 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Powell. And I'm Matthew Feeney. And today we welcome back Brian Wilson. He's co-founder of Combat and Classics, a program out of St. John's that organizes free online seminars on classic texts for active duty reserve and veteran U.S. military. He also leads discussions for the partially examined live podcast, Non-School Program. Hi, guys. Thanks for having me, Matt. Last time we had you on, we did Plato's Apology, Socrates' defense before the people of Athens when they had him on trial for impiety and corrupting the youth. And today we are doing the next dialogue in that sequence, which is the credo. So when we start having you tell us what's the context for this particular discussion. Yeah. So the credo, and if you haven't listened to the first one, spoilers ahead. Socrates is found guilty. So now he's in prison. But the issue at hand that he's wrestling here in the credo is he can get out, right? That's the pitch. And the subtext is that he, that the government of Athens, probably not a big deal because there was the talk of him being exiled as an option prior. So he is just going to talk with credo about, you know, is it, would it be right for me to ignore the verdict? Would it be right for me to leave? And so, you know, jumping right in, it's, there's, you know, it's, it's like we were talking about before we went live, it's, there's, there's a much more hit you over the head libertarian theme on this one a little bit. But I also think there's a lot of ambiguity that you can chew on in this one. And like a lot of Socratic dialogues, and I always kind of harken back to the Republic with this is, you know, is, is Socrates really laying out a coach and argument here? Is he really? And I think this is something for the listeners to think through as we talk about this and then hopefully you're kind of spurred on to read it. And so whether you're just listening or whether you're reading, it's, you know, ask yourself in very specific terms and very like, okay, I need to define my terms is Socrates being consistent. So I just, I wanted to start off with a line in 46C where him and credo are already kind of in the mix and talking about these different options. And Socrates says, I value and respect the same principles as before. And if we have no better arguments to bring up at this moment, be sure that I shall not agree with you, not even if the power of the majority were to frighten us with more bogies as if we were children with threats of incarcerations and executions and confiscation of property. So like other St. John's seminars, you know, we start off with an opening question and then we just try to help each other learn. So Socrates is laying out this excuse to credo about why he's not going to break out of the jail. And he brings up this concept of the majority, but the question for you all is how is that different than what got him here in jail in the first place? Yeah, I think it's a very interesting question because in the previous episode we discussed the trial and an argument could be made that he was, well, this is what happened that there was a big jury that found him guilty and that's in some sense a majority rule. So on the one hand, he seems to have this reverence or respect for the state but also to be skeptical of majority rule, which I think is a very interesting two set of beliefs to hold at once. It's interesting that when he starts presenting the arguments for why he shouldn't run away. So credo has shown up and said, look, basically we can bribe people to get you out. It's not going to cost that much. People are kind of expecting us to do it. It'll be easy. And Socrates says, no, when he starts offering these arguments and credo has said, yeah, like, look, people are, he's going to hurt my reputation if I don't bust you out of here because people are expecting it. And Socrates said, why the hell should you care about what the majority thinks of you? You should only care about the people who are right. But when he starts giving the reasons why he needs to stay, he slides into speaking in the voice of the state. He says, I'm speaking. I can imagine the, I think he says, the laws and constitution of Athens saying. And then it shifts into it's now personified. It's no longer, so like the trial represented the will of the majority, which he seems to be very much opposed to, but when he's presenting the arguments for why he ought to obey the will of the majority, suddenly it's no longer the will of the majority, but this like personified state. I think it's, see, I take it a little more ambiguous ambiguity there than the state, right? So I'm trying to be very specific. Maybe it says the state in your translation, but in my translation it just says the laws. Right. It says the laws and constitution. So, and I, where does it say the constitution? Help me out on that one. I'm trying to find it. It's in my translation. Because you know, I'm reading this as the law. And I feel like with the law, you know, you get into a fuzzier place than the state, right? If he had just said the state, hmm, you know, he's not going to, he's not going to sell me as much, but if he's talking about the law, and especially like he said in the apology with his daimon, right? This daimon, this kind of God that he follows is the God of reason. And he doesn't mention the daimon, right? He doesn't mention reason. He doesn't mention virtue, right? He just mentions the laws and what the laws