The Republic by Plato [Book 9]

Book 9 continues the discussion over tyranny and how it evolves from democracy by taking into account the nature of the individuals living in the circumstances that are not guided by the philosophers but controlled by appetites and unnecessary desires. People enjoying too much liberty become too much licentious and base their lives on amusement and ornaments and are very much influenced by the subordinates of the top people who want them to remain in this way and eventually become worse so that their work is done easily and nobody challenges their authority. I accept this. The children of these people have tendency to become shameless and behave like a drunk man who cannot control his desires and develops too much love for the demands that he has. Socrates considers love as a tyrant as it oppresses every other thing in life and makes you believe that love is everything which it isn't. The man who becomes so much indulged in fulfilling the unjust demands that are created falsely in his mind, eventually ends up in spending all his money and then start stealing from parents and others, plunders, loots, does robberies, false witnessing and become informer and then joins the mercenary armies for money. These armies infatuate people of lower conscience who actually do not understand the concept of a real army and then they select the tyrant among them who, before gaining power, makes association with flatterers, make them feel comfortable, professes every sort of affection and leave them after they have gained from them. This type of behavior is consistent in tyrants and they do not believe in the paybacks to the people who actually have done a lot for them. This kind of person is either master or slave and never enjoys any kind of friendship and hence, becomes worse which is a total opposite of what Socrates preaches to have in aristocracy. Well, I have repeatedly said that royal kings can also become tyrannical directly because people of lower conscience are in every form of society and they are  masses and even if there is a society of people with higher conscious level, they can be brought to lower level without making them go through the process of democracy.

Next point that Socrates is talking about is the condition of soul of the tyrant. A tyrant is most powerful in his government but his is enslaved and is full of trouble and remorse. A tyrant with public life is worse than a tyrant with private life only because a private has to carry only his own misery but a public is burdened with the miseries of the people under his government. His life is surrounded by slaves and his home is a prison from where he can go out only in fear of getting killed by some slave in private. His soul is paralyzed and he cannot master himself which makes him and his people worse day by day.

Then, Socrates talks about the pleasure of three classes of men, namely: lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor and lovers of gain or money. Each of these people considers pleasures of their class to be the best but the truth is known to the lovers of wisdom and not to the crowd of admirers because reasoning is done when a man has knowledge which brings in the philosophers and hence, the lovers of wisdom.

Socrates also talks about the feeling of pleasure and pain in different kind of people. Some people say that they were in pleasure when they were healthy but they didn't know it until they fell ill and vice versa which make them believe that absence of pleasure is pain and absence of pain is pleasure which is not true. For example, the pleasure of smell doesn't turn into pain after its gone. So, its the appearance and not the reality that pleasure is absence of pain and vice versa. Socrates says that the people in lower or middle region cannot understand this concept because they always roam in the same region throughout their life in ignorance with the upper region where pain and pleasure are felt together. Gluttony, sensuality and life like that of cattle who look down always and move stooping earth are the people in lower and middle region and when the lovers of honor and the lovers of gainers among them are guided by philosophers, then they attain the highest form of pleasures naturally.

At last, Socrates gives answer to a point which was raised in one of the earlier books of The Republic that injustice suits the ruler. He says that injustice is a multiform monster which destroys the human in the person holding those monsters in him. If injustice is left undetected and unpunished that it becomes worse and gives birth to tyrant in the long run but if it is detected and punished, then a gentle element is liberated and the soul is perfected in the city of his own personality and becomes humanized so that he can maintain order and regulate his remaining life properly. I think that punishment not necessarily liberates the gentle elements in many criminals for whom guillotine is prepared. Just as Socrates infers from assumptions that a particular ideology is bad because this might happen, then I can also infer that a criminal with a guilt of 300 intentional murders on his head, when given favorable conditions, will come out of jail and will start increasing the count again and so he must be killed instead of getting the perks of process of getting humanized. Maybe Socrates is talking about the liberation of soul which happens after death penalty but I want to ask that of what use a human soul is when you actually do not know whether it is there or not.