How Plato Predicted Trump Nearly 2,500 Years Ago
By: Daniel Nations
Tags: Politics, Election 2020, Philosophy, Trump

Plato was said to have his first frightful vision of Trump while meditating atop Mount Lycabettus

Plato was many things in his life. Philosopher. Teacher. Seer.

Filmmaker.

Oh, you didn’t know Plato was behind such all-time greats such as Gladiator and The Matrix? Sure, his original screenplay didn’t have a great red-pill/blue-pill scene. The Wachowskis added that part in later, but Plato’s Republic lays out the basic plot.

In Plato’s version, Neo was chained to a wall deep inside a cave. The only thing he could see was the flickering shadows cast by the torchlight. Neo had lived his entire life in that cave without seeing another living being, so for him, those shadows were all that existed in the universe. One day Neo — whether by luck or magical powers — was able to escape and make his way up through the cave and outside, finding his universe suddenly expanded into one of fragrant flowers, playful birds singing beautiful melodies and the bright sunshine that was so directly opposite of those flickering shadows.

And then the Wachowskis decided to go with a more gritty “real” world where everyone was essentially a triple-A battery for some machines. That’s Hollywood for you.

But Plato’s most fascinating work was his prediction of Donald Trump’s presidency, which Plato called The Fall of Democracy Into Dictatorship. Catchy title, actually.

Plato’s Republic isn’t just the Allegory of the Cave that became the basis for movies like The Matrix, Inception and (of course) Doctor Strange. Much of it is spent detailing the perfect government and how that government slowly falls apart through generations of social evolution.

Plato believed the perfect form of government was one ruled by… himself! Or people like him. These Philosopher Kings are chosen and educated to be great leaders who are always looking out for the best for the Republic.

Crazy, huh? The crazier part is how much the early Roman empire mimicked this idea. The first emperors weren’t a succession of father and son. Emperors were chosen, often adopted by the current emperor and educated to rule. This practice lasted until Marcus Aurelius decided to abandon the tradition in favor of handing off the rule of Rome to his wholly-not-up-to-the-task son, Commodus.

Sound familiar? That’s basically the plot to Gladiator. Or, at least, Plato’s version. The Republic doesn’t fall immediately into a dictatorship. There are several steps along the way, the first of which is the fall from the Philosopher Kings to a ruling class of soldiers who put honor and conquering above all else. This in turn leads to a bunch of pillaging, lots of riches, and a love of hoarding. Or, basically, what happened to Rome after Aurelius messed everything up.

The funny thing about Gladiator is how it depicts Aurelius as not wanting Commodus to take over for him. Apparently, Aurelius breaking with tradition and wanting his natural born son to take over for him wasn’t a good enough plot for Hollywood, so they went with a fictionalized version. It’s no wonder Plato got out of filmmaking. As Jay famously says in the all-time classic film Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, “I hate how fake Hollywood is.”

Fun Fact: Mark Twain states that the perfect government is a benevolent dictatorship in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, which was obviously plagiarized from The Republic.

Where were we? Oh yes… The Decline of Western Civilization Part III: The Trump Years.

You see, Plato was a smart dude. Like: Really Smart. Smart enough that when he wrote a book detailing how people like him should rule the perfect government, he claimed to just be repeating what Socrates said. Socrates being dead at the time, he tended to make a good scapegoat.

The Republic ruled by Philosopher Kings eventually falls to rule by the military, who being pretty good at their jobs, make the Once-Republic a fairly rich place. People like it. Having a lot of money is pretty good. But you know what’s better? Spending money, which is where Democracy comes into the picture.

But before we delve too much into Democracy and its descent into a chaotic Dictatorship, let’s take a time out and talk about copyright infringement.

We don’t hear as much about piracy these days. The music and movie industries have found a nice solution to the problem in the form of monthly subscriptions, but barely a decade ago, copyright infringement was a widespread scourge that ravaged intellectual property rights across the world. In some war-torn areas of the world, out-of-work writers and musicians could be found wandering the desert looking for scraps of food and droplets of water.

“Please, sir, could you spare a small melody in the key of F Minor. My children are starving…”

Or, perhaps, my memory is making it out to be a little worse than it actually was at the time. But, being a writer who makes money off of this “intellectual property” stuff, I decided a few decades ago to avoid copyright theft. It would simply be too hypocritical to make money off of it and then steal the works of other artists.

