The Architect of Tyranny
The Architect of Tyranny
"If you were to look at a double helix from the top down, all you would see are rings within rings within rings."
If you read my most recent poem, you’ll notice that I called Plato’s “Socrates” the “Architect of Tyranny.” It takes just a quick search to understand that there is a difference between the Socrates of history and Plato’s version in The Republic, so truly, we are dealing with the platonic worldview. I am far from an expert on such matters and have not yet finished other works by Plato; nevertheless, I would like to expound on what I feel as though I understand now about Western philosophy in general.
The reason that I am interested in Western philosophy is because it is the “genetic blueprint” of Western thoughts and attitudes. If you take even one class on the East, you’ll understand that Eastern civilization has an entirely different logos. People groups in general have different worldviews, but make no mistake that the Chinese-centric (“China” literally means “Middle Kingdom”) worldview present in east Asia has its own DNA. This should cause you, most likely a child of the West, to think, “well, what is the West’s DNA?”
And how do you access this DNA?
Well, you access it the same way your ancestors and Great Men of History accessed it. You read the same books that they read, and you join the dialogue across the ages between great thinkers of the West across time. Yes, there is a dialogue, and people have been speaking with each other, even speaking with the dead. At the beginning of Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon (a book that I have yet to finish), he mentions that each great writer in the Western Canon sort of chooses for himself who they dialogue with.
They “feel themselves chosen by particular ancestral figures” (p. 19). Reading this line caused me to meditate on this Bible verse where God is speaking:
Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure:
- Isaiah 46:10
To put it another way, when he writes, he writes to another great writer of the past; he dialogues with someone perhaps long gone about the questions that he has had about their work. This was apparent to me as I saw the link between the reference to The Ring of Gyges in The Republic by Plato and the one ring in The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien had something to say to Plato and perhaps a few others across the Western canon who have attempted to unravel the mystery of the ring—I haven’t scratched the surface of what all I need to read and that depresses me.
What I find interesting about “the ring” as discussed by Plato and known as The Ring of Gyges is that there still seems to be no satisfactory explanation of what it represents. It just doesn’t feel right to me to say that it represents “power” because it has a dynamic element to it that conflicts with that. The ring is a source of power, but truly, it is an item that reveals the darkness in one’s own heart. In fact, one might say, in a metacontextual way, that the “ring” is really the thing “that reveals one’s own heart.” The understanding of its essence is difficult to grasp like river water flowing through a stream. Its meaning is less thematic and more meta-thematic, or it is a metanarrative about a metanarrative within itself. Curiously, it is a “ring” or takes the shape therein, and a ring loops in on itself. Tolkien writes about this same ring, and the ring is a reference to a ring mentioned at the dawn of Western civilization within an allegory.
If you say that Plato is near the beginning of Western civilization and Tolkien is at the end of Western civilization—I’m certain it’s also referenced by other authors within the Western Canon—then the self-referencing ring creates a ring (multiple rings) by being referenced again and again from the beginning and the end of the civilization. In other words, the ring is meta within meta within meta on and on and on across time. This self-referencing linking of rings within rings within rings is cyclical time itself (ascending and descending time cycles from God creating the heavens and the earth until now and into the future). What this means is that time is NOT the pagan understanding of a flat circle, but it is the ancient Hebraic understanding of being cyclical because of ascending and descending circles or cycles of time, think of a slinky, a spiral that you can ride up and down, but it’s even more complex.
Prophetic voices in the Faith have even seen Jacob’s Ladder (where angels ascend and descend) as a double helix, a DNA strand stretching between heaven and earth.
[side note, if you want to know what level of schizoid I’m at, please reference the above paragraphs, KEK.]
In Imperium (another book that I haven’t finished), Yockey says that history is the relationship between the past and the present. You can imagine that link in cyclical form as a cyclical ladder that has links between both the “beginning” side and the “end” side, again, a double helix. If you were to look at a double helix from the top down, all you would see are rings within rings within rings.
What I’m trying to get at with this schizoid take is that the imperfections of the West that we see on display every day now are not something that began at a certain time in history as much as they are an imperfection that was there in the beginning. Imagine the West as Adam and Even in the Garden of Eden. The snake was there for many years before it brought its trickery to God’s children, but it doesn’t matter that the snake is there. It doesn’t even matter if you talk with him every once in a while (though dangerous). It only matters if you believe him and his lies and act on them.
Plato is not really “The Architect of Tyranny,” but even in his writing, the flaw of the West’s DNA is revealed. From his descriptions of the perfect city or perfect society, one can see a utopian vision of a strictly managerial society. It’s there. It’s there even at the beginning. But back then, no one had the power to create his perfect city, but with the technology of today, maybe someone will try. Perhaps the ring couldn’t activate back in his time, but today, with our technology, one can slip on the ring and his darkest fantasies can be enacted on the world.
Is not the ring the thing that reveals one’s heart? one’s most corrupt and most foul desires, one’s most embedded flaw takes center stage as soon as he gets possession of the Ring.