The city and the lie
On the axis: The value of truth · the common order
Many common orders rest on unverifiable narratives, from founding myth to official fiction: does a society owe its members the truth, or can it live on shared myths?
Justification
Leaving the cave is painful, blinding, and yet the only liberation: to stay among the shadows is to take reflections for reality and live in chains without knowing it; knowing is not an ornament of happiness but the conversion of the whole soul toward what is. Yet the philosopher-king administers a noble lie to the city: the primacy of truth holds first for the soul being educated, and Plato accepts that the common order may itself rest on a myth.
Republic, VII · Republic, III
Justification
The argument proceeds by analogy with the technai, the crafts: one entrusts the helm not to the many but to the pilot who knows, and a ship where the crew elected its captain by acclamation would be deemed mad. Governing is likewise a knowledge, that of the Good and of justice, acquired only through a long education. From this Plato infers, against the Athenian that condemned , that authority must fall to competence and not to the opinion of the greater number. The thesis cuts all the deeper for striking at his own city's ruling regime.
Republic, V, 473c-e · Republic, VI, 488a-489d (the ship metaphor)
Anchors: Plato · Arendt
leads to: Who should decide