are saying. And it's fascinating to me that he has to have this conversation with himself, right? That he can't even use credo as his interlocutor, which is what he does in a lot of situations. So maybe credo's really dumb. That's an option, right? Or he's trying to give voice to this alternative and either try to talk himself into or out of it, or talking credo into or out of it. But, you know, by his actions, he stays. So it's just very confusing to me where he says this, you know, why should I respect the majority and the earlier part is very much about, you know, you need to find the person that understands good opinion, that has a good opinion to do good, and you follow that. Like, just like a trainer, you follow the trainer that knows what he's talking about. You do that and ignore the majority. And yet, here we are, where he's in jail because the majority of the jury put him there. And then he's following, or at least arguing with himself via this disembodied thing, the laws. So here I found the... So this is... My edition only says it's somewhere between 48e and 50a. But it says, look at it this way. Suppose that while we were preparing to run away from here, the laws and constitution of Athens were to come and confront us and ask this question. Now, Socrates, what are you proposing to do? Then later says... So again, the laws and constitution are speaking and say, so far as you have the power to destroy us the laws and the whole state as well. But this argument he's having with himself, it is true he kind of cuts credo out of the whole thing, but there's this weird admission at the end where... So almost all of the arguments he makes, which we'll go through, are simply him speaking in this imagined voice. Like, it's like he's not giving his own views or even asking the kinds of questions that aren't like, these aren't really my reviews. I'm just asking that's so typical of Socrates, because he said it's in... All of his speeches in quotes as the laws and constitution of Athens. But at the end he says, that my dear friend credo, I do assure you is what I seem to hear them saying, just as a mystic seems to hear the strains of music, and the sound of their arguments ring so loudly in my head that I cannot hear the other side. It's like this isn't even a dialogue. It's just... It's like a monologue of the voice in his head and he's not willing to even entertain or listen to counter-arguments. Yeah, and 51C, the translation I have at least says, the laws might say... The laws might say... And then he goes on to talk about the sort of things that the laws provide and that Socrates should probably be thankful for. And he mentioned things like educating him and raising him. And it's a fascinating point, I think, because the context of this is so, I think, intuitively frightening. He's facing certain death and making an argument that to Libertarians like us is rather disturbing, saying that there's some sort of obligation to the entity that raised you, that educated you. And it's an argument you hear, I think, quite often actually outside of seminar rooms when discussing texts like this, that the laws are worth respecting or the state is worth respecting because without it, what would you be? You're here because of it. I think it's very tricky, right? Because if the laws are just, then you must do just by them, right? And that's kind of the layer beneath this idea of laws. Socrates says, he's like, I can't do injustice, right? Even if I have been unjustly tried, right? I can't do that. But he doesn't address the question if the laws are just or not, right? And I feel like this disembodied laws conversation is important to the dialogue. He's not presenting this to Credo. He's not saying, Credo, don't you believe that the laws nurtured you and the laws raised you and gave you this ability? He's not making that argument to Credo. He's arguing with the laws in his own head and I just think sometimes, I take, there's a part in the Book Four of the Republic where they're talking about. I think I brought this up in the last pod where Glaucon in the formation of their ideal state asks him, okay, well, you've provided for all the basic necessities without a state, but don't you want a footstool? And Socrates is like, oh, you want a footstool now? Okay, well, now we need gold people and silver people and bronze people and guardians and all this stuff. The rest of the Republic is kind of a satire or a joke as, you know, like this is what you need to provide this, which is also not true, but it's, you know, I feel like it's a similar, you know, conception of, you know, if the laws are just, then I cannot do injustice by them. I can't just leave, I can't use bribery, but the system is set up that way. You know, he's within this system. He's within Athenian justice and there's some part of Athenian, and the law, there's some part of Athenian culture that is saying to Socrates, it's okay. Like you can just, you know, put a bribe in, you can go to Thessaly, you can get out of here, and it's no big deal. But he has this conception of this dialogue with the laws that is forcing him to stay, and I don't understand it, you know? So he doesn't seem to, he seems to on the one hand take a procedural view of justice. Like the law is structured to do these certain things and the law has spoken because we had a trial and I was condemned, I was found guilty, so it would be violating the law irregardless of its content, right? Well, you can look at this in two