- Socrates said that no man thinks of himself as evil, wrong, or harmful. No man seeks to do the bad. Every man seeks to somehow (the word in Greek is “pos” — somehow) do the good, the right, the virtuous.
2. So, Biden thinks that he is doing good. He is lacking in knowledge. If he had better knowledge, he would behave differently. But Biden is sure that he’s on the right track.
3. Biden says, “We are changing lives” [by grabbing your money and giving it away to other people]. Yes, Joe, that comes with being President. You get to change people’s lives.
4. The Biden Open Border will change the lives of many, and has already terminated the lives of many by Fentanyl. An emergency responder was stabbed by a Biden border crosser. So, you changed her life, for sure.
5. Opinion (I am doing the right thing) is not what required for virtue. It is what all people have at all times about themselves and what they are doing. Biden has an opinion about himself and the quality of his conduct.
6. Biden’s opinion is backed up by about 80 million (well a bit less now) faddists, who seek virtue fighting a Green War in the Sky (they grab your money and pay each other to do studies and read them at Aspen, and Davos).
7. Now Socrates did say that virtue is knowledge (arete episteme estin) by which he meant that knowing is the basis for real virtue. A kind of knowing (not opinion) called episteme.
8 Socrates never said that knowledge is virtue (or Prof Pinkface at Harvard, who really does know almost everything, would be the paragon of virtue, which he’s not, by a mile).
9. Socrates believed that virtue is a habitual trait built up over time in people living in very well organized cities as Plato describes in “The Laws” (which I read with Leo Strauss there to explain it to me).
10. The Laws is an early precursor of the plan for Rome in many important respects. Rome was organized along such lines, and Cicero was virtuous, and so was Marcus Aurelius, and many other noble Romans. Rome did not have a “noctural council” like in Plato’s “The Laws”
11. Rome had maybe half a dozen good Emperors, Augustus chief among them and Constatine explicitely not among them. The good Emperors lead Rome to a certain greatness, that has never been fully matched, although many have tried.
12. None of the Greeks or Romans took citizenship lightly. Or borders lightly. To be a citizen of Athens entailed many many many duties and devotions of time and attention. To be a citizen of Rome, you had to have a name, be a named person, from a known family, and actually the name of your family was a part of your own name. Lucretius Titus Carus was in the family of Carus. Although a slave, he had a place in Rome because he had a name. He did not just swim across a river, or jump a wall.
What Socrates Teaches US About Joe Biden
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