New batch of kittens at one week old

It's so wonderful; a repeat of last year's event. Again, the perfect mother, five healthy and happy little ones, growing nicely, gaining weight, although the smallest one, at 131g this morning, is still below the optimal range for a week-old kitten which is 150g-250g. The rest comfortably fit within the parameters, the biggest one weighing 171g. Céleste, like her mother at this stage, is eating like a horse, trotting out into the kitchen at regular intervals to remind me that she's feeding for six. Extra portions have been well and truly earned!

There is no room for complacency; for every miracle one must be truly grateful. Other than a bit of hissing from grandmother Wenus and uncle Pacio, the mature cats have accepted the situation as something that happens. Pacifyk requires a little extra attention to let him know he's not been forgotten, Wenus, meanwhile, has become a rare visitor to the house, popping by twice a day for a feed, and going back out straight away. What is the English for 'obrażona'?

Below: the entire quintet chugging away happily, making contented grunts and squeals as they do so. Grey is the colour. I miss an orange one here. Céleste is shedding fur in tufts; it impedes the young ones' access to her nipples and is unnecessary for warmth as the temperature in the house is in the mid-20°Cs. I wonder how many kittens have inherited her long-hair gene.

No names for the kittens yet (though the fifth one – the lightest of the brood, the dark-grey tabby with long tail – is likely to be Quinto/Kwinto) At first sight it looks like they are all male. I hope so – a female will either have to be given away or sterilised, as I feel I am approaching the absolute limit of the number of cats I can optimally look after. 

Meanwhile, life for the other cats goes on; below: in the forest next door with Scrapper, Czester, and in the undergrowth, Hipek. They all followed me there, and followed me home for brunch.

This time six years ago:
I'm from the south – the south of Warsaw

This time seven years ago:

Summer day at school, 50 years ago...

[Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band]

This time nine years ago:
Warsaw wealthier than most of UK shock!

This time 11 years ago:
Opening of the railway line to Warsaw's Okęcie airport

The Arms Salesman – a short story

{{ The first four paragraphs came to me as I looked down on the beige marble windowsill in my bedroom. The following scene flashes into my mind. What follows beyond, I composed. }}

James was asked to take a seat and wait. He looked across the beige marble floor. "Impressive," he thought to himself. "Real money here." In front of him, a wall panelled up to the ceiling with wood veneer stretched up some thirty feet, a huge clock behind the reception desk, consisting of a circle of Roman numerals in white, with white hands. Quarter to four. On either side of the clock – a white map, the same diameter as the clock, of the Western Hemisphere to the left and the Eastern Hemisphere to the right. The remaining three sides of the vast reception space were glass, wall to ceiling. James noticed a distinct lack of company logo on the wall.

Hush. One or two people crossing the enormous reception area. Sunlight sweeping in from the west.

He sat down in a low cream-leather sofa, by which was a glass table with reading matter: the New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and that same corporate brochure the recruitment people had sent him.

[AI image generated by ChatGPT, using above text as prompt]

An officer in an Air Force uniform, holding a clipboard came out to greet him, the sound of his metal-tipped heels clicking on the floor as he crossed the empty reception area. "Mr. Martin? Good to see you. Come on through." James stood up, shook the outstretched hand and followed the officer. Elevator up to the eighth floor, along a corridor and into an airy office, large window offering a beautiful view of Cincinnati in the late afternoon.

The officer joined three men in suits and a guy in Navy uniform behind a long desk; James sat down in a chair across from them as they shuffled papers.

The Navy officer welcomed James and began to read. "Drafted USMC, Pacific campaign 1944-45, Assistant Aircraft Mechanic rising to Master Technical Sergeant... Honorable discharge October '45, volunteered June '50 for service with USAF, Flight Engineer school, flying WB-29s and SB-29s over the Sea of Japan, and then RB-36s... Won't ask you where you flying those... Impressive resumé, Mr. Martin. You can keep planes flying... but, uh, can you... sell?" 

"I sure can sell if I believe in the product, sir. If I can trust my life to it. And that's why I'm sittin' here, and not at the offices of your competition." James gave a practiced wry smile.

"The job involves travel, Mr Martin. Europe – NATO member countries. England, West Germany, Spain, Portugal. And some Latin American customers – Argentina, Chile. Another team handles the Far East. You'll meet people from ministries of defense, air ministries, air forces; all of them are sufficiently proficient in English. They are conversant with the technical specs of our products and the products of our competitors – American and foreign. The foreign competitors will be typically be from Britain. The domestic ones, you know 'em well. 