ways, right? I think, maybe this is where you were going, like, you know, what came to my mind a lot of times is, you know, a letter from Birmingham Jail, right? So you have this idea of, you know, that peace and love is what drives mankind's relationships with one another and that if you oppress one, you oppress the many. And there's this, you know, beautiful eloquence in that and something that stirs your conscience and puts right in your face this idea of just versus unjust laws. And also this conception of sacrifice, it's like, if you want me to sit here, I'll sit here. That's fine, but you can't stop where this is going. Whereas with Socrates, why not make a message like that? Why not have a message of rebellion, of still knowledge and justice and peace but rebellion at the same time. And I feel like that's missing from this and how to have, how do you have a fully logical, a fully reasonable account of your actions without an understanding of the nature of rebellion, of the nature of saying, no, this is not right. And I feel like there's something in there, and this is why I hang out with smart guys like you to help me understand this better, is there's something in there that's missing, and I feel like it's something around this dialogue with himself vis-a-vis the laws. Well, he does mention, again, when he's speaking for the law, he has them say, like, look, you had an opportunity to persuade us. Like, it feels like that notion of saying no and that notion of rebellion comes in under the idea of persuasion. That if you disagree, the thing to do is not to disobey because he thinks that disobeying destroys the law, which then destroys the state. Or to run off, but to make the attempts to persuade, which is what he arguably did, although we can question how good of a job he did or if he was even intentionally, like, if he was trying to persuade. But he made that attempt and failed. But the thing that I was going to say is that he's... So he's got this, he says, look, it's good because there's this procedure. The laws give us this procedure and I was found guilty, but it seems like the way that Credo is presenting the, come on, look, we can get you out and it'll be easy. And the expectation is that you will is that part of this procedure is then, and if you're found guilty, then we can buy off the guards and you can run. Like, this is the expectation and so it's not clear why the finding guilty is part of this grander law, you know, that the jury finds him this way, but the getting out of jail which is expected is not. Yeah, I think that's a pretty good take on it. I do think there's a good chance here that Socrates is worried about the reputation here. And of course the dialogue starts with Credo saying, well, you know, this will make me look bad and Socrates doesn't seem to care. And I do wonder if they had just gone off to Thessaly what Socrates' reputation might have been. But it's hard for me to get into the mindset of Socrates given what you said a little earlier which was that he might just treat this as a rhetorical battle lost that he stood in front of hundreds of people and tried to make a case and failed and he's willing to suffer the ultimate consequence of that. And like we discussed in the last episode, he knew that he was, you know, guilty and didn't exactly treat the jury with much respect with the first verdict. But again, how much of this is rhetorical flourish? I'm not sure. I think there's a lot in here as far as, you know, things that are maybe pointed at us as libertarians, right? And, you know, in the line that Matthew was just mentioning at the end of 52 when he's quoting the laws and he's saying the laws would say, surely they might say you're breaking the commitments and agreements that you made with us without compulsion or deceit and under no pressure of time for deliberation you've had 70 years during which you could have gone away if you did not like us and if you thought our agreements unjust, you did not choose to go to Sparta or to Crete which you are always saying are well-governed nor to any other city, Greek or foreign. And so there's, you know, that critique of us where we're like, why are we spending so much on entitlements and, you know, they're like, well, if you don't like it, it's not all right. And yet we don't. So, you know, this makes me kind of wrestle with that conception of, you know, is there some other innate piece of this that, you know, man and the place he is born and raised are tied together on some level that's beyond, you know, just this conception of justice or just this conception of the laws. It's a very worrying conception of consent, if you ask me. And it is, as you pointed out, I'm sure everyone at this table has heard the argument before, well, you could move to Canada or you could move to Australia or something like that, which ties into two thoughts that always come to my mind when this happens. Number one, values are subjective and you might be annoyed about some things the American government does, but you don't hate them enough that you would leave. But secondly, it's the moral burden seems the wrong way around in a strange way. It's up to me to exit this institution that I didn't have a choice in specifically where I was born. And I think, you know, I've discussed this with Aaron. I'm off-mic before and I know he thinks along the similar lines, is that fair? I don't want to put words in your mouth, Aaron. But Aaron is nodding. Yeah, like, so I want to, I