in practice, the guardians are unable and unwilling to accept that these amateurs could be correct. The constant refrain from the guardians was that the “science” always reflected in their most current decisions. When masks failed, it wasn’t because masks don’t prevent the spread of this virus, it was because the people didn’t wear them correctly or enough of the time. As a result, we always needed more constant masking. When case rates increased with the initial lockdown orders, the stay-at-home orders needed to be extended until they “worked” and then revived every few months. Yet when anyone criticized the failures of Faucian policy, they were attacking “science” itself.
The most obscene example was definitely the vaccines. Throughout the pandemic, we were constantly reminded that vaccines prevent the spread of diseases and lead to better health outcomes. This is true in principle, but it is clear 18 months later that these particular vaccines did not work as advertised. We were told that once 70% percent of the population was jabbed, we would reach herd immunity and could return to normal. When this didn’t happen, the guardians just demanded more boosters and harsher mandates, lamenting a pandemic of the unvaxxed. When reality on this planet didn’t reflect what they expected, the guardians hemmed and hawed and demanded their decrees be more strictly enforced and further dissent be silenced.
COVID really has been the perfect encapsulation of the modern Platonic worldview. The complete lack of accountability for the guardians is a feature of the system, not a bug, as is shown in Plato’s quote above. The only thing that matters is the intended effect of a program, not its actual result. If the guardians develop a program that intends to reduce poverty, it must be constantly extended even when measured poverty never declines. Even 100 million Chinese lives were still not enough to convince Mao of the failure of the Great Leap Forward, and Stalin was always five years away from the communist paradise.
In this case, the Platonic mindset is not limited to the political left. As a GWOT veteran, we saw the results a group of Republican guardians could achieve in leading us to nowhere. When Iraq and Afghanistan didn’t form flourishing democracies, did we decide to stop fighting to implement one? No, we kept fighting because the national security experts were convinced that democracy is what these people needed. When the easy money of 2002-2006 crashed the economy, did we limit the role of central bankers and end the cheap credit stunts that caused it? No, we simply gave out an ever-escalating amount of money for another decade. In the minds of the guardians, if we lack the growth they expected, no expense can be spared to make it so. Republicans never demanded an end to the Fed or fired the Joint Chiefs because of these failures. Instead, when any policy is met by a conflicting reality, the guardians simply pursue the policy ever harder. Utopia is always just past their fingertips.
As we now stand on the precipice of economic and social disaster at their hands, how do we guard against our guardians? I think we first need to criticize them in a more effective way that is more meaningful to their sensibilities. Take for example the constant refrain in many circles about the evils of the military-industrial complex. According to these critics, the reason we fight constant wars is to allow defense contractors to make money. Although weapons makers greatly profit from war, the guardians of national security don’t see themselves as profiteers. As the mission of the USNA above shows, all of the generals and admirals that lead the military are trained in the perfect ideal of defending the nation. In their minds, wars are fought to keep America strong across the globe and keep potential enemies at bay. They don’t send men to fight for profit in this ideal, so this criticism means nothing to them. The foreign policy establishment can simply ignore the criticism, even though it is completely correct in practice that defense contractors have an incentive for forever wars.
A more effective criticism of war policy must instead be critical on the terms that the guardians understand and believe. For example, all military officers pledge an oath to defend the US Constitution, against all enemies, foreign and domestic. For most people this means nothing, but to military officers, we are taught that we swore deference to no man, only our constitution. If an order violates the constitution, every officer has a moral duty to ignore and prevent that order’s implementation. Military officers take this oath and the defense of their subordinates’ lives as a sacred trust. Instead of referencing profits, criticizing the effects of these orders on their subordinates’ lives or their lack of constitutional authority would be more effective. This won’t stop the most cynically ideological lunatics in leadership, but it would greatly erode the support amongst the rank and file that is the heartbeat of the military. The guardians rely on the acquiescence of the ruled and must constantly be made to pay a social price for ignoring the needs of their fellow citizens.
I think the other important aspect is to present clear alternatives to the population at large to the rule of the guardians. COVID has certainly shown that most people in America just want to be led, but they also have a sense of fairness that must be satisfied. If everyone of us sacrificed for two years and only ended up in a worse position, the people are much more willing to follow someone other than the current group of shitheads that got us into this mess. This presents an opportunity, but also a challenge to not simply replace one set of guardians with different ones. Instead, we must focus on undermining the worldview that relies on guardians in the first place and replace the current failure with something reliant on individual liberties and responsibility as its foundation. Wake up those around you to the harms that the guardians cause and then build better communities outside their influence. But please remember, as another philosopher once said: “Only take one red pill and not the whole bottle.”