David Butterfield

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739 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 20 May

David Butterfield’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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TRIGGERnometry · How Civilisations Die - Ancient Greece Expert David Butterfield · 20 May 2026 podcast

episode to study.

I do think hubris needs to be a recurrent word.

The Athenians did become too confident in their own principles and in their own futurity.

And by virtue of that, they didn't allow themselves to innovate and to rethink.

Socrates' whole goal when wandering around the agora and buttonholing people and interrogating them about their supposed expertise is that people don't really know how much they don't know.

They're ignorant of their ignorance.

He, of course, famously said, the one thing that I know is that I know nothing.

This was allegedly the root of his wisdom.

But what the Athenians, despite having Socrates really badgering them with these questions, never did is to interrogate whether the democratic process in its ultra extreme form really was working.

And because they didn't do that, and the political system didn't really allow them to do that, they left themselves vulnerable to completely ridiculous decisions, such as attempting to take down Syracuse mid-war.

and vulnerable to complete political 180s, such as a tyranny stepping in and initially being welcomed by the people.

So the lesson is, if you want stable government, you need to have broad extension of power

but also genuinely self-reflective modes of interrogating how the power works.

You need education.

You need to take the process of your own governance seriously.

Merit matters.

Merit is not equally apportioned between everyone and you need to be able to have grown up conversations about who can do what better and who is not doing things well.

So obviously all of those are rather banal things to say, but one of the striking things about Athenian democracy is how little at the time it interrogated its principles.

Yeah, we're in a much worse place than late-day Athens.

Late-day Athens had still a system of delegated trust in your fellow Athenians that they knew enough to be involved in the shared conversation, and ultimately there was a shared goal, which for Athens was the survival of the city-state.

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