19th November 2011

The French justified Greece’s entry into the EU by claiming that they ‘could not say no to the country of Plato’. You bet they couldn’t.

In the Republic, Plato outlined his utopia. This was not a practical construct, but a vision of an imaginary, ideal community whose purpose was to act as a model for how things might be. He did this by sketching a picture of the educational and moral underpinning that went into making a good human and extrapolating from that an institutional programme that would create the good state.

The consequence was twofold. First, Plato had to show up the deficiencies of existing constitutions, to demonstrate there was no future in them. Democracy in particular, the system under which Plato lived in Athens, came in for special contempt. The EU could not agree more.

Second, Plato assumed it was worth any price to impose his vision of the perfect state, because it represented the best that humans on earth could ever achieve. But the noble vision of ‘goodness’ at its heart was ultimately tyrannical, because it denied freedom. Moral purity was to be imposed by Plato’s indoctrinated Guardians.

The EU too had a noble political vision — Europe at peace — but put economic progress at its heart. The result was the imposition by indoctrinated EU Guardians of a regulatory/financial tyranny invented by economists and controlling all the main economic levers. Such a system, as many pointed out at the time, could not work, as we are now discovering to our multi-trillion euro cost. Thanks a lot.

Yet, locked in its own make-believe shadow-world, the EU still clings to its own hype and is currently trying to solve the economic catastrophe of its own making by putting in power in countries that it has destroyed the very people who created that catastrophe in the first place — EU economists! Plato would be laughing his himation off. His famous allegory of men locked into the shadow-world of an underground cave, dogmatically refusing to open their eyes to the real world above, could not have been more exquisitely realised.