The Memoirs of Socrates: The Last Rational Man

By S. T. Levin

During the month between the conviction and the execution of the original teacher of wisdom (or philosopher) Socrates, these memoirs were dictated in the hope of correcting the conventional wisdom of history and the foolishness of Sophists as of 399 BCE with the knowledge and wisdom of the real man called Socrates.

The 24 centuries of human history that followed were irrevocably twisted by his one-time associatethe creatively dishonest dramatic genius Plato.

During the last 30 years of Socrates lifetime (and the first 30 of Platos), while the evermore educated (Big Government) Oligarchy thrived, the common citizen majority, the middle-class as they are now thought of, lost their property, their liberty and their lives.

From a generation before Socrates birth through the first 40 years of his real-world life, the common citizens of Athens rose from centuries of poverty and oppression to true liberty and the opportunity for personal wealth and glory in the greatest and freest political society of the then known western world. Athens and its Delian League in the 5th century BCE was the equivalent of, or better than, America in the 20th centuryif one were a common citizen without inherited advantages (or other social connections).

What had preceded the decline in the formative 70 or more good years in Athens? And how did the generation-long decline occur?

Far more than the Peloponnesian War that Thucydides documented caused that decline.

Internal corruption proliferated as wealth and Sophisticated Higher Education for the affluent Oligarchy grew even before the Great War began. The socially prestigious Oligarchy re-acquired dominance and the common citizen majority were ground down into unthinking followers.

Sound familiar?

Socrates sarcastic memoirs reveal the tragic history of the internal decline of once-dominant Athenian culture, all told in a rational chronology of historical fact.

For additional information and author bio, see www.STLevin.com

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Aug 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9781480817357

S. T. Levin

The author, born and living in New York City (for as long as Socrates lived in Athens) has watched his culture and country first rise to supreme greatness and then decline. For the last 40-50 years that cascading decline was inseparable from the coterminus rise of professions and professionalized higher education in influence and expense. As the years passed, this no longer seemed coincidental. For over 30 years, from endless but skeptically critical rereading of Plato and Xenophon and Herodotus and Thucydides, and the less complete study of more modern interpreters of same such as George Grote in the 19th century and Bertrand Russel, Karl Raymond Popper and Thomas Sowell in the 20th, certain patterns of thought and culture were revealed. This book is a product of an non-credentialed amateur's quest for the truth of “why” and “how” this American decline pattern is a repetition of happened more than 24 centuries ago in the freest and wealthiest society the western world had ever known – up until then.

Book preview

DAY ONE

[Editor’s Note: these memoirs of Socrates were dictated to scribes over the course of twenty-five mornings during which Socrates (convicted of impiety) resided chained to a wall in the prison of Athens awaiting his execution. A complete explanation of its discovery and its translation can be found in the first addendum at the back of the book. A brief outline of the minimally known facts that constituted the previously understood version of the life of Socrates will be found in the second addendum which ends with a chronology of the major historical events of his world. The entire Socratic text now follows.]

So here I sit, in this windowless putrid-smelling dungeon carved into the Hill of the Muses west of the Acropolis. And among the many other ironies of my circumstance is this: I am inarguably the most famous living Athenian. Not counting a handful of military figures (such as the devil Lysander) I am arguably the most famous living citizen in all of Hellas. In all of Athenian history, only Alcibiades who died six years ago is more famous today than I am. To most of today’s voting-age citizens, Pericles the Great has become a vague character from the distant past. Hardly anyone alive today speaks of him or even remembers his name. At least that’s the way it seems if one reads the pamphlets and listens to the rumors about politics and socially prominent celebrities, past or present, the social gossip story stuff. For several years now there are more bullshit stories about Socrates than anyone else who ever existed—man, God, or Demigod.

