Four Habits of Wise People in Foolish Countries

When your country chooses idiocy, take a page from Socrates.

Socrates saves the future Athenian general Alcibiades. Antonio Canova, 1797

Socrates shouldn’t have been so careless. Everyone must have told him so.

When the Spartans marched into Athens in 405 B.C. and installed thirty aristocrats to rule over the once-free city, the message was clear — PICK A SIDE. Flee with the exiled democrats or throw your lot in with the Thirty Tyrants.

Are you with us or against us? Are you among the select or part of the problem?

But the famous philosopher carved out a physical and ideological middle ground while adhering to the highest standards of ethics and philosophy. He refused to participate in the Tyrants’ misrule, but nor would he leave his beloved Athens behind. Socrates didn’t let himself become polarized.

The Socratic response holds valuable lessons as the United States takes a “victory turn,” into disunity. The Thirty Tyrants era and Athens’s proceeding conflict with Sparta are one of the original pressure cookers of recorded history, so Socrates’s response suggests a playbook individuals can execute if their society goes off the rails.

“Who is not aware that nothing thought to be good or bad looks the same to the sage as it does to everyone else? He pays no mind to what others consider shameful or wretched; he does not walk with the crowd; just as the planets make their way against the whirl of heaven, he proceeds contrary to the opinion of the world.”
— Seneca, On the Constancy of the Wise Person 14.3–4

1) Don’t Let Them Hypnotize You

Donald J. Robertson

said it well:

Countries don’t make choices—people do. The problem is that we make them under hypnotic assaults playing to our biases.

Facts and statistics are mere window dressing for the polarizing communicators who want us to dance like puppets; story is their tool of choice. They know which stories get a crowd calling for blood, and which distract us from the inconvenient elephants in the room.

Wise people rely on philosophy and smart questions to protect them from hypnotic stories and the cognitive biases that make us easy to manipulate. Whereas story and bias zoom our attention in, philosophy zooms it out so we can see the broader context.

Socrates infuriated the demagogues of Athens by refusing to mindlessly absorb their stories. He kept interrupting, forcing them to defend claims piece by piece. With this broader, slower rollout, their stories were less convincing or even laughable.

His famous Socratic Method is simply asking questions about claims:

The Socratic Method in a Nutshell:

1. Someone makes a claim about what’s good or bad.

2. You ask what the claim means and what the person believes, and look for tension between the two explanations.

3. Use your questions to show that the claim fails to satisfy the person’s belief.

4. The person is refuted without argument. You’re simply asking questions and the answers speak for themselves.

5. The person will likely clarify what they “really meant,” and you’ll start over.

“do not allow yourself to be carried away by its intensity: but say, 'Impression, wait for me a little. Let me see what you are, and what you represent. Let me test you.'
— Epictetus, Discourses, 2.18.24

Philosophical exercises, such as those described in Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life, also help us to see past our biases and emotions to bring the bigger picture into focus.

To stay clear of society’s craziness, a philosophical practice is key.

2) Pitch Your Tent In The Middle

Socrates loved Athens. It was a place where ideas did battle and the arts flourished. By comparison, Sparta stultified its people. It produced few thinkers, artists, and philosophers of note. The moldering ruins of Athens still inspire wonder, but there’s little sign that Sparta was more than a dusty village.

Yet Socrates freely criticized his city’s flaws; he knew Athenian democracy was vulnerable to eloquent demagogues. The government of Sparta, on the other hand, was designed to move slowly and deliberately.

Socrates’s Spartan praise was akin to an American lauding Stalin amid the Cold War; a recipe to turn your countrymen against you.

But Socrates was proven right. Demagogues led Athens down a disastrous path that lost it the war. Socrates could see it because he never bought into the polarized us vs them narrative. He saw the strengths of both sides.

Today is little different. Earth is no utopia, but we’re more affluent, technologically advanced, and safer than ever before. Yet demagogues sell a distopian vision and us vs them narrative.

In his last days, Socrates composed a poem that began:

"Judge not, ye men of Corinth," Aesop cried,
"Of virtue as the jury-courts decide."

Majority opinion is no rational basis for deciding what’s right. We have to reason for ourselves if we’re going to find a better path, and that means recognizing that the usual polarized extremes rarely have more than part of the truth.

3) Don’t Abandon Your People

When society goes crazy it’s easy to shrug your shoulders, keep your head down, and retreat from those who need your steady hand the most.

Socrates never went for this approach, for all his misgivings. He deployed against Sparta and fought in three major battles. We think of him as a philosopher, but the Athenians considered Socrates a war hero.

At the battle of Delium he saved the life of Xenophon (famous for leading "The Ten Thousand” out of Persia), and the future general Alcibiades at Potidaea. In one of Plato’s dialogues, the general Laches says Socrates “was my companion in the retreat from Delium, and I can tell you that if others had only been like him, the honor of our country would have been upheld, and the great defeat would never have occurred.”

Fighting isn’t the only way one serves. Socrates considered his main contribution to be spurring fellow citizens to be better. In, “On the Orator,” Cicero says:

“They say that the great Socrates used to declare that his work was done when his encouragement had fairly driven a man to an urge to understand and acquire virtue. When a man was convinced that his prime need was to become a good man, the rest of philosophy followed easily.”

Everyone is faced with opportunities to throw up our hands in disgust when society acts foolishly. Socrates suggests we should always look for ways to step into the gap and do our part.

4) Avoid What’s Worse Than Death

Everyone is thinking: Socrates was put on trial and killed, right? How can he possibly be a model for living well in chaotic times?

Socrates would tell us that some things are far worse than death:

“If you act unrighteously, your eye will turn to the dark and godless, and being in darkness and ignorance of yourself, you will probably do deeds of darkness.¹^”

The madness of the crowd is catching.

One of Athens’ shortsighted mistakes was executing six victorious generals who led a Athenian fleet to victory at the Battle of Arginusae. Some Athenian sailors were drifting at sea because their ships sank, and when a great storm blew in the generals were unable to rescue the sailors; they all drowned.

The generals were put on trial for negligence, and contrary to the law, were tried as one.

Socrates happened to be serving as an official in the assembly that day, and felt this was not only a great injustice, but also illegal. He refused to let the assembly vote on trying the generals as one, though he was abused and threatened by the furious crowd. In The Apology, Socrates says:

“The orators were ready to prosecute me and take me away, and your shouts were egging them on, but I thought I should run any risk on the side of law and justice rather than join you, for fear of prison or death when you were engaged in an unjust course.”

Despite Socrates’ efforts, the generals were condemned to death. But Socrates did his best to see that justice was done.

The Thirty Tyrants later summoned Socrates and four other men as part of a program to make average Athenians complicit in their misrule. They ordered him to arrest Leon of Salamis, who was guilty of nothing more than being wealthy. Socrates refused to participate and went home, a dangerous move that could have cost him his life. The Democratic faction fought their way back into the city soon after, perhaps saving Socrates from retribution.

Yet it would be that restored democracy that would put him to death. Although impiety and corrupting the youth were the charges, the real issue is that Socrates would not swallow the party line; not that of the democrats, nor the oligarchs, nor any other faction

I think Socrates would have considered his intransigence to be based on holding the principled, rational center as his city went mad. Socrates might have appreciated what W. B. Yeats wrote after World War I in "The Second Coming."

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

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1. Plato, Alcibiades 1