Much talk doing the rounds about “might is right” and the “rules-based order”.
I wish commentators would read – no, really read – the source document for the might-is-right arguments: Plato’s Republic. Because then, they might realise that rules are not a constrainer of might at all.
Rather, Plato advocates for justice – which, back then, wasn’t to do with morals or principles, well-honed judgments or righteous outrage, but, rather, the state of the soul: individual and city-state.
Justice was a form of inner coherence: alignment of each person and the body politic with what is good, beautiful and true.
Morality, as is meant now – right by calculation (utilitarianism) or reason (doentology) – is antithetical to the older idea of justice because inner coherence is taken out of the equation. Behaviour is all, not character and certainly not soul, which is sniffed at or pooh-poohed.
The upshot is that people today are rarely educated in what Plato thought fundamental. Moral diktats are blind to the inner conflicts that are at the heart of the art of knowing yourself, as are ethical calculations to the longings of the soul. Uneducated, the conflicts and longings run riot.
So why do might and moral rules now determine the parameters of debate? They appear to be the only two options when people feel themselves to be imprisoned in a cave-like reality, trapped by dark material constraints that raw power promises to ease and rules to govern.
Gone is the spiritual vision that knows of the light, desired by love, and pursued not by power or principle, but by perception: discovering that the divine life within is the divine life without.
Only then comes true peace and strength.
This thought was published at my Substack, A Golden String. Do consider subscribing.