During the last several months when my indictment for impiety became a matter of public discussion, I should have paid closer attention to the political organizations dedicated to the eradication of this so-called dangerous educator of Athenian youths. But even if I had, I would have done nothing different than that which I have always done. As I said to some of my friends weeks before my trial began: It is as if I were a physician arraigned by a confectioner and tried before a jury of children. My only refuge, my only defense is the factual ‘evidence’ of the innocence with which I have so publicly lived my entire seventy-year life.

I have an awful lot of lies about me to correct, and only twenty-four or twenty-five or maybe twenty-six days in which to do it. So let me begin with this point: to call me an educator is to get the rational subjective point-of-view (or vision) of everything backwards. It would be more accurate to call me an anti-educator. With the rarest of exceptions, Sophists, professional paid educators, lecture and most especially teach rhetoric. I never charge for my time in conversation. I never lecture anybody. I practice the dialectic. They speculate and theorize and manufacture fancy words with which to befuddle those less capable of utilizing if not quite comprehending such empty sophistry, such sophisticated bullshit. I take the opposite approach: I ask clarification questions along two basic lines of reasoning. I ask questions that enable me to better visualize what I am told about the objective world of nature including human nature, and I ask questions to clarify the precise meaning of the words the educated use to describe what they so foolishly believe is newly discovered as true about nature or morality.

When I was a boy almost all voting citizens were very skeptical about any new ideas being publicly advocated with fancy rhetoric used by young articulate politically active or socially prominent types.

Well, times have changed—and not for the better! People can be made to believe in anything—even irrational ideas about nature or how to advantageously change it, or even protect nature from human intervention, so long as it is dramatically and repetitively discussed with little, if any, contradiction. The more prestigious the speakers are the more powerful the message. The more educated the sincere believer in the latest theoretical scientific knowledge (which always turns out to be extremely generalized and uselessly imprecise if not out and out misleading foolishness) the more sincere the motivation of the believer to spread the word of their newly discovered beliefs to the nonbelievers. Nowadays, quite a few people can be made to sincerely believe anything crazy. And the more articulate the true believer advocate is, the more they find clever verbal ways with which to justify an irrational belief in the crazy ideas their dopey followers so sincerely believe in. Human nature is what human nature is. Sometimes it’s pretty rational. Not often—but occasionally.

It’s a lot more fun going through life, minute-by-minute, with a palpable emotional awareness guiding your consciousness than it is applying reason and logic with the forcible application of willpower. After all, there are so many more ways to be amused today than there were way back when.

A little over thirty years ago, back at the beginning of the Great War, during the Potidaea campaign, I started to become progressively more generally known in Athens than I had previously been to what few young men had so willingly submitted the benefit of their higher education to my dialectic cross-examinations in the public Agora (or happened to be in the area and listening in). That all evolved over the ensuing thirty years.

You have to remember that during many of those war years, the city was crowded with suburban and rural citizens fleeing Spartan occupation of Attica where such non-urbanized citizens normally lived. And so, during the years the Spartan Army faced our Long Walls for many of the years of the Archidamian War, both from social gossip stories circulating when I was not present, and also because of the much larger number of people who crowded the Agora constituting an ever wider audience of my public cross- examinations or elenchus, I became progressively more and more famous. I can well remember in those Archidamian War years most everybody still knew who Pericles was and almost everybody remembered how free and wealthy and glorious Athens had become before the Peloponnesian League broke the treaty and started the war.

Athenian moral and rational degeneration during that decade was sad enough. But then each of the next two ten-year periods saw Athens degenerate to such a degree that its predecessor decade could pass for a Golden Age (of Pericles or otherwise) by contrast.

And oddly enough, each of those decades, saw the character called Socrates proliferate ever more through the social gossip stories of Athens. In the last ten or so years, since the first Oligarchical Revolution, the political and social character Socrates has actually entered into the written literature. Pamphlets are written not only alleging what I teach, but even fabricating prestigious banquets where the character Socrates converses with famous people of today or even the distant past. They are all bullshit stories of course. I had a few completely private dinners with Pericles and several other famous people, but I never attended one of those fancy so-called Symposium public banquets.