A civilian guy introduced himself. "It's all about handling objections. It's about future promise. Upgrades in the pipeline. Service levels. Maintenance and overhaul schedules. And budgets. Can you tell a good story, Mr. Martin? That's what we're lookin' for... A sharp guy – smart guy  Got the patter, as well as the technical ability to diagnose any malfunction."

"And budgets" repeated one of the suits.

"Brought up on a farm, huh?"

"That's right. That's where I learnt to keep engines running."

"Martin - I'm rootin' for you here," said the Air Force guy. "Prove to us that you can sell."

James leaned forward. "See, if they really wanna – if they really have to buy... then I don't really need to sell them anything. They've already bought our product before I've even walked into the meeting. These boys – they're all damned scared of communism, of communists, of Russia. We have proven equipment that's way ahead of what the Soviets have. So I'm here to say I know this kit, I know it inside out. I've flown with it. I'll tell them that I'm physically here, with them, in their office, because I trusted my life with this kit time and time again, at 35,000 feet and it did not let me down. And I know full well that what's coming next in the product pipeline will be... far enhanced, ahead of what I was using on active service just two years ago."

The panel all nodded.

"If we take you on, you'll need some, shall we say, polish. Don't mean to sound disparagin', but a farm boy sat next to a foreign defense ministry official at a formal dinner at some tony restaurant or in our embassy has to sound right. Small talk, what have you."

"I can learn!" laughed James. "Easier than fixin' carburettors!" 

Another suit asked: "You like dames?"

"Sure, who don't?"

 "Just know when to behave yourself, that's all."

"Uh huh."

"You never know who that dame at the hotel cocktail bar you might strike up a conversation with really is."

The interview changed tack.

"Mr Martin – you know the internal combustion engine real well. You know turbosuperchargers, you know fuel-injection systems. You have completed a transition course to jet engines, but we still sell piston engines to military customers around the world. The world's air forces are switching to changing to jets and turboprops. How do you see the future of turbosuperchargers?"

"Well, they ain't nothin' new, but there are still thousands of piston-engined aircraft still in frontline service and will be for the foreseeable future. Until jets can fly for ten hours at a stretch on maritime patrols..."

That reply had the panel nodding again.  A few more formalities, and then "Mr Martin, would you mind waiting outside a few minutes while we reach a decision?"  He thanked them and went out into the corridor and lit up a cigarette. 

Five minutes passed; the door opened and the Air Force officer stepped out. In his hand, what looked like an airline ticket. "Congratulations, Mr Martin – you have the job. We want you to start straight away. Here's a travel voucher to New York City.

[Continues into this short story, written 18 months ago.]

This time last year:
Cleaning it up

This time two years ago:
Ciechanów

This time seven years ago:
It's the 31st of May and where's the viaduct?

This time nine years ago:
My mother's little suitcase – on show at the national army museum
(from June 2025-September 2026 it's showing at Kraków's Schindler's Factory museum)

This time ten years ago:
Stormy end to May

This time 11 years ago:
Where's it better to live: London or Warsaw?

This time 12 years ago:
Jeziorki, magic hour, late-May

This time 14 years ago:
Świdnica, one of Poland's lesser-known pearls

This time 17 years ago:
Spirit of place

Kodachrome moods

Visually, the most beautiful time of year? The whiteness of the clouds, the blueness of the sky, the greenness of the land. Bathe in the qualia, wallow; relish. Out with the camera, polarising filter fixed, giving a true representation of what I see through my sunglasses. No tweaking of saturation or vibrance in Photoshop – only a slight tweak of dehazing  and texture sliders to pull out more detail from shadows and highlights. The most important thing with landscape photography – to faithfully capture what I saw and felt at the moment.

Below: approaching the end of my lane. Agriculture abounds. It is dry for the time of year; farmers need to irrigate.

Below: to quote Charles Trenet: "Au ciel d'été confond/Ses blancs moutons/Avec les anges si purs". However, to quote George Michael, "All that's missing is the sea". Somewhere south-east of Jakubowizna.

Below: along asphalt new from Machcin II towards Dąbrowa Duża (left) and Gaj Żelechowski (right)

Below: classic Chynów landscape; verdant vegetation of late May, flawlessly blue sky and the dusty track that leads on to Adamów Rososki and Grabina.

