The MP John Redwood has hired a London PR firm to raise his profile. The firm is keen for him to feature in lifestyle articles, when he will talk about his great love of windsurfing, films and theatre. ‘John is happy to talk about a wide range of subjects,’ we are told, including ‘his favourite restaurant/food and his passion for motoring.’ It sounds an exciting prospect – how one longs to hear about why he loves going vroom – and all too horribly typical of Plato’s democratic man.
In his Republic, Plato analyses the way in which societies degenerate over time and mutate from one type of political system to another. Oligarchies, he argues, tend to become democracies (the fourth lowest system in Plato’s ranking, only one above the worst, tyranny), and democratic man is characterised by his poor upbringing and lack of values and sound habits. Refusing to allow older and wiser minds to guide him, he ‘spends as much time, money and effort on unnecessary pleasures as on necessary’. All pleasures come alike to him, and he moves restlessly from one to the other – ‘one day he gets drunk at a party, the next he’s sipping water and losing weight; then he takes some exercise, then he takes things easy, and sometimes he’s apparently a philosophy student’. Then he gets involved in community affairs and public speaking, then joins the army, then goes into business. ‘His lifestyle has no rhyme or reason, but he thinks it enjoyable, free and enviable and he never dispenses with it …he becomes multi-hued and multi-faceted, a gorgeous and varied patchwork …his way of life can be admired by many men and women because it contains so much variety in it.’
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