Frequently wandering about the Agora as I have always done, it is only in the last six months or so that it has become impossible for me to fail to take conscious note of the vast political organizations and coalitions which have proliferated in our highly politicized snake pit of a postmodern Athens. At first, every anti-Socrates propaganda calumny—whether verbalized rumor or published in some social or political pamphlet only served to amuse me in its dishonesty. We have completely unfettered free speech in Athens, which provides a tremendous amount of security for liars and their lies. It is what it is.

But then, about six months ago, I had an experience that has repeated quite a few times since. The first time it happened I was so dumbfounded I could not stop laughing until the young man went away.

Each time, when I was alone in public, a young man I did not know would approach me, usually when I was all alone walking home from the Agora. He would tell me he wished to inform me, a stranger who might have sons to be educated, how he had been corrupted by his education with the Sophist called Socrates. For a while, in several subsequent such encounters I found some amusement in my regular dialectic cross- examination of their incompletely-formed bullshit story.

My wife was frightened by such incidents. After the first two times, I omitted or at least toned-down the information.

Well, the purpose of these memoirs is to set the record straight about the real Socrates. In a little while, I will get around to explaining the distribution of the two copies that we are producing here today and in subsequent days.

It would not be possible to go pamphlet by pamphlet with corrections. Practically speaking, everything that has been said and written about me is in whole or in part a lie.

I have real beliefs about what is true and what is good. And I can only explain what I believe is true and what I believe is good in a logical context of space and time. I cannot tell my story without telling it in a rational context of the real history of Athens in particular and Hellas in general. And for twenty years or more now hardly anybody among the citizenry really knows history anymore. The Sophists do not teach history. They lie about things in history but they certainly don’t teach history. How in a rational way can a rational human being understand anything about human politics if they don’t understand history to begin with? If you do not understand history you can be made to believe anything. Human nature is what human nature really is, not some potter’s clay to be molded into human perfection by the educated political leadership of the best and the brightest.

If there is one simple thematic truth I have pursued all of my life it is to learn and adapt to that which is true and that which is good. If knowledge of nature, including human nature, is not rationally acquired by reason, it is not reliable knowledge. It may not be knowledge at all—but it certainly is not reliable knowledge. Due to its logical implications, it can only lead you astray regardless of your motivation and regardless of your beliefs.

Well, to get back to these memoirs. I like to keep things in a logical context of space and time. It enables me to make sense of things. But then sometimes, it is rather difficult to keep things in a logical context of space and time when it extends over the years. I wish we had a way of calculating. We can’t even in a logically efficient manner count the years in a human lifetime. Each year is officially given the name of the new Eponymous Archon. There is no simple mathematical way of counting or calculating groups of years from one event to another without simply counting on your fingers and toes along a list of annually selected Eponymous Archons.

And we think we are the wisest people in the world. Ask any intellectual educated man and he will explain all the great mathematicians are of the great Hellenic race. Why those so-called mathematicians can play more meaningless games with geometric shapes and angles than any other race. They just can’t seem to find something useful to do with mathematical numbers. Not being even a mathematical expert, let alone a mathematical authority, being just an uneducated layman, I would think great mathematicians would make more use of numbers. Think of how much more efficient life could be if numbers became useful tools in calculating material world useful things. How is it possible to do complex real-world activities intelligently without weighing and counting and measuring things at a minimum? But then I am just a layman

Well to get back to my so-called memoirs, I have a wonderful, wonderful memory. It is an absolutely superior memory. My means of calculating the years is to simply remember how old I was when a particular event is being discussed. And when events that occurred before I was born are at issue, well then, I use my mom’s date of birth, or that of my dad. God bless their truly kind immortal souls! Sometimes I use for a reference point the date of birth or death or marriage of any of all four of my grandparents, although I only lived with and really knew my dad’s mom, my grandma—may God eternally bless her immortal soul! She is my true grandma for all eternity.

