Why Socrates Hated Democracy

Source: Why Socrates Hated Democracy, The School of Life, 4:21, uploaded 2016-11-28, category Other / Unclear, playlist index 1232.

The Parthenon stands in the video for democratic values. Leaders of modern democracies like to be photographed there because Ancient Athens appears to offer a clear origin for their political ideals. The School of Life sets that image against an awkward fact from the same civilisation: Greek philosophy, through Socrates and Plato, treated democracy with deep suspicion.

The ship and the vote

In Book Six of Plato’s Republic, Socrates speaks with Adeimantus about the people who should govern a society. He asks Adeimantus to imagine a ship preparing for a sea journey. The crew would want someone educated in navigation and the demands of seafaring to decide who commands the vessel. They would not choose a person at random and trust that person’s instinct about ships.

Socrates then applies the same test to political judgement. Choosing a ruler is also a skill, so the people who choose rulers need to learn how to do it. Letting an uneducated citizenry vote, the video says, is as reckless as putting ordinary passengers in charge of a trireme sailing to Samos through a storm. The vote counts as a decision about the direction of a country, yet the system often treats the ability to make that decision as something people possess automatically.

The jury that condemned Socrates

Socrates had a direct and catastrophic reason to distrust the judgement of voters. In 399 BC, Athens put him on trial for what the video calls trumped-up charges of corrupting the city’s youth. A jury of 500 Athenians considered the case and found him guilty by a narrow margin. The city then killed him with hemlock.

The video presents the execution as a tragedy for philosophy comparable to Jesus’s condemnation for Christians. The comparison gives Socrates the status of a martyr for serious thought, whilst also making the political mechanism of his death part of the argument. The video treats the jury’s decision as a shallow judgement that became a final sentence.

Wisdom and birthright

The source presents Socrates as an educator of a broad electorate. He wants political judgement tied to rational and deep thought about public questions. The video calls the lost distinction “intellectual democracy” and “democracy by birthright”.

Modern democracies extend the vote to everyone who meets the formal conditions of citizenship, yet they rarely connect that right to an education in judgement. The video treats that gap as a condition for demagoguery. A broad electorate can make good decisions when the surrounding education gives people the knowledge and habits that voting demands. The vote itself cannot supply those habits.

Alcibiades and the sweet shop

Ancient Athens had already seen the danger in demagogues. The video points to Alcibiades, whom it describes as rich, charismatic, smooth-talking, and careless with basic freedoms. His influence helped push Athens into disastrous military adventures in Sicily. The example shows what happens when a gifted public figure can turn popular desire into political authority.

Socrates develops the same warning through an imagined election debate. One candidate resembles a doctor. The other resembles the owner of a sweet shop. The sweet shop owner attacks the doctor for causing pain, prescribing bitter potions, and restricting food and drink. He offers pleasant feasts instead. The doctor can answer only by saying that the discomfort serves the patient’s health, which gives the audience little immediate pleasure and would provoke an uproar.

The analogy describes a structural problem in elections. A candidate who offers easy answers can present difficulty as cruelty, whilst a candidate who describes a real remedy has to defend the discomfort that comes with it. Voters may choose the promise that feels good in the room even when the longer-term result harms them. The source treats this as the mechanism of demagoguery, extending beyond one dishonest politician.

The education around democracy

The video closes by describing the modern habit of treating democracy as an unqualified good. Socrates’s warning is narrower and harder to dismiss. A political system depends on the education that surrounds it. When citizens receive the vote without learning how to judge public choices, democracy can elevate sweet shop owners whilst leaving doctors with the worse argument.

The account follows the video’s reconstruction of Plato’s Socrates. Its claims about the trial, the Athenian jury, Alcibiades, and the Sicilian expedition come from the source’s captions and description rather than from independent checks of the ancient evidence. The source supplies no bibliography. It names Plato’s Republic, so those historical details remain attributed to the video here.

Further reading / references

• Plato, The Republic, Book VI.