But what I found most interesting in the era of digital piracy was just how popular it was to be a pirate. Everyone was doing it. Kids. Grandparents. Certainly, people my age.

“Musicians don’t really get paid for this stuff. They get paid for concerts.”

“I wasn’t going to buy it anyway, so I might as well copy it.”

“It’s not really stealing.”

These were some of the many popular rationalizations. But, for the most part, widespread copyright infringement came down to one very basic idea: people wanted something and there was a way to get it for free.

Which brings me back to Donald Trump and the Fall of Democracy. Plato talks about Democracy as being a generation of soft people who loved to spend money and have “things.” They would spend and spend and spend until, eventually, they ran out of money.

But was that going to stop them? Heck no. Not as long as Visa and Mastercard existed. When they ran out of money, they would borrow. And when they couldn’t borrow… they would steal.

Sound familiar?

Plato’s Fall of the Republic isn’t just about government. It’s about people. It’s about how high ideas such as “give us your huddled masses” could slowly evolve through the generations into “give us more white people with good education because we have enough brown people, thank you very much.”

In The Republic, the leader was a mirror of the people. And when the people had the moral *cough* flexibility *end cough* to rationalize things such as theft, they were a people ripe for a dictator. Because, basically, people want to vote for themselves.

And that’s one of the true tragedies of Donald Trump. He’s a reflection of us. All of us. The left can’t just opt out and say they didn’t vote for him. After all, while 65.8 million people voted for Hillary Clinton (around 3 million more than voted for Trump), about 40 million left-leaning eligible voters sat on their couches and ate potato chips that day.

Donald Trump courted the white supremacist vote by vowing to build a wall to keep brown people out of our country. Donald Trump vowed to keep an entire community of people out of the country based on their religious beliefs. Donald Trump ***made fun of a disabled journalist***.

And 100 million eligible voters (of which about 40% lean left and 20% are independent) couldn’t be bothered to vote.

That’s almost 1/3rd of the people in the United States who looked at this orange fellow spewing hatred in hopes of getting elected the President of the United States and decided… you know what? I have better things to do on Tuesday. Maybe I’ll go out for tacos instead.

Plato didn’t predict Facebook or Twitter. He didn’t lend his film producing talents to the people behind the The Social Dilemma, a documentary on how social media and big tech companies manipulate people. But Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is eerily similar to the confirmation bias that people become stuck within by constantly being fed only the news that confirms their own bias. And Plato did predict how our leaders would reflect our own traits.

After Donald Trump failed to decry white supremacy in the first Biden-Trump debate — instead telling them to “stand by” as if he would soon need them as a well-armed militia — a Republican Facebook friend of mine posted that he was glad the election was in God’s hands. A sentiment that no doubt reflected his feelings that he didn’t like either candidate.

It made me wonder about God’s plan and how, yes, Trump being elected President in 2016 very well could have been a part of God’s plan.

God’s plan to remind us that white supremacy is alive and well in the United States.

God’s plan to teach us that only viewing one side of the news is akin to ripping out one of our eyes.

God’s plan to demonstrate how electing a President based on his ability to nominate a Supreme Court Justice even though he is obviously inadequate to the job of leading a country is a great way to get 200 thousand people killed because of a deadly virus said President is incapable of dealing with.

And, hopefully, God’s plan to have him defeated in 2020 to stand as an example to future generations on just how dangerous partisan politics can become when a population’s moral flexibility allows them to elect a wholly immoral person to the highest office because he is “on their team.”

In the end, the worst thing about Donald Trump is that he is our president. All of ours. He is a reflection of the society we built. A society where left-leaning music lovers don’t want to pay for music because it’s just giving money to evil corporate music labels. A society where right-leaning voters would “never elect that man” and then “well, Supreme Court…” that decision away. A society where a brilliant older woman could be seen as “too severe” or “unemotional” or simply too “unlikeable” to be President and yet a man who brags he can “grab them by their pussies” is perfectly fine to hold our highest office.

As Plato predicted, we are an imperfect people and we elected a highly-imperfect leader. It’s time to do better.