Book Cover Earthcolony

Chapter 10

A cosmological worldview governed by duality and proportionate justice is inevitably reflected in social relations between all governments and their citizens.  Since that theory of nature allows for no absolutes, i.e., truth.  It follows that lying is unavoidable, and thus necessary for the preservation of the State. In fact, it is the belief that the ‘lie’ in state-craft is absolute. Most of what the citizens know of the state is cosmetic or appearance or image; it is propaganda.  Plato emphasizes this again and again. The State operates on premises quite different than those which it promotes to the masses. In order for the plutocratic caste to accomplish the ends of government, Plato posits the importance of lying and secrecy which is a privilege solely possessed by their castes.[1]  One can never get to the truth in government because government is the lie that ‘government is necessary’. By deduction it follows that Plato’s reasoning leads to this conclusion.  Freedom is impossible in relation to government.  For freedom and government are mutually exclusive.  For that reason the State or Government is always idling on high anxiety; its enemies are everyone everywhere who impulsively struggle for wiggle room out of their bondage to the lie, to the State.

Again, and for our purposes, we trace his emphasis on the necessity for State duplicity to his basic theory of the division of existence into the three basic phases of 1) pure being, 2) becoming, and 3) non-being or nothing.  Now, corresponding to those three aspects of being is Plato’s epistemology, i.e., what is it that a citizen can know?  There are again three possibilities.  One can know the truth through pure being; one may have an opinion which is more or less truth mixed with more or less falsity through becoming and perishing; and, one can have an illusory kind of knowledge, i.e., one can be ignorant and thus know nothing.[2]

The kind of knowledge associated with each aspect of being follows necessarily as a result of his theory of degeneration from pure being.  The human form by virtue of its admixture with physicality or matter can only know some truth which is unavoidably mixed with untruth, i.e., opinion.[3]  So, for Plato the controlling principle of government must be deceit because it is the controlling principle of material being, i.e., the mixture of some truth and some falsity.  The premise is simple. Some truth and some falsity equal falsity. For him this rule of duplicity is manifest in the depths of human nature as a dialectical struggle between ego and instinct.  But that struggle is analogous to the point just made above and we are left here with this fact: some ego and some instinct equal instinct. Revolt of the masses therefore is inevitable. For the plutocrats, that means they must 1) repress, i.e., become increasingly totalitarian over the masses or 2) they must flee for their lives or 3) they must die.

We shall see in later chapters how the Platonic theory of deceit became an effective tool in the use of ‘treaties’ (lying) to set the stage for the alienation, suppression, and repression of Native Americans, the Hawaiian people, and finally the American people.












[1] Ibid, Book III, [382],[389] [414-416]

[2] Ibid, Book VII Allegory of the Cave [514-517], [532] also see Book VI, Plato uses an analogy: the good is to the soul what the sun is to the eye.[508][509] Lastly, for a full dialectical discussion see Book V {475-480]

[3] Ibid, Book VI, [508]: “…but when turned towards the twilight of becoming and perishing, then she [the soul] has opinion only, and goes blinking about, and is first of one opinion and then of another, and seems to have no intelligence?” [Italics mine]