Platonism & Collapse

How Plato's Ideas Shape the Grand Arc of History

TL:DR Over the course of history, whenever major systems break down, a strange insight bubbles up from the fringes of society. The ideas of the Greek philosopher Plato always begin to circulate in hushed whispers. It happened during the Fall of Rome, when Platonism went by the name Christianity. And it happened again during the collapse of Medieval society, this time under the name Magic. And it’s happening again now as our own system circles the drain. Today it’s called the psychedelic tradition. In each of these times and places, Platonism played a major role in revivifying collapsed societies. And in each case, the heroes of the previous age lose the Platonic insight and become the villains of the next.

What is Platonism?

To understand Platonism, take the example of a chair. You might be sitting in one right now. Chairs come in all shapes and sizes, from backless bar stools to lavish thrones. You’re capable of recognizing a wide variety of very different objects as chairs. Recognition means comparing observable objects to a preexisting mental ideal of a chair—and coming up with a match. Think of this ideal as an abstract understanding of that which all chairs have in common. We navigate the world around us by categorizing it in this way.

The Greek philosopher Plato suggested that ideals are what reality is made of. The basic building blocks of creation, he might have said, are not atoms but concepts. In Book VII of The Republic he likened the world we observe with our senses to mere shadows flickering on the wall of a cave. Ideals—which exist outside of space and time—cast the shadows which we mistake for reality. The ideal of a chair hangs out there in the ether. When you look around for something to sit on, you compare patterns in your visual field to that otherworldly template. Plato’s suggestion was that since the things we recognize around us are derived from this higher realm of ideas, that higher realm must be true reality.

Raphael painted the concept of Platonism in his “School of Athens”. At the focal point, Aristotle in his blue robe insists, with an overturned palm, on the primacy of the observable universe . To his right, Plato demurs and indicates the higher realm of ideas with his upward-pointing index finger . (Photo taken by the author)

Platonism in the Classical Era

The Roman Empire was brutal tax regime. As its armies put new territories under conquest, it extracted wealth from those territories to pay the armies for the next conquest. Refusal to meet the demands of Roman tax collectors was met with brutal punishment. Wealth streamed into the capitol and pooled there, piling up into the most massive hoard the world had ever seen. “Wealth mounted, but it did not spread,” wrote legendary historian Will Durant, “In 104 B.C. a moderate democrat reckoned that only 2,000 Roman citizens owned property.” This in a city of 5 million. Counted among the wealth flowing into Rome were so many slaves that their population eventually made up half the city. The seeds of collapse were sewn. Not only was Roman society was a ticking time bomb. The Empire was an ethical disaster.

At this moment, Christianity stepped on the stage of history. It had Platonism baked into its core. Christianity is Greek; the New Testament was originally written in that language. There are many ways in which Plato influenced the fledgling religion, but the most obvious example is his hierarchy of reality, in which the physical world is a reflection of higher, eternal and perfect ideals. From this notion sprang the Christian understanding of the material world as imperfect and transient, while the spiritual realm and God were considered ultimate and unchanging. In fact, Platonism was so integral to the new faith that the Christians of Alexandria, located on the Nile delta, became known as “Neo-Platonists”.

Perhaps it the refreshing anti-debt, pro-poor streak that made Christianity so popular. Or maybe it was the idea of a better world waiting after death that appealed to the weary citizens of a dying empire. Whatever the attraction, Christianity was a historical force to be reckoned with. It went from a persecuted minority to the state religion of Rome within a few short generations. Its adherents were so convinced that the material world is an illusion that they were almost happy to be fed to lions in the Colosseum. The usual threats of torture and death were powerless in the face of such a doctrine. And so, as the Empire collapsed, its government tried to stave off disaster by adopting the popular new religion. Emperor Constantine accepted baptism into the Church of Christ in 337 A.D. One of his successors, Theodosius, set up the new state religion as a monopoly on access to the divine. That cheerful fellow ordered the eradication of all traces of pre-Christian thought. That included pagans like Plato; there was to be no spiritual competition for the Church of Rome whatsoever. There would be no going back to the old ways. The Neo-Platonists of Alexandria were declared heretics, the famed Library of Alexandria was razed, and the writings of Plato were lost for a thousand years.

Platonism in the Medieval Era

As the embers of Rome cooled into the Middle Ages, the Roman church became gradually more corrupt. It monetized the spiritual monopoly set up by the Christian Emperors of Rome by charging people for sin forgiveness. By the time the Black Death arrived in Europe in 1347, the church was a carnival of corruption and immorality. Popes and antipopes excommunicated each other. Political power struggles, conspicuous wealth, and sexual deviancy became the hallmarks of the Vatican.

The arrival of the plague punched another gaping hole in the credibility of the church. Instead of a germ theory of disease, the church was working with a “Wrath of God” theory of disease. The horror—thought to be reserved for the wicked—fell upon the clergy just as much as the rest of the population. Powerless to stem the dying, the church was exposed as having no more of a clue what was going on than anybody else. Its claim to inside knowledge from God was discredited and its spiritual monopoly shattered.

The Black Death damaged the credibility of the Roman church, but it also annihilated the Medieval economic model. With half the peasantry moldering in early graves, the survivors realized that they could play one feudal lord off against another in a bidding war for their labor. They stopped swearing fealty and started shopping their labor around to the highest bidder. The birth of this, our modern economic paradigm, was midwifed by the plague.

In that era of collapse and despair, Platonism mounted a comeback. The Medicis of Florence were so disgusted by church corruption that they flouted its authority and reversed the course of Theodosius. The patriarch of the Medici clan, Cosimo, dispatched agents to every corner of the Mediterranean Basin. Their goal was to hunt down pre-Christian, pagan manuscripts wherever they could be found. It was Cosimo’s man, Marsilio Ficino, who translated the lost works of Plato and reintroduced them to Western society.