I want you to know of my family history so that you may truly know who I am and how I came to be. These are the years of my family. My mom was born ninety-four years ago and died at the age of seventy-two. My dad was born 114 years ago and died just before his eightieth birthday.

My mom’s mom was born 112 years ago and died eighty years ago only days after her husband, my maternal grandfather, was mortally wounded as a senior Athenian infantry officer at the battle of Plataea. My mom’s dad was almost fifty-seven when he died a true hero. (Outside the family and not counting Crito, only Pericles and Aspasia ever knew that little piece of knowledge before. I will get around to quite a lot of Pericles’ stuff in good time.)

My grandma that I knew, my dad’s mom, she was born almost twenty-two years before my dad, 136 years ago. And my blessed grandma died when I was almost eight years old. I think I miss her the most. She was so kind and good to me. And we all loved her so very much. My brother (my half-brother actually) Patrocles loved her at least as much as I. (My dad adopted him when he finally married my mom. My grandma was not Patrocles’ blood grandma at all. And yet she totally loved him as if he was my full-brother and her equally true grandson by birth.)

And then there is my dad’s dad: Socrates. I’m named for him. Socrates was born 161 years ago. And the old man lived three years past the battle of Plataea. He was eighty-three, almost eighty-four, when he died. Old Socrates lived almost four years longer in lifespan than his son, my dad.

I am the descendent of people who (if violent death can be honorably avoided) live a long, long time. My dad lived eighty years—the last twenty-five with a progressively worsening great deal of pain from all his physical injuries. Like my mom’s dad, old Lamprocles, my dad fought as a hoplite soldier at both Marathon and the other historic victory over the Persians at Plataea. My mom said my dad fought on our left flank at Marathon carrying a huge Spartan shield. She told me that though he was only twenty-three years old he had seriously hurt his shoulder—his left shoulder. And for the rest of his life, year-by-year, it, along with the inevitable back pain that people like us who work with stone tend to acquire, got worse and worse and worse. My dad never spoke in the presence of me or my brother about those two historic battles with two exceptions. They were both at two private dinners at Pericles’ table with my mom and me and Pericles’ wife Aspasia during Sophroniscus’ last few years with us.

I am told my dad’s dad, old Socrates, lived the last thirty years of his eighty-three years in this material world, also in a great deal of back pain from the arduous labor of cutting and moving and arranging stone and marble and granite. My brother and I too acquired our inevitable physical injuries from that same arduous labor of cutting and moving and arranging stone and marble and granite. (Crito likes to call it the construction industry. That way the work sounds much more sophisticated.)

Just to finish out all the numbers. My dad’s parents were married 115 years ago. My grandma liked to say my dad was born three quarters of a year and fifteen minutes later.

My mom’s parents met each other in Athens after the final Miltiades withdrawal from the Chersonese ninety-four years ago. It supposedly took all of three months for my mom’s parents to marry. (My mom’s mom wanted to wait until she was eighteen). And then it took another three quarters of a year and fifteen minutes more for my blessed mom to be born.

It is just one of the peculiar ironies about my family history that from two days after the battle of Plataea no one in my family ever left the Athenian homeland with the following exceptions: my three military campaigns during the Archidamian War, and that short little trip my mom and my dad and my brother and I took to Delphi along the Sacred Way and back after my grandma died.

But, ironically, if you drop back a bunch of years, my two grandfathers spent almost all of their adult lives (before settling in Athens) outside of the Athenian homeland. My mom’s dad spent almost twenty years in the little army in the Chersonese that Miltiades commanded protecting both sides, but especially the European side of the Hellespont. Everybody knows about the Hellespont. Everybody knows about Troy and Homer and all that stuff. And everybody ought to know to make Homer’s story sensible that’s the route the grain ships take each year from time immemorial, since way before Agamemnon, if there really was an Agamemnon, to keep our race from starving. Starving in part that is; there is always plenty of food for people who have connections. Even during Lysander’s blockade when countless people literally starved to death inside the walls of Athens, there was plenty of food available for people who had connections.