mean, as I decide one of the, every, so three times a year because we have three interns, masters, three intern classes come through K to each year and for each one I give a talk about the problem of political obligation and authority and whether we have a duty to obey the law and the text that I assign them is the credo and the reason that I assign it is not just because it's great and everyone should read as much play-doh as you can but because the arguments that Socrates offers so this one that you just brought up, Brian, which is an implicit consent argument are basically the same arguments that people make today for why we have a duty to obey the state and all of the major arguments, the kinds of arguments that get made today really show up in some form in the credo so it's that Alfred Whitehead's quip that all of philosophy is footnotes to play-doh really shows up here with the credo but this is a really troubling thing. I mean, we know that Socrates, Socrates is like the consummate Athenian. He, I mean, he's, he mentions like he's never really left the city. He had some military adventures earlier on but since then he's, he hasn't left the city. He had no desire to leave the city. Athens is what he loves. It's the place he wants to be and so the cost of leaving, of heading off to some other town is enormous for him and these burdens do seem quite high and so that, you know, love it or leave it but the argument that we as libertarians get all the time I think really under appreciates how embedded we are in our culture, our way of life, our society, our friends, our family, that stuff, it discounts that. I mean, this was, Hume has an objection to this argument in his essay, things called on the social contract where he just says like, you know, you say just take off and leave if you don't like it and that this, and that's sticking around as evidence that you have implicitly signed on to this social contract but when you are a poor workman and you, you know, this is the only world you've known, this is the only language you know, like it's not really an option. It has to be a legitimate choice and for Socrates it seems very clear that leaving is not a real choice for him and never really was. Well, I mean, you know, the idea of a, I mean, really it's a quasi-cultural shift, right? Because if he goes to anywhere in Greece they're going to speak the same language, they'll be a bit of a patois but nothing that shocking. There are, you know, government entities that are well-governed and that's laid out as well but it's like, what is keeping in there? And I mean, I don't know if Matthew wants to talk about it. I mean, I don't know exactly where you're from, Matthew. I'm based on your accent, I'm assuming, like somewhere in Alabama. Close. But it's, you know, it's like why stay and why go? And especially if death is your other option. It doesn't make sense to me to appoint. Yeah, although I think some of it might be to make a point that I can't imagine making but Socrates as an ancient Greek probably could which is to put justice as an ideal more important than your own life. At 43B he says, speaking for the, you know, the laws, so be convinced by we who brought you up, Socrates, and do not put children or life or anything else ahead of justice. And I just find that mindset a little boggling myself and it seems not to mean that I don't think justice isn't important but I can't imagine being willing to sit in a prison with an open door with a cup of hemlock and thinking, I'll drink this rather than flee. How does that line factor play though with the idea that, so of course this, you know, you always have to mention that we don't actually know what were Socrates' ideas versus Plato's ideas. And these early dialogues probably represent Socrates more than the later ones say the Republic do which are more Plato's ideas but the Republic is about the nature of justice. But it's a, what we, it's ultimately like it's an individual virtue. Like this entire metaphor that he constructs in the Republic of the virtuous city is just to get at what does it mean for justice in the individual. And so if that's true and justice is a virtue then of people instead of, say, institutions then it would seem that this allegiance to justice that he has where we can't place anything else above it would seem to leave open or necessitate the questioning of okay great then but if justice is something about me then if the jury says X but X is not just then justice says ignore the jury. Yeah, I mean the strangest thing about this given our perspective is that he seems guilty of something that we might describe as a thought crime or just thinking the wrong things and influencing the youth. And people in the world today who sit in prison cells because they've said the wrong things I hope would intuitively think well the state is being unjust. I'm not the, you know, that's the problem. The problem here isn't that I just lost an argument in a courtroom. The problem is that the law is bad and that's the real injustice and it doesn't seem to occur to Socrates that's a point worth seriously considering. I mean although he does mention of course the importance of majorities. And it's so troubling, right? Well, it's troubling in that, you know, there are so many people, you know, kind of icons of philosophy of religion or whatever that are willing to martyr themselves for an ideal of justice that transcends the state to one degree or another, right? And it's mostly death