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times are unusual: Jefferson. Napoleon. Su Dongpo, who led the Southern Song
Dynasty to real greatness. Given the difficulty of finding such a match you can
perhaps understand why history is so often pitched with evil; and why Plato was not
a democrat. He knew how hard the ideal was to achieve; how suspicious we ought to
be of it’s accomplishment. You might have in your mind a picture of a perfect Sicilian
government: Literate, open to foreign ideas and trade, careful to balance the
privilege of power with its still heavier obligations. The reality: A homicidal king.
The stretched distance between ideal and reality was what Plato and Socrates
thought philosophy must fill.

As we consider the immense gap between where we are now – a fracturing,
struggling order confronting new power arrangements whose content and speed
and instincts are all really foreign to all of us – the puzzle is how best to fill the space
between where we are now and where we intend to go. In Plato and Socrates’ age,
before they great emancipation of the Enlightenment, it was only natural that their
focus was on the education of kings. This, after all, was where most of the power lay.
It was the decisive element: Was the ruler good or bad? But we confront our age
with a different balance. What will decide our future, I think, is not merely our rulers
but the quality of our citizens. I mean you and me. As we’ve seen, much of our future
will be embodied in highly concentrated, connected systems that move at very rapid
velocities and are spliced everywhere with the accelerant of artificial intelligence.
We are all preparing ourselves to be subjugated in a sense by these systems and by
their masters. Our best defense will not be to wait for wise leaders, for the
appearance of men and women bespoke fit to the moment, capable of balancing
instinct and interest into a rare balance. They are unlikely to emerge – and just
getting rid of the people we have now will be hard enough. Any strategy based on
hoping for great leadership is too risky for all of us. No, a better best defense is
finally to rely on ourselves, to use the inheritance of the Enlightenment – the
revolution one that made us citizens and not subjects – to ensure we’re not made
subjects yet again, to forces we can’t understand and won’t manage to control. In
trading our liberty for convenience, we are spending that inheritance too fast now,
too blindly.

It would be easy enough to say that we all need to become more technical, that we
need new versions of Plato’s Academy where we teach our children, our leaders and
ourselves the inside tricks of the wired age. After all, if we’re to prevent the
machines and the New Caste and the ripping dangers of a connected age from
demolishing everything, we’d best know what they are doing. The need for more
technical knowledge for all of us is, inarguably, clear. As I’ve said, one of our
problems is that we live in an era of leaders who honestly don’t have the Seventh
Sense, who lack a fluency even with the mundane quotidian demands of our digital
fluxus – secure passwords on their own email, say, or an instinct for compressed
space and time. Mapped on to the really big policy questions of the day, like the
prosecution of our wars or the repair of our economics, they are outmatched. So:
Yes, we need political direction informed by a feel for the fast, far-running fibers of
the topological landscape that will decide our future. We need men and women who
can command networks against network dangers. Linked, high-speed systems, after

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