Part of the Medici’s obsession with pre-Christian paganism was their obsession with magic. Particularly alchemy. At its most basic, the idea behind magic is that reality is like a dream. That is to say, we are experiencing and creating reality simultaneously. In a lucid dream, the dreamer realizes the apparently rock-solid dream world they are experiencing is actually contained entirely within their own mind. Magic is another iteration of the Platonic notion that a mental realm of ideals is the true reality. It suggests that our world is a mutable illusion.

The notion that we are co-partners with God in the act of creation, and not just observers of it, was the opposite of the church’s conception. They were running a scheme in which people paid the church for remission of sin. But no one who considers themselves God’s equal is likely to pay for God’s forgiveness. So any comparison that elevated humankind to the level of God had to be considered the worst imaginable blasphemy. Those who dared to suggest it were burned at the stake. A lot of potential income depended on it.

But the Medicis were determined to stick it to the church. When an ancient Greek manuscript on magic was discovered by one of his agents, Cosimo de’ Medici ordered a halt to the translation of Plato. With only a few years left to live, old man Cosimo wanted to be sure he got a crack at that book. It was called the Corpus Hermeticum, and it literally refers to humankind as siblings of God. “If then you do not make yourself equal to God,” it says, “you cannot apprehend God; for like is known by like.” The Corpus Hermeticum couldn’t be more Platonist. In fact, that dusty old tome was originally written and compiled by the Neo-Platonists of Alexandria during the twilight of the Roman Empire.

In addition to being armed with platonistic ideas, the Medicis also had a banking fortune to use against the church. In an era of economic collapse, they leveraged these weapons to challenge the Vatican for intellectual dominance and political power. The grandest part of their strategy was single-handedly financing the Italian Renaissance. Artists like Raphael and Michelangelo incorporated Platonic ideas into their work, portraying idealized forms and exploring the relationship between the physical and the metaphysical. That flowering of the arts was nothing less humanity picking itself up off the mat after a chaotic collapse of the Medieval social and economic orders.

Platonism in the Modern Era

Just as the Roman Empire became corrupt and found itself confronted by Platonism in the guise of Christianity, the Roman Church went on to become corrupt and find itself confronted by Platonism in the guise of Magic. Both of those confrontations took place during great turns of the age.

Today, we are on the cusp of another great turning of the age. And Platonism is back. This time in the guise of the psychedelic tradition. In 1936, a Swiss chemist named Dr. Albert Hofmann first synthesized LSD. That tiny molecule has already had a titanic impact on our society. Look no further than the Beatles. Those guys talked openly about how LSD boosted their creativity and helped them graduate from the poppy surf guitars of “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” to the glory of Sgt. Pepper, Abbey Road, and the White Album.

To understand the connection between Platonism and psychedelics, imagine you are staring into a millpond on a calm day. The surface is perfectly flat, like a mirror. You can see a crisp, clear reflection of yourself staring back at you. In this analogy, the reflection in the water is analogous to the material reality we observe with our senses. It’s an illusion—a shadow cast by a higher, hidden reality. Plato might have suggested that we tend to fall into the trap of mistaking the reflection in the pond for our actual selves. But the spell is broken when you drop a rock into the pond. The ripples distort the image, revealing it to be an illusion. Psychedelics functions like that rock. It perturbs consciousness. And that perturbation of the mind distorts the normally-rock-solid observable universe. The experience leaves no doubt that the observable universe is a product of the observing mind.

In 2007, a 101-year-old Dr. Hoffman wrote a letter—during the iPod era—to Steve Jobs. He penned this note because Jobs, like the Beatles, had been very vocal about the creative value of LSD and how it played a role in his accomplishments. Indeed, no less illustrious a source than The Wall Street Journal suggested in June 2023 that psychedelic drugs like LSD “power” Silicon Valley. The impact on music and technology that Platonism, under the guise of psychedelics, has already had on our culture is profound. So what else might Platonism have in store for us during the great turning of the age unfolding in our own time?

Just to set up shop, science had to sail right past the assumption that the concept of an objective observer makes sense. As the alchemists of the Renaissance gave way to chemists in their white lab coats, the Platonic insight was again lost to history. Science still assumes that the observable universe would still be there, even if we, the observers, were to vanish. But the double-slit experiment and the placebo/nocebo effects offer undeniable evidence that we are not mere observers of reality.

The discovery that the Earth orbits the sun, and not vice-versa, epitomized the transition from the Medieval to the Modern era. It was a wholesale inversion of reality. An illusion was broken. Up until that moment, any fool could see the sun “moving” across the sky. Much like the church did when data about the elliptical orbits of the planets started rolling in, our scientific authorities shrug their shoulders and pretend the double slit experiment and the placebo effect haven’t thrown their discipline into a state of internal contradiction. As we transition out of the Modern Era, Platonism seems once again likely to undermine the credibility of the authorities. Perhaps we can finally break the spell and reckon with the stunning inversion of reality that Plato saw coming 2,500 years ago.

Fundamental inversions of reality are unsettling, to say the least. And here at System Failure, we always like to end on a positive note. To that end, the lesson we should learn from history is that hope lies in creative expression. The Medici’s unleashed the Italian Renaissance without psychedelic drugs. But those substances are already an integral part of a momentous transformation taking shape around us. They could be our version of the wooden sailing ships from Age of Exploration that directly followed the Renaissance. In other words, they could be the vessels that carry the boldest among us to the furthest frontiers of the human imagination. It seems to have already worked for the Beatles and for Steve Jobs. When old systems stop working and seize up, new ideas are the only way to get back up and running again. Ideas are the fundamental building blocks of reality, as our old friend Plato might have said. History is about to arrive, once again, at his doorstep.