Well, old Lamprocles (my first son is named after my mom’s dad) signed up in Miltiades’ little army practically right after completing his cadet duties, and spent almost twenty years of his adult life working his way up the officer corps. He hated all the petty social and political disputes back home. He only wanted to do the honorable thing. All my grandparents only wanted to do the honorable thing—to do the best they can as my grandma would say. And so my mom’s family, right after her parents married, even before she was born, settled not far from where my dad’s family had been living for years, right near Marble Way in the Alopece deme. And my mom’s dad just stuck to military stuff until he, as the polite euphemism goes, fell at Plataea.

My other grandfather, old Socrates, also hated all the petty social and political disputes back home. But being so much older, he had an extra twenty-five years to get started hating all that childish behavior of putative adults. Old Socrates came from a destitute family (that would have thought of any typically poor family as a well-off family)—from the poorest area of Attica beyond the hills, actually very close to Brauron where the old tyrant Peisistratus himself had come from.

First, as a very young man, he went up to Thrace to learn mining engineering as a very bright laborer. Over time, he became a very skilled stonecutter. He spent most of his life cutting and rearranging stone and marble and granite in innumerable projects all over our world—except in Athens itself. The family briefly returned to Athens to register my dad as a citizen and then took off again. (My dad when he was a little boy, along with his parents, was actually up in the Hellespont area—right in the Miltiades territory—for several of the years that my mom’s dad was an unmarried professional soldier out there.)

And then, a little over 100 years ago, just as the brand-new Cleisthenes Constitution (the one that is coming to an end with my trial and execution you know) was about to go into effect, they all came home, my dad and his parents, and settled near Marble Way, bought the house, opened the business—and we still have them both today. (Previously, you know, old Socrates had spent a lot of time working on the interminable great restoration of Apollo’s Holy Temple at Delphi. You should know of the huge improvement that the Alcmaeonids paid for—for whatever mysteriously disputed motives.) That is how we settled in the deme of Alopece and became a part of the tribe of Antiochus. Or at least that is the story my grandma told me so very many times I could never forget it if I lived 100 lifetimes.

Not that I would have taken her word for it if she just lectured me. My grandma did her best to answer every single question I ever asked her. She loved it when I asked her about the family. She loved it even more when I’d repeat my questions in skeptically different forms, over and over again. That compulsive cross-examination process just happens to be the very kind of dialectic that has made me so unpopular among so many pretentiously educated people. I drive the world crazy by asking questions. I am trying to visualize what the speaker is telling me in the most rational way I am capable of. So I ask questions. Clarification questions mostly.

Pericles when he was being witty liked to refer to me as the Master of the Clarification Line of Questioning. All I am really doing is trying to visualize what I am being told. And once I can visualize what I am being told, I go off in those two areas that always make me most especially unpopular—even temporarily with Crito and my wife both. Once I understand what I am being told, I have to understand the next two questions: Why? and also, How? How do you know? Where is the real (facts and logic) proof?

My grandma loved it when I did that kind of stuff. And she loved it not just when I did that kind of stuff about the family and its history. But even when I was two or three years old and I asked her what color is the sky? And she told me it is blue, when those clouds are not in the way. So I asked her why? Why is the sky blue, grandma?

Why is the sky blue, grandma?

I miss my sweet grandma so.

(Socrates gasps for air and then briefly weeps.)

I’m sorry I don’t think I can continue anymore today. Thank you very much I’ll see you all tomorrow.

I would like to be alone for a while.

DAY TWO

[Socrates speaks]: Good morning gentlemen.

[Crito speaks]: It is not necessary for you to do the greeting on the record, Socrates. And by the way, it is anything but a good morning; it is raining as hard as it ever rains in Athens and looks to be able to do so all day long. You are almost fortunate to be locked up in a dungeon carved into a rocky hill without even a view of the sky.

