On Plato

Plato's Republic definitely carried the big brother aspect. It's like removing what you think is bad as a way to keep people in control by not letting them think. First of all erasing the bad in poetry will make everything good. What would good be without bad? You can't really have one without the other. It does really remind me of the way things are now. It's easy to see how ignorance can get caught up in rhetoric. Some are at different levels than others when it comes to persuasion. Whereas it may be easy to persuade some and harder to persuade others regardless of how amazing the rhetoric is. Why not just teach the children what Homer's poetry was really about instead of changing it? Even in Republic 10 Adeimantus states "Just between ourselves, and please don't denounce me to the tragic poets and all the other imitators - all such things damage the minds of those who hear them, unless they have knowledge of what they are really like as an antidote" (40). So as philosophers couldn't they just enlighten the children with this knowledge. It's contradictory. It makes Plato seem very egotistical. They act as if the citizens are just lower people that can't think for themselves.It's amazing how much truth they instilled in poetry. What was also interesting to me was that they referred to poetry as a her.