Below: round the corner from home, the road to Grobice. New houses are being built here. But just look at that sky... that dreamy sky...

Back in the old days of film photography, my favourite stock for days like this used to be Kodachrome 25 ASA, ultra-fine grained film, or failing that, the 64 ASA version. The film needed to be just slightly underexposed (by a third or two-thirds of an f/stop) to get the best colour saturation. Once taken, the film was sent to Kodak's labs for processing and returned by mail in the form of 35mm slides, in cardboard mounts. For use in slideshows. Getting a print from the slide was horribly expensive and in 95% of the time, disappointing. Today, you can digitally tweak colour temperature, exposure, saturation – dozens of parameters – in Photoshop until you end up with an emotionally satisfying image that precisely matches your qualia at the moment you took the photo. Back then, you got one chance to get it right.

Left: a Kodachrome, taken in... well, this is intriguing. The photograph was taken in 1939. In New York City. At the World's Fair. The Polish Pavilion. The tower standing outside the pavilion was a synthesis of a mediaeval fortress and modern skyscraper. Found on Wikipedia's page about... Kodachrome!

Experiencing such scenes, I get feelings of anemoia (nostalgia for an era I didn't live through) or exomnesia (memories from outside my time and place). Good. They bring deep joy and a sense of connectedness with the Infinite and Eternal.

This time four years ago:
These are signs, tokens

This time five years ago:

Am I a serious man?

This time six years ago:
Sunset's trip

This time 12 years ago
The importance of the rucksack for the body

This time 15 years ago:
How I almost saved Barack Obama

This time 17 years ago:
Some anniversaries missed

This time 18 years ago:
Twilight in the garden

This time 19 years ago:
Hissing of the summer lawns

The Five Newcomers

Here they are - in order of weight. All are grey, like their father. It's too early to tell if any are longhairs like their mother, but the stumpy-tail gene is present in three of them.

Weighing in at 91 grams on the evening of Day 1 (so about 15 hours old), this character: a lovely uniform mid-grey colour on top. Stumpy tail. [Update 28 May: weight 120g.]

The second 91-grammer is grey with white undersides that meet up in a white collar. Pink fingers and toes, and a regular tail.

Next in weight, a pair of 90-gram specimens. Grey, with tabby markings, white undersides and collar. Also has pink hands and feet. 

The second 90-grammer is an overall grey tabby, with no white coloration on the upper surfaces, and another stumpy tail:

Finally, the lightest of the litter, another overall grey tabby, with regular tail. The weight - 77 grams - gave me cause for concern, as healthy birth weight for a kitten ranges from 85-115g. However, as I write this, I have weighed this individual again today, aged 36 hours, and it's a pleasing 87 grams; putting on 10g a day is healthy weight gain at this early age. [By the morning of 28 May, it's 107g.]

Too early to check for sex, or to detect any character traits that might lead to a name-choice (as in the case of their uncle Scrapper who was an evident scrapper from the outset).

Céleste, like her mother before her, is an absolute star when it comes to motherhood. Fussing over the little ones, ensuring all get fair access to nipples, minimising time out of the birthing box to visit feeding bowl and litter tray, Céleste is diligent and scrupulous.

Grandma Wenusia and wujek Pacio both entered my bedroom, looked into the birthing box, and hissed. But then they both hissed at Hipek when he joined the colony as the only unrelated cat, which suggests that dislike of the Other might be a genetic trait. Scrapper and Czester both looked in and registered no reaction whatever. Arcturus hasn't even bothered to visit. The nicest reaction was from Hipek; he came, he looked into the birthing box, and stared at the new life inside for quite a while in silence.

This time two years ago:
Coffee Time

This time ten years ago:
Call it what it is: Okęcie

This time 11 years ago:
Three stations in need of repair

This time 12 years ago
Late evening, Śródmieście

This time 13 years ago:
Ranking a better life

This time 15 years ago:
Paysages de Varsovie

This time 16 years ago:
Spring walk, twilight time

New life (again!)

Around quarter past two this morning, Céleste began giving birth, with the fifth kitten popping out at exactly 03:03. Céleste has been visibly pregnant for the last few weeks, waddling around, but still being capable of a blistering turn of speed when running with her brothers in the garden. 