and rebellion to the state, right? It's people that are going to stand up to the state's power, the state's apparatus no matter what, you know, form it might take. I mean whether it's, you know, Mohamed Bozaday who's credited with starting the Arab Spring that just lit himself on fire because of the amount of permitting that was required. You know, he just wanted to open a little corner food shop and, you know, the government wouldn't let him, right? So we somehow empathize with that and understand it to a degree in this idea of rebellion, this idea that, you know, sometimes rebellion causes or requires death. But this is, it's a rebellion, but it isn't, you know? And it's something that's just so hard for me to wrap myself around. And it's somebody that, you know, he was the gadfly, right? He was questioning everything and the state doesn't like it. And we talked about in the apology how he specifically said, he's like, I'm going out of my way and not talk about politics because I know you guys are going to kill me if I do that, right? And the state gets its way. Like, he doesn't talk about politics. And now he's here kind of saying, taking this idea of the laws and laying it out very explicitly and maybe agreeing with it and accepting death rather than saying, no, this is wrong. No, there is a sense of justice outside of this. Well, and we discussed this in the last episode, but when discussing the possibility of death, he seems to have a different conception of it than we might have. He says on the one hand, well, the worst that happens is I just go to sleep. But think about this, I could also spend the rest of my time hanging out with some really smart guys and just talking philosophy all day. And I suppose his fear of death, and we have to remember he's an old man and, you know, traveling all the way to Thessaly as an exile is not an insignificant thing. So it might just be, you know, don't romance it too much, but that the course of action he takes makes sense given the context and what he actually thinks about death. I feel like that's another giant contradiction that, at least in my mind, that I don't buy the I'm old, it's not a big deal, you know? Like, I've seen this in, like, the Marine Corps, right? When you have 24, 25-year-old guys and they're in a rock and they can stare death in the face and, like, they're okay, you know? They know what they're in for and they know that that's a possible result of their actions, of their being there. But I also, you know, I have a lot of older folks in their 60s and 70s that, you know, come to the seminars and that I talk to significantly and their grip on life is tight. You know, I don't, you know, I hear, you know, things that jive with death before dishonor from, you know, folks in their late teens and 20s. I don't hear, you know, from 72-year-olds that I have conversations with, like, nah, it's not a big deal, you know? I don't, it's, you know, and I'm sure there are people out there that might think that, but it's tricky for me to wrap my head around that. So this is probably not the case, but part of me wants to think, like, okay, so he knows he's not long for this world, regardless, because he's pretty old and means pretty old by our standards and so he's quite old by the ancient world standards. And if the people of Athens, so Socrates is certainly not a fan of democracy, he loves Athens, but he does not like democracy, but the people of Athens have made this dumb decision to kill him. He's, he has like, he's like, okay, well, if you've made this dumb decision to prosecute me and so now I'm going to show you, I'm going to make you convict me, like do something even dumber and then you're going to do something even dumber by putting me to death and now you're all sitting around, like, thinking, hey, he can get out of this, hey, he can get out of this, you know, it'll be easy and we're expecting it, but I'm going to show you, like, I'm going to be a gadfly to the end by making you actually carry this out. Yeah. I think that really does come through when, during the trial, given the chance to, after being found guilty, he's given the chance of proposing some kind of punishment and he just to be annoying, knowing that this would have just proposed as a pension. Like, he must have known, I think. But getting back to this text, I think, I'd love to hear what both of you think about the concept, and we've discussed it, I think, on a little layer of it, the concept of duty and where it comes from and why the allegiance to the laws is a good thing, because I think that discussion is kind of worth having. It seems very important to Socrates, especially. Yeah. I mean, you're talking about 51-D, right? We have given you birth, nurtured you, educated you. We have given you and all other citizens a share of all the good things we could. Do you buy that? Well, not particularly. You know, it gets worse when they say, I think this is the right passage, and that whether it is to be beaten or imprisoned or to be wounded or killed, if she, so the laws or the homeland, leads you into war, you must do it. Like, this sort of, yeah, I'm not sure I'm buying much of this, but that shouldn't be too surprising, I suppose. Right, but it's very troubling because these are all things that through his actions he follows through on. And so there's another huge curveball for me, is that he went to war, right? Multiple times, he was called to war and he went, right? The laws or the state call him to die, and