Old, Dead, White Men

Plato determined philosophers should be kings.  This was after he came up with the cavemen story, in which in a world where men are forced to watch shadows created by a fire, one man breaks free.  Plato believes that that man should rule the world, but none of the others do.

Plato is full of shit.  So is Rousseau who, if he spent one minute complaining to a sensible person, would have been told that his whole 'Social Contract' is his way of getting out of work that he doesn't want to do.  Hobbes's 'Social Contract' is really just an expression of his fear.  These old men should have spent heart-to-heart time with themselves and asked themselves what's really bothering them.

Yet they are a part of today's liberal arts cannon.  Granted they did live in powerful societies, who gave birth to today's modern government; however, this is a time where if we did nothing but learn, we might learn a fraction of the information out there.  We do not have the time to become polymaths who deduce the idea of the philosopher king by starting with a universe of ideals and ending with modern men.  Yet we reserve a valuable amount of time for reading this stuff.  Pity the poor person who spends ten years immersed in it until they realize that they spent ten years learning something that added nothing to their lives (I've met these people).

Unlike Plato, I understand the bias that not knowing something can do to a person's impression or understanding.  A child literally does not understand death.  The development of child-murderers are frightening, because these children ruin their lives in ways that they can't begin to comprehend.  Our brain knows only things that it can see through our own senses.  If nothing else through these two facts, I can deduce that there's quite a lot I don't understand, and what I don't know affects my life in ways that I can't understand.

Therefore, if we don't know what we don't how, I've thought about how we should allocate time to learning different subjects.  I've come to believe that people have inner questions, and that they should be allowed the time, space, and guidance to seek the answers.  Too often, in our education system, we're forced to listen to lessons about which we as a society even no longer care, instead of being taught to answer the questions around which we form our lives.  Perhaps if Plato, Rousseau, and Hobbes had education systems that taught them to distinguish rationalization from reason, they would have published more worthwhile works.  Perhaps if we learn how to target and refine questions and then find the answer, we'd have a healthier dialogue.