Since last Thursday, when for an hour or so she lay next to the kitchen table panting quickly, I knew it would be any day now. Yesterday evening, all the other cats moved out for the night – Céleste remained alone in the house. She followed me into my bedroom, where the birthing box stood. I went to bed around nine and was woken up by miaowing; soft bedside lamp on, and there it was, the miracle of new life. Photo below taken in low light; the first kitten is out and still soggy with afterbirth.

This is the third time I witnessed the birth of kittens; a profoundly moving experience. Each successive time it becomes more so. I can now imagine the kittens morphing into adolescent cats by autumn; prime kittenhood (oohs and aahs) does not last long.

Tiny paws tangled in umbilical cord; bloody fur, lots of licking. Tiny parcels of dark, wet, squealing fur on wet towelling and wet cardboard.

After five hours of Céleste's constant licking off the bloody afterbirth, I can see that the dominant colour among the kittens is grey, confirming my suspicions as to paternity – the grey-and-white tabby tom who'd turn up on the dziaka in early spring, ready to father at the earliest conceivable opportunity. The photo below was taken on 10 March, so about a fortnight before insemination.

Céleste is 11 months and 10 days old today, so a couple of months older than her mother was. She has always been a patient cat, never miaowing to be let out or to be fed, just standing by the door or by the bowl; and so it was with her birth. No noise, no drama, just quietly getting on with it.

Céleste gave birth on the same towel, in the same birthing box, in the same place (corner of my bedroom), where she was born. A sense of continuity.  Unlike her mother, who showed signs of anxiety whenever my head hovered over the box, Céleste was perfectly comfortable with my presence around her and her kittens, but then she has been familiar with my presence since the very beginning of her life.

So – I'm now up to 12 cats. Wenusia, her children Scrapper, Arcturus, Pacyfik, Czester and Céleste, Hipek the old stray I took in two months ago, plus now the new five of Céleste's. Will I keep all five? We'll see. Assuming there's a female or two in the litter, will I keep them to procreate further? Probably not. 

In the meanwhile, it's Babcia Wenusia, Uncle Scrapper, Wujek Arkcio, Wujek Pacio and Wujek Czestuś to you and me.

Coping with seven is no problem. I just have to buy more cat food. But coping with 12? Again, we'll see.

Why would a billionaire want more money? A man's wealth is expressed in cats.

This time last year:
Birdland

This time three years ago:
De-growth – a personal manifesto

This time four years ago:
Start Late, Finish Late – more on the Speed of Life

This time nine years ago:
Swans' way

This time ten years ago:
Sam Smith, Shepherd Neame and the Routemaster bus

This time 12 years ago:
Rainy night in Jeziorki – no flood this time!

This time 13 years ago:
Wide-angle under Pl. Wilsona

This time 14 years ago:
Ranking a better life

This time 15 years ago:
Questions about our biology and spirituality

This time 16 years ago:
Paysages de Varsovie

This time 17 years ago:
Spring walk, twilight time

The demand chain and behavioural economics

Not far from home there's a scrapyard; hundreds of cars, piled one on top of another, awaiting final breakdown into reusable parts and eventual smelting. 

If only the planet's automotive companies put as much effort into keeping old cars roadworthy as they do in manufacturing and marketing new ones!

Yesterday, I filled up the Micra for the first time since the 19th of December. Since that day, the 21-year-old car has been driven 724 kilometres (450 miles). I'm getting 18.4km to the litre or 52 miles per (UK) gallon. Other than the big weekly shop in Warka (exactly 18.4km away), I hardly drive the car at all. For the first seven weeks of 2026, the car didn't move because there was too much snow, and the salt used to clear the roads is dreadfully corrosive to the car's undersides. I hope to keep the Micra running for many, many years. Following classic-car Facebook accounts, if cars I remember from childhood are still in regular use today, why can't a 2005 car be around in 2070?

The scrapheap on the DK50 at Nowe Grobice is full of cars that I'm sure could have been repaired and kept going for years had there been a will to do so. Many owners get caught in the following trap: "My car's worth €5,000. It will cost me €3,000 to fix. So I will sell it for five and use the three set aside for fixing it to buy a used car for €8,000." And then they end up buying one for ten. "But it's got all the options." The idea that an old car is beyond economic repair is what fills the scrapyards to the brim.

I was particularly sad to see an Audi A2 up there. It was a car built before the current craze for oversized SUVs, a car with an aluminium space-frame body, light in weight and resistant to corrosion. 

