A City Built on Lies//Haylee Lynd

     How does one create a just city, full of honest and virtuous citizens? By telling all its citizens lies, of course!

     There is such a thing as a useful lie, and there are times when it is okay, and maybe even better, to tell a lie. For example, little white lies save people's feelings. To give a better example, if a woman looks like she is running for her life in the grocery store and runs left, and then a man with a gun runs up to you and asks you which way she went, it is definitely okay to tell him she went right. In fact, in that case, there's a strong argument that your dishonesty is more just than your honesty. The question I have is whether it is okay to tell a lie to an entire city of people in order to increase both goodness and justice within the city.

      In creating his just city, Socrates devises a plan to censor many things to train the future guardians and leaders of the city. Additionally, Socrates plan calls for a city with a very specific social class structure, which leads Socrates to need to answer as to how he will prevent rebellion against the structure in order to maintain it. How do ensure there is never controversy over who should rule? Socrates chooses to do this with a lie. "Now then, we spoke some time ago of useful lies," says Socrates, "Could we contrive one now, a noble lie that might be believed by the rulers themselves, or at least by the rest of the city?" (Plato 112) While his lie may be useful, whether or not it is just needs to be examined. 

     Socrates' proceeds to describe what is commonly termed "the myth of metals." In summary, he will persuade the rulers and the guardians, and then the rest of the people, that all of their training and education(heavily censored education) was a dream and that "they were the whole time deep within the earth being given form and feature"(113). Then, when the process was complete they were delivered up from the surface of their mother earth; thus, they will consider the land which they are on to be very important and be more apt to defend it. To prevent controversy over who should rule and, essentially, keep everyone in their place, he will tell them the rulers were born with gold in them, the auxiliaries with silver, and so on. Obviously, the first citizens to be told this are not going to accept it. We wouldn't if the government all of a sudden tried to tell us such a story. Thus, it will take several generations before it is believed and rebellion is no longer.

    I find it extremely ironic that the just city is built on a lie. Because of this fact, is it really just? It seems its foundations aren't. The description of the just city, of its censorship and of the lies which will be told by its government, makes me uneasy. As a twenty-first century American, freedom is very important to me, and censorship goes against that. Additionally, the descriptions remind me all too much of "utopias" in literature which were quite the opposite, such as the settings in "The Giver" and "1984." Thus, I question whether the just city is actually just or could ever be just because what the city is built upon seems to not be.

P.S. I commented on Isabelle and Clabo's posts.