Today we’re going to walk into Plato’s world—his hopes, his fears, and his blueprint for what he thought a good society might look like—and we’re going to do it through three hot wires that still shock people now: gender, democracy, and what happens to a culture when it confuses freedom with appetite. Plato is not a modern liberal, and he’s not a simple misogynist either. He’s a moral engineer. He looks at human life the way a physician looks at a fever: symptoms first, causes second, and then a harsh prescription that most patients hate. If you want the cleanest summary of Plato’s political psychology, it’s this: most people do not want truth; they want comfort. Most people do not want discipline; they want permission. And when a society builds its identity on permission, it eventually hands itself over to whoever can master desire, fear, and spectacle.

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

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