I wish to update you on the status of your memoirs. Yesterday afternoon, as planned, we made two copies each of your previous two political treatises, after which I put all six documents in the same secure place where the two originals had been stored for all these many years. My God, one had been there for twenty-two years

Can you believe it? Twenty-two years!

Starting tomorrow, and each subsequent day, when you have finished dictating, I will need these two men to return to their regular duties. As you know, life goes on even in the business world. I am not even sure which days I will be less certain to accompany the scribes when they come to see you. Of course, if for any reason, you wish me to be present, old friend, I can think of nothing that could possibly be a higher priority in my life than to help you in any manner that you could possibly require, and at any time.

As you requested, one year to the day after your death, I give you my sacred word of honor, I will burn the originals and with the two new copies of those two political treatises attached then distribute one full set each exactly as you have requested. Each set, with both of the two treatise copies attached, will then be personally distributed by me. I will personally and simultaneously hand one of each of the complete sets to both Aristocles and Xenophon (his with special subsequent verbal but confidential instructions). And now let me fall silent—permanently silent if possible.

[Socrates speaks]

I have so very much to tell. It is as if I have been given a great gift. There are things I am now free to reveal that have never been public knowledge before. Some things involve my family which has been entirely a private matter up to now. Some things involve private confidences I shared with publicly known men such as Pericles the Great to cite the supreme example.

And then, there are those public (but withheld from the public all of my life) sincerely believed opinions or judgments that were too socially unacceptable to dare utter. My mom was fearful that someone outside the family would know that my opinion of the Spartan moral character was anything less than superior, as per the conventional wisdom. In point of fact, sometimes these socially incorrect judgments can actually get you murdered in the real world. Does the name Ephialtes sound familiar to anyone? (Or to cite a much more recent example: does the name Hyperbolus strike a familiar note?)

Well I have quite a lot of these (however socially incorrect) judgments to finally record in my memoirs. It will then be clearly written down what I truly believed. It will even be recorded what I truly believed and was too cautious to publicly express until after I was dead. Bullshit stories about me will be refuted in published material that any curious person can read for himself, if he sincerely cares to know the truth. Even illiterates can ask a trustworthy friend to read to them.

And, by the way, I have an awful lot more of these socially incorrect judgments about true history as well, as best I understand true history, rightly or wrongly. And I have a good deal more to say about the moral character of publicly known people. The fear factor disincentive against speaking truthfully as best you understand the truth, rightly or wrongly, certainly does disappear with death. Once you’re dead, the threat of assassination doesn’t work so well—at least not in terms of true censorship.

That means the Spartans cannot touch me. Not by means of any agent or mercenary or even fellow-traveling (Athenian citizen) volunteer. Not even by means of their entire hoplite army.

I’m seventy years old and it took me over half my life to really learn about the Spartans. It is so socially incorrect to speak truthfully and knowledgeably about the Spartans that though I composed a modest little treatise about Spartan hypocrisy in the last two years of the so-called Archidamian War it has been kept secret from the world. My mom died a little more peacefully, being pleased with that treatise, twenty-two years ago, barely one week after I finally completed the second and final draft. And that was just weeks before the treaty—the Peace of Nicias—was supposed to finally end the fucking war—pardon my Thracian.

Before she died, my mom made both Crito and me together, literally swear an oath to never allow that treatise to be seen by the public until I was dead for one full year.

By the way, I call it Spartan hypocrisy because almost everything of true significance the world sees and believes and even more importantly says and hears in public about Sparta is as much an act as what is performed on the Dionysian stage when Aristophanes writes the roles of all the speakers. And I mean all of the speakers. Every single one! No one who knows (or even suspects) dares speak the truth, the ugly real world truth, about Sparta. And my Spartan treatise was completed seventeen years before Lysander proved to that rational portion of the world where human intelligence still functions that I was being much too kind and understated in my criticism of Spartan moral character in the generality as well as in the individual!