he does that. And so, I mean, I love your narrative, Aaron, of, you know, he's just being a gadfly to the end. That gives me some hope, you know, some like little happy thread to hold on to, but I don't know if it's true. I can't, like, say, no, it's very specific. He says right here, I think that there's contradiction in what he says. You know, when he talks about it at the end of about going to Thessaly, you know, at the end of 53 at 53, and he's basically saying there, he's like, people will think bad of you. He just said he doesn't care. Like, he just said this entire time that he doesn't care what the majority thinks. You know, he only cares what is right. And so he's laying out this long argument, this whole last, you know, pages about what will people think of you if you go to this other place? Like, how will they, you know, view you and what you've done, and it's, well, why do you care? What the majority thinks, right? So wrapping my head around what I see as contradictions and what I see as logical fallacies, but looking at his actions, it's what he follows through on. And it's tough. It's tough for me to wrap my head around. Yeah, and I think 53e also includes a passage that I quite liked when he says, let me find this. Oh, yeah. Will no one say that an old man who probably only has a short time left in his life was so greedy in his desire to live that he dared to violate the greatest laws? Perhaps not if you do not annoy anyone. And so... What's the chances of Socrates being annoying? Right, well, exactly, yeah. So a lot of this duty to obey the state argument and it takes, I mean, as he presents it and he makes the same argument several times, he repeats himself a fair amount when he's speaking as the lords, but a lot of it breaks down into two main categories, I think, three, possibly. So there's one that looks like a kind of natural duty argument, which is, like, you recognize that you have a duty to obey your father and that that's just part of who you are and what it means to have a father and be a son. The state is like a... and the laws are a superfather, and so therefore, like, if it applied a little bit there, boy, does it apply a lot here, then there's this implicit consent argument about you could have left at any time or you could have told us you didn't like this stuff. Well, of course, that's what he did at his trial, but you didn't, so therefore you have implicitly signed on to obey and then the third seems to be this gratitude account, which is the, like, we gave you life, we educated you, we provided you with all this awesome stuff and this is how you repay us. And all of these are the same arguments that we hear today all the time with the love it or leave it or, you know, these institutions are awesome, the kind of, like, founding fathers are awesome theory of government, or the, like, you didn't build that, you know, you use the public schools and now you have to repay it. And it seems like the mistake and it seems like a contradiction what he's saying too is this confusion of, like, yes, he probably does have duties to this society that helped him out and played a key role in raising him. Yes, he stuck around in this society and yes, it gave him things. It provided and it provided him with an education and enabled him to provide, I mean, ultimately, all of humanity with an education. But those are things about Athens, right? Those aren't necessarily things about this particular government that happens to be the one that set down this law about impiety and corrupting the youth and convened this trial, you know, and we know that he's rebelled before. He refused the, it was a critis and the tyrants when they gave him an order to participate in killing someone. Like, he refused to do that on grounds of justice. So he seems to be just flat out confusing, like, all of his arguments are about why he should respect the people of Athens and feel good about the society that he's in, but not necessarily arguments about why the proper way to discharge those duties or the proper way to demonstrate gratitude or the proper way to show this consent to obey the laws versus helping out his society in some way, which is the argument libertarians make all the time. Like, great, yes, I was educated and gained lots of things, so now let me start a business that will give lots of people jobs or invent something that will radically change everyone's life. I'd rather not just give that money so that we can use it to drop bombs on people. I love that you raised the issue of duties and particularly as a release to parents because that's an issue that Credo raises explicitly in the dialogue saying, I think you are betraying your sons whom you could raise and educate by going away and abandoning them and as far as you are concerned, they can experience whatever happens to come their way when it's likely that as orphans they'll get the usual treatment of orphans. One should either not have children or endure the hardship of raising and educating them, but it looks to me as though you are taking the laziest path and it's interesting that Credo seems to think this will be a tug, like appealing to Socrates, like okay, you can't argue against that duty, like this looks bad and Socrates does saying, at present I am not going to abandon the arguments I previously made and that really is an astonishing part of the dialogue and Credo uses the cliche, think of the kids and it's still not persuasive. Yeah, it's tricky. I was thinking as