Father & Son: To My Philosopher Prince
Why I Wish You To Have A Classical Education
“Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils.”
— Plato, The Republic, 4th century B.C.
Action makes life better or worse.
And inaction makes life worse by default due to entropy.
Entropy: “A lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder.”
So act we must.
How then, do we decide how to act?
Some men think, some men act, many do neither, few do both.
I believe Plato was right when he wrote of the ideal state having Philosopher Kings for its rulers.
Plato was referring to rulers when he spoke of his ideal of a Philosopher King.
Marcus Aurelius and Alexander The Great are two real life examples.
But each man is the king of his own kingdom and, to my mind, a Philosopher King is a man who thinks and acts.
The inevitable consequence of proper thinking and proper acting is the betterment of life for one’s self and one’s community.
Some may claim that evil men think too.
But it is not a thinking man who concludes that action that makes life worse is the correct course.
That’s the reserve of men who are slaves to their lower impulses and use their minds to justify their base behaviour.
Why A Free Man Needs Philosophy & Politics
Philosophy means to love wisdom, which is the study of how to think.
Politics means the activities associated with governance, setting the rules of the game.
Whether you grow to govern a country, an organisation, a household, or your own life, to be both good and effective you must be educated in Philosophy & Politics: how to think and how to govern.
There is good reason why a great many of our leaders studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the same schools and Universities.
The reason the majority of people are ruled by the few, and are so easily manipulated in their opinions on the matters of the day, is because they are insufficiently educated.
They have no framework for understanding the world at its core and making their own decisions.
As a result they default into compliance, with no real thought behind what they do or why, and thus they live and die unexamined lives.
For the uneducated, the chains may long have gone, but there is still slavery of the mind.
The world today is full of weak, lazy, indebted, addicted, purposeless, people.
They live at the mercy of the decisions of others and don’t realise that they can break free at any time if they educate themselves and offer something of value to the world.
It’s not their fault, there is a lack of civic duty in political leadership.
Our political leaders are lifelong politicians looking out for their own self interest at the expense of the populace.
Governments get bigger, taxes get higher, the quality of public services gets worse, and the people get squeezed.
I don’t know how to fix that problem at a grand level.
But I can fix that problem at the level of my relationship with you.
Son, I wish you to be a good man and a free man.
I wish you to be free in your mind and free from having the quality of your life dictated to you by people who either don’t know you exist or don’t care that you do.
I wish you to be free to choose your vocation, free to choose whom to love and with whom to build a family, free to choose what to believe on the merits, and not through manipulation and dangerous ideology.
It is a life of personal responsibility where the quality of your life is determined more by you than it is others — not withstanding the hand of fortune that moves us all.
For that reason I will educate you in the great ideas from the past 2,500 of Western Civilisation as a starting point.
What You Will Learn
You will learn how to think, how to write, and how to speak — rare and powerful skills mistakenly presumed to be common.
You will learn why representative government is good and how the freedom of the individual has progressed over time.
You will learn how the wealth of nations is built from the bottom up, from free people willing and able to improve their lot in life by producing products and services of value — not from government control and central planning.
You will learn to think of yourself and others in your decision making, aware of the impact you will have not only on your own life but as a node in network impacting the lives of others.
You will learn that when reading the great books of 2000 years ago, if we change the names from Lucius and Severus and Tiberius and Cicero to Matthew, Jack, Thomas, and David, the problems we face today are much the same though our technology has advanced.
You will learn the great ideas of History and how to apply them in your life.
From there, perhaps we can look East and visit Japan and China to learn from Eastern Philosophy and Politics too, like Lee Kuan Yew who so successfully built Singapore picking the best ideas from East and West and applying them to a multicultural swamp to build one of the most prosperous and safe cities in the world in just 50 years.
Together we can travel to Athens, Sparta, Rome, Florence, Tokyo, and London and bring the ideas and stories to life.
This is not an academic exercise.
The purpose is to give you the tools to be a good, free man, reaching your potential, and being a positive presence in the life of those you meet.
I will give you the education, what you do with it is up to you.
Let’s make it fun.
Love,
Your Father