Plato's Revenge
Why Platonism Keeps Reemerging During Times of Crisis
Overview
The great philosophical controversy preoccupying humanity is whether our minds exist within a broader material world, or whether the material world exists within our minds. The latter position was most famously elaborated by the Greek philosopher Plato in the 4th Century BC.
But the former position is universally favored by the political and economic authorities in every age. The authorities have a vested interest in making people believe that we are mere observers of a vast external reality. The alternative belief—that we are all partially creating this reality with our minds—makes people much more difficult to control.
The fundamentally democratic nature of Platonism explains why it gains traction when political and economic systems break down. The following essay is a brief history of Platonism during the late Roman Empire, the late Medieval period, and modern times.
Introduction
As great empires collapse, Platonist ideas start to percolate out on the radical fringes of society. Few stop to question whether the emperor is naked when economic systems hum along, operating efficiently. But when those systems lapse into chaos, people begin to question authority. As Rome fell, Platonism took over the crumbling Empire as Christianity. After the Black Death exposed the Roman Catholic Church, Platonism re-emerged as Magic. Today, as our modern economic engine coughs and sputters, Platonism is once again coming back; this time in the guises of the Placebo Effect and the Double-Slit Experiment.
Platonism
The Greek philosopher Plato noticed that there are two realms of existence. There’s the mental realm where you decide to make your hand into a fist. And then there’s the separate physical world in which your hand actually closes. The great question of philosophy is how the idea of closing a fist makes it across the mysterious membrane from the mental realm into the physical world.
Plato answered that eternal question by suggesting that the physical and mental realms bear the same relationship you have with your shadow on the sidewalk. The material world, in other words, is a lower-dimensional slice of a higher-dimensional reality.
Platonism in Antiquity
Several centuries before the birth of Christ, Plato thought of the higher-dimensional mental realm as populated by ideals. He defined the ideal of a chair, for example, as that which all chairs have in common: the perfect chair. This ideal is not observable in the physical realm; it rather floats around inside our minds.
What is observable in material reality are imperfect versions of those ideals. When you walk into a restaurant, you compare various objects to an ideal chair inside your head. Then you sit down on the object that most closely matches that ideal.
In the late Roman Empire, the bound book was the cutting edge of communications technology. One book in particular, The New Testament, conquered Rome in its twilight. The last emperors all converted to Roman Catholicism as the Empire collapsed around them.
In the early days of Christianity, the idea of a perfect but hidden realm found its way into the new faith as the notion of heaven. Those early Christians used familiar Platonic ideas in tandem with bound books to explain and propagate their faith to Greco-Roman audiences throughout the Mediterranean Theater. Thanks to their efforts, Christianity exploded in popularity and spread like wildfire.
But history is not without irony. The Emperors of Rome converted to Christianity to bolster their political positions. When that didn’t stop the Empire from circling the drain, they doubled down by banning all pre-Christian books and ideas. That included Plato. His writings were lost to Christendom for a thousand years, and the Platonic roots of Christianity were forgotten about until the time of the Renaissance.
Platonism in The Renaissance
After the Fall of Rome, the Roman Catholic Church became the highest authority in Europe. That is, until the Black Death arrived in the 1300s. That pandemic carried off the credibility of the Church along with a quarter of the population. Not only was the Vatican revealed as powerless to stop the dying, but the clergy succumbed at even greater rates than the laity as the performance of Last Rites over-exposed them to the pathogen. Grave doubts about whether the Church actually possessed an inside connection with God began to swirl and fester in the European mind
These doubts were notably shared by the banking house of Medici in Florence, who put their vast fortune behind a revival of Classical Greco-Roman culture. The Medici commissioned great works of art with classical pagan themes. And they dispatched agents to every corner of the Mediterranean looking for the lost pre-Christian manuscripts that had been suppressed by the last Emperors of Rome. Their motto was Ad Fontes, which means “back to the source”.
They were more successful than they could possibly have imagined. The Medici laid their hands on a crumbling book of ancient magic called the Corpus Hermeticum. They assumed this text was of the same vintage as the Old Testament. But in reality, it dated back to the late Roman Empire and, like Christianity, was heavily influenced by Platonism.
Hermeticism takes Plato’s elevation of the mental realm over the physical world to its logical conclusion by suggesting that our minds create the physical world. Just like our dreams, which are both generated and experienced by our minds at the same time. Renaissance Magic arose from this idea. If reality is generated by the mind, it can be manipulated by the mind in the same way that a lucid dreamer manipulates a dream.
This magical idea was the polar opposite of Church doctrine. According to the Vatican, we are mere experiencers of reality. God alone does the creating, and comparing oneself to God is the ultimate heresy. But the magical tradition—forced underground by the Church on pain of torture and death—holds that we are partners with God in the creation of reality. “If then you do not make yourself equal to God,” reads the Corpus Hermeticum, “you cannot apprehend God; for like is known by like.”
During the Renaissance, the printing press was the cutting edge of communications technology. The presses pumped out heretical pamphlets faster than papal authorities from Rome could confiscate them. The Church lost control of the narrative and magical thinking swept over the European continent like a flood tide. While the old Medieval economic order was washed away in the aftermath of the plague, public fascination with magical arts like astrology and alchemy flourished.
Platonism Today
Not even the brutality of the Inquisition could put the genie of magical thinking back in the bottle. That feat was accomplished by science.
Science is the child of magic. As the Scientific Revolution unfolded astronomy replaced astrology, and chemistry replaced alchemy. The insight that our minds create reality was lost, and the philosophy of Plato was all but forgotten again.
Banking houses such as Medici, Fugger, and Rothschild replaced the Popes at the apex of the European political hierarchy. Entrepreneurs began borrowing money from these international bankers and repaying the loans by bringing to market the fruit of science: labor-saving technology. Science became the seed-corn of the new capitalist economic system.
Being a critical component of the modern economic system means that science must be palatable to power. That’s why it rejects the idea that reality is a product of the mind and embraces the old Church doctrine that we are humble observers moving around inside a grand creation.
But now Plato is coming for revenge!
The shovel of science has clunked into an unexpected treasure chest. The Placebo Effect and the Double-Slit Experiment demonstrate that reality really is a product of the mind. The tool of science was honed by the rejection of Magic, but that tool is now revealing the validity of Plato’s ideas. The entire scientific discipline exists in a state of unrecognized tension.
The doctrine of science purports to eliminate bias through objectivity. But objectivity loses all meaning if observation creates reality, as the Placebo Effect and the Double-Slit Experiment show. Science can neither admit that objective observation is a myth, nor deny the results of its own experiments.
Today, the cutting edge of communications technology is the internet. Our modern authorities have lost control over the narrative again, just like the Popes and the Caesars before them. Interestingly, another plague—the COVID pandemic—mirrors the Black Death in terms of damage done to the reputation of the authorities. Once again, a monolithic belief structure endorsed by power is fracturing. Strange ideas are bubbling up from the radical fringes of society. You have just finished reading a prime example!
Conclusion
Economic systems and systems of belief reflect each other. Because economic systems have life cycles, systems of belief do too. Authorities buttress their power by representing reality as external to the mind. They want their subjects thinking of themselves as mere observers of reality. That puts Platonism perpetually at odds with the various political and economic establishments that have come and gone over the millennia. Plato is banished during times of economic efficiency but returns from exile during times of economic dysfunction. As our international banking system faces an existential crisis, keep a weather eye out for his return.
Further Material