you were talking, Aaron, just about like our kind of doctrinal foundation for libertarianism, we talked about this a little bit and the apology is you usually start somewhere, right? You start from some idea of like I own me or something like the non-aggression principle and I'm just wondering if even though Socrates maybe didn't carry it to its full blossom, right, which we potentially see with him kind of succumbing to some degree mentally and physically to the state, but having a starting point of a libertarian ideal of, I don't know, I'm the least wise man in Athens. And where do you get from a political philosophy based on I don't know or based on I don't know, I can't always make good decisions about what I should be doing, you know, much less what I am going to demand at gunpoint of someone else. And I've been messing around with this, but I did the credo for Partially Examined Life a few weeks ago, did a seminar on that. And you know, that question just kind of popped into my head and I just kind of asked that idea of like, you know, how do you have a system of government that is based on, you know, this, what we would call almost obvious illogic of, you know, this guy's asking too many questions, we got to kill him, right? And then you get to what would Socrates ideal state be like, right? And I mean, it might be this, it might be Athens because he succumbs to what they demand of him, but what if then you could have a conception of the state that is just, I don't know, I don't, I'm not sure about anything, which I think then leads you to some kind of at least least harm principle. It leads you to almost a Hippocratic view of first do no harm. And I think that, you know, thinking through a lot of stuff based on that because it really sent me on kind of a deep dive on, you know, let's look at praxeology, let's look at Austrian economics, let's look at all this stuff through the lens of I don't know, I'm not sure as your starting point. And, you know, you can almost build out, you know, I'm sure a lot of fans, a lot of your listeners are big fans of Euclid and Lobachevsky as far as geometrical systems. So you can almost start what I think is a fairly logical proof where, you know, the parallel lines don't meet, but it's not necessarily 90 degrees. And so instead of starting from this idea of non-aggression or this idea of property, you start from, I don't know, I don't know what's best. And you can have some fun kind of rhetorical games with yourself and it might just be that, it might just be rhetorical games, but you can also, I think the flaws in a lot of political thought and political system around the world come into sharper focus when you stop arguing about, because I've had the property argument in, you know, St. John's seminars where we actually don't, like, ever talk about personal politics, which is hilarious and fun for me, too, because it's like, oh, you guys don't know what I think. They probably do after about 20 minutes because I'm not super subtle. But, you know, starting with this idea of this Socratic ideal of I don't know I think leads you to some really fun places as far as kind of libertarian thought and libertarian ideals. And it forces you to, and we talked a little bit about this at the end of the apology, you know, it forces you to really make things that we think we believe in, like I own me or like, you know, all I owe you is non-aggression. And it forces you to really crystallize those in your mind or it forces you to have a little bit of give in that and then examine it a little more closely. Well, I know that if a regular Free Thoughts host Trevor Burrus was here, he would jump on the opportunity to talk about skepticism, just because I don't know is something I find libertarian saying quite often, especially in this building. But I think more importantly, the second question is when people say they do know whether the follow-up should be how. So in public policy, when people are proposing things that often are encroachments on liberties, it behooves us to ask how do you know what the education system should look like or how we should regulate our food or what substances you should be allowed to put in your body. And that I think is why skepticism is so valuable and why the Socratic discussion, especially on politics specifically, is so important. I think extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and nothing is more extraordinary to me than saying, listen, I know we've never met, but I know what you should do about your life. So maybe four years ago, I published an essay in a book called Why Liberty? edited by Tom Palmer and put out by Students for Liberty and Atlas called The Humble Case for Liberty, which was this argument. So start with the idea that more or less everything I think is true right now, I could be wrong about to one extent or another and then where do you go from there and how do you build a society? And there is the first do no harm part of it and there's the call for humility because I think the one way you could go with that is like, look, we might be wrong. And so you could take the rational ignorance argument that says like, well, the voters don't know anything for often very good reasons. So don't let them decide. Let the people who probably do know, so the technocrats, the experts, decide, which is to some extent the kind of argument that Socrates is making here when he's talking about like, look, you shouldn't care about what the majority thinks. Like, if