Of course, it is extremely difficult to acquire real-world knowledge about the most secretive closed society (or police state) the world has ever known. Unlike here in open society Athens where foreigners can come and go pretty freely, no one may even enter Spartan territory without official Spartans accompanying them, controlling them, and quite often of course, lying to them. Spartans are great liars! With many exceptions of course since Spartans of truly good character do exist. However, taking the publicly expressed word of honor, the publicly sworn oath, of any Spartan official is not a wise choice. And those special Spartans of truly good character have no means of ever being free of Spartan ideological control short of becoming a Persian functionary. (Spartan King Demaratus was not the only such example in real history.)

Well anyway, my mom warned me about the Spartans all my life with her. (When she died my mom was seventy-two and I was still forty-eight.) It may have taken her a while to get started but she never stopped warning me about the Spartans. She said they were a group of bullies and liars who couldn’t even trust each other. And neither my grandma nor anyone else in the family ever contradicted her. Not even my brother who was nine years older than I. And may God bless his truly gentle and immortal soul too.

By the way, to go back to the assassination of Hyperbolus, which occurred twelve or even thirteen years ago, I’m not that positive who had him assassinated. It occurred in Samos during that crazy revolutionary year. There was no reason for the Spartans to liquidate him. Of course he was an inconvenience to the Great Alcibiades, who was both quite a successful bully and indisputably the greatest liar in the history of modern Athens! Or should I say postmodern Athens. Since the last twenty to thirty years in Athens has been so different from the once modern Athens I was born and raised in and came through middle-age into old age in.

A good way to begin today’s Socratic lecture is this: since I am here in this prison awaiting a legal execution it occurs to me I need to speak quite a lot about the laws of Athens, about the Constitution of Athens, about the courts of Athens, and most especially about the lawyers of Athens

[Editor’s Note: the following eleven paragraphs drone on pedantically because one (or more) of the three topics that motivate Socrates to uncharacteristic fulminations has been breached. Those three topics are (1) the corruption of Athenian higher education, (2) the corruption of Athenian morals and (3) the corruption of Athenian politics.]

You cannot speak about lawyers without first speaking a bit about higher education. If I really were (exactly as I have so often for several decades now been misrepresented as being) a contemporary high-class (scientific-knowledge type) educator of the so-called young, or a so-called Sophist (pretending to be the equal of the truly great wise men of the past like Protagoras or Gorgias or Anaxagoras before even them), in other words, if I were a recognized professional-class teacher of wisdom (which is to say, in the real world, a pretentious educator of our future leading lawyers and politicians and, of course, yet more teachers) I would probably prattle on at this point about some future, far off, hypothetical (and, of course, unchallengeably perfect) untried, untested theoretical Constitution and legal system (if only the ignorant world would follow my incontrovertibly wise teachings). I could not possibly lecture about what is the legal system without impressing upon you a progressively superior replacement for what is the actual legal system. They, the politically active (especially the socially prominent among the politically active) Sophists, are all so taken with themselves these days it is enough to make a decent person want to puke! They always have a better way of doing things. And they are always wrong.

[It is quite an irony that I am to be executed as the personified symbol of professional teachers of (fraudulent) persuasion to the student class all because my decades of publicly, and openly, rationally, cross-examining the lies of sophistry failed to reverse or even curtail the ever-growing trend of more and more and more educated professional class lying about politics and poetry (which also means politics or religion or both). Nowadays professional-class lying has expanded from the class of lawyers to quite a few other areas of educated and professionalized Athenian life. Athens once had Anaxagoras on a full-time basis, and the itinerant Protagoras on a part-time basis, dominating the small prestigious version of the ever-growing higher education business—back until the last five or so years before the Great War began. By then, both Anaxagoras and Protagoras had been long gone from Athens. It was just a few years later, two or three years after Pericles had died, that it finally became apparent that Athenian higher education was now prestigiously dominated by both Hippias and Prodicus. (Prodicus was the preeminent of many Sophists of the rich boy who grew up to become Theramenes. And where you again find a prominent man named Hippias, this time the prestigious Sophist, there you again find another coercive exploiter of many beguiled Athenian citizens! Do you think the association of the name Hippias with evil is just another of life’s coincidences?) The goal of higher education in Athens went from knowledge of nature and moral quality and integrity to creating and enhancing successful careers and fulfilling lives. Why am I the only Athenian who seems to notice a coterminous association with the changing state of Athenian morals?]