you're worried about health, you talk to the doctor. You don't listen. You don't let the people decide. And if you do, you're going to end up unhealthy. But I think the counter to that, because that can lead to really horrific outcomes as we've seen, I mean, the 20th century is right with that sort of stuff, is that the experts often lack that humility as well. And so it's funny that Socrates makes this argument because by our standards, those doctors that he thinks are the ones you ought to listen to were often pretty nuts. I mean, that medicine was, let's just say, rather primitive at his time. And so the very fact that this is a 2,000-year-old document like shows that that argument doesn't work quite as well or at least counsels us to have that level of humility. But I do think there is a strong libertarian case to be made from that starting point of, I'm not certain, you're not certain that what that means is that even when we try to act correctly, we may do harm because we just don't have enough information. And so at the very least, don't institutionalize it at gunpoint because what that means is that if the more power you give to the potential errors, like the state decides we should all follow the food pyramid, and then it turns out like, oh no, that was not actually that good of an idea. Well, now you've done a lot of damage to all sorts of people who might have chosen otherwise. So at least you don't have that, you reduce the number of negative externalities from the error because I'm only affecting me and not you and you as well. But yeah, I think you can spin out a pretty good system from just that simple like I could be wrong statement. I hope everybody's clear about the, where you can pick that book up and that this was just a total plug for... We'll put a link to it in the show notes. We gotta move that product, people. Podcast doesn't pay for itself. Yeah, so I liked your narrative, Aaron. I liked this concept of gadfly to the end. And I love the fact that you guys do this for the interns, you know, for every intern class. I think this is a wonderful place to start. There's a great Richard Feynman quote about I would rather have unanswered questions than answers that can't be questioned, right? And this is the tricky part about Play-Doh. And maybe the magic is in economics. Maybe that's why it's such a critical part of libertarian thought, libertarian ideals is because you can show that cause and effect. And this is where Glaucon's Footstool is, that can be the title of your next essay. Go ahead and write that up. Is where things go awry because, you know, the examples that you gave about, you know, the doctor or just the, you know, the education system that was there was, you know, guys like Socrates walking around and getting paid to just kind of walk around with their retinue, with their posse and rhetorize, right? And Socrates didn't like that. He said, you know, these guys are full of it. But it was still a quasi-free market system. And he didn't see a discrepancy there between that and the state. And, yeah, I mean, these economic questions are in there. This thing just goes everywhere, doesn't it? Well, I really enjoy a privilege of working at the Cato Institute. I get to sit sometimes in the back of the classes and talk to these interns. And you can tell by the body language that the first few minutes are rather uncomfortable. And what's fun about this is, I think, and the reason why this is such a valuable dialogue to read if you're interested in political theory is if you do believe that democracy is a good system and that majority's rule and that you ought to obey the laws because you have a duty to the state or you should have gratitude or you have some sort of social contract, well, this is potentially what it will look like on the receiving end if you happen to have the wrong ideas or do the wrong sort of thing. I like that Socrates is the logical anti-libertarian on this point that he's just, I guess, this is what's going to end up happening. And that, of course, I read this dialogue before I was a libertarian, but I enjoy it much more now. Yeah, I mean, it's a wonderfully rich dialogue, as are all of these. I encourage, probably the one following this, Fido, I, we probably will not discuss on an episode of Free Thoughts because it's not on a topic remotely related to what we talk about in the show, but I encourage everyone to read it as well because there is, I mean, just the, these four dialogues in these last days of Socrates as works of literature stand among the best that have ever been produced and Socrates as a character and I challenge anyone not to read the closing pages as Socrates drinks the hemlock and not tear up a bit. But the richness, I think, of the credo in particular is the fact that the arguments that he makes feel very contemporary. I mean, these are the arguments we make today and they're convincing for a lot of people and what's wrong with them is not immediately apparent and you don't get, sometimes, play-doh stuff that the arguments are very weird because you're not an Athenian at the time and so you're not hooked into that culture and so it just seems bizarre, but the credo does not feel that way at all. It feels very contemporary and speaks across the millennia to us and these are arguments well worth wrestling with. Thank you for listening. Free Thoughts is produced by Evan Banks and Mark McDaniel. To learn more, find us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.