But, getting back to the category of educator of the students of higher education category, it is important to take note that if I truly were a high-class so-called Sophist, no matter how much idealistic bullshit my lectures droned on about, mostly I would have to be teaching practical rhetoric—if only by example. Rhetoric: as in the skills of how to use our ever more sophisticated language. Or, more precisely, rhetoric: as in how to use our language to persuade others with oratory or more personalized communication. Whether they are consciously aware of the fact or not, that is precisely what the well-capitalized ambitious so-called students are trying to learn in so-called professional-class higher education. It is the real-world higher education presently acquirable by those who being financially able to pay extra will get for their family’s money and has been exclusively so for several decades now. Perhaps with a handful of exceptions that is the way it has always been. That goes back long before the Great War began over thirty years ago.

Since postmodern higher education is a much larger field than a small number of highly prestigious Sophists, if I were merely a regular (rather than prestigious and therefore much lower-cost) so-called teacher, I would (just as the preponderance of them do) try to advance my career to enter the better paying, more prestigious high-class world of the prestigious Sophist by means of acquiring the most students and therefore the most money, prestige or whatever else I valued in this material world. I might also spend a little time bullshitting of idealized worlds to come, but, mostly, I too would have to teach practical persuasive rhetoric, and not a great deal differently than the more prestigious Sophists actually do—in my less prestigious case by means of more honestly and efficiently teaching a few of the regular set of non-rational emotional manipulations and verbal tricks of sophisticated, and therefore socially acceptable, professional class deceit. What I and all the other educators, whether prestigious Sophists, or regular Sophists, would be teaching, that which we call rhetoric, is fundamentally the technical means to persuade others with fancy language. Others, namely: the naïve, the gullible, the weak-willed and the stupid.

[A lot of it is a very unconscious process because you are learning how to speak in the sophisticated language of the educated class no matter how empty it is. At its most refined level of development it usually involves many often metaphorical references to poetry as well as to politics and government. That is why it is the art of persuasion.]

Human nature is eternally persuadable by non-rational rhetoric. All of human nature is! Don’t kid yourself whoever you are, there are times you and every other human being make judgments or decisions that are naïve and there are times you make such judgments or decisions when you are being gullible. If you are that special human being who has never known fear when making a judgment (or choice or decision), then maybe you have never made a weak-willed judgment. But if that is what you sincerely believe, then you belong in category four: because though you really are sincere you also really are (however innocently so) stupid.

I have spent much of my adult life asking clarifying questions of these pretentious assholes, pardon my Thracian, and also of their (even more pretentious at times) students (or assholes-in-training, so to speak). And believe me: both the high-class so-called Sophists and the regular rhetorician Sophists are not much different from each other. They both teach pretty much the same bullshit. And they both pretend to be so much smarter than your average common (usually commercially-oriented citizen). Most people work for a living so commercially-oriented is part of being a so-called common citizen in our world.

When it comes to speculative ideals involving human nature, there is no perfect world. There can never be a perfect world. Not as long as human beings have free-will. Not as long as nature gives humans, every single one, smart or stupid, a lot of latitude to make choices. And that’s called free-will. And no amount of fancy talk from some pretentious, overeducated bullshitting professional wise man can ever make it go away. Not in the real world