With a diesel engine, it could cover 33.3km on one litre or 94.2 miles per (UK) gallon. Surely, this is the sort of car the world needed? Well, it turns out that – no. After a mere five years in production, the last Audi A2 rolled off the production line in August 2005. Today, Audi produces five saloons (also offered in hatchback/estate versions) and eight SUVs. 

The smallest car in Audi's current line-up, the A3, takes up 22% more roadspace (7.9m² vs. 6.4m²); in its base version, the A3 weighs 35% more than the A2. In stop-start urban traffic, the A2 can cover over 18km on one litre of diesel, while the A3 can only cover 14km, what with having to accelerate that extra bulk every time the lights turn green. And for the gentle, rural driving that I do, an A2 can cover over 26km on a litre – something impossible for even the most feather-footed A3 driver [Data via Google Gemini.]

Meanwhile, I am being bombarded by online ads for new cars. No – I will not buy one. I would rather sink thousands of zlotys into keeping the old Micra roadworthy than to walk into a showroom to buy a brand new car.

We talk of 'supply chains'. What about 'demand chains'? ChatGPT defines demand chain as "the sequence of activities through which customer need is identified, stimulated and converted into profitable orders." Note use of the term 'customer need'. Our needs are for most part simple; our wants are complex and latently profitable. The demand chain is about reframing our desires – often spurious or frivolous – as necessities.

I've been interested by the concept of behavioural economics for a long time. It is the main reason why economists can't predict the future: the infinite complexity of the market behaviour of eight billion individuals. Like the butterfly in your garden whose flapping wings unleash a typhoon in Indonesia, one person's decision not to buy a winter coat can result in the closure of a garment factory in Brazil.

Endless economic growth is predicated by consumers' insatiable appetite for more, stoked by the demand chain.  A consumer may begin with a vague want – comfort, status, convenience, security, belonging, self-expression, relief from anxiety. The market then supplies the narrative machinery that frames that vague want into something harder to resist: a need.

How many times have you caught yourself saying "this is not indulgence; this is self-care," or  "this is not luxury; it is an investment," or "this is not about convenience, it's about productivity." A crucial part of the demand chain is the psychological conversion mechanism: transforming an entirely discretionary desire into a seemingly rational expenditure decision. And this works so well in the clothing industry.

For the good of the planet, for the good of your bank account, doing less is not necessarily the answer; the real answer is wanting less. To quote epigramologist Jacek Koba, "happiness is when the ratio of your expectations to your reality is 1:1".

This time last year:
The pareidolias of smell

This time two years ago:
Qualia compilation 7: Motorways at night, Yorkshire

[An unbidden memory from 50 years ago unlocks memories from past life.]

This time four years ago:
Interstices (junction of S7 and S2 expressways just ahead of its opening to traffic)

This time five years ago:
Joys of Spring

This time six years ago:
Jeziorki in May

This time seven years ago:

Spitalfields and Smithfields – more from London

This time nine years ago

That tune going round your head now...

This time ten years ago:
The eyes... the eyes... 

This time 11 years ago:
New old terminal open at Okęcie airport

This time 13 years ago:
Arrogance vs. humility 

This time 14 years ago:
Warsaw looking good ahead of the football-fan influx

This time 15 years ago:
Heron over Jeziorki

This time 19 years ago:
Present rising, future loading

Plato, God and the Afterlife

Threaded through Plato's treatise about the State are many references to God and the Afterlife. It is, after all, natural to assume that in the pre-Modern world practically everyone believed in some sort of God or other. The Greeks had their myths, their polytheistic pantheon of Gods, and Plato assumed that these Gods were associated with the mythos of the Hellenic peoples. Though when Plato refers to God, he does so in the singular. 

In his ideal state, the mythos must be protected. Poets who subvert tales of the Gods, who ascribe evil intent to the actions of the Gods, should be banned (Homer included). Very much in the vein of Putin.

Plato is at his most specific when it comes to setting out his spiritual vision right at the end of The Republic, in the second half of Book X. He tells (through the narrator, Socrates) the Myth of Er. 

A slain warrior who returns to life after 12 days, to recount what he had just witnessed. As Er tells it, when his soul left his body, it "went on a journey with a great company" to a place of judgment, "at which there were two openings in the earth; they were near together, and over against them were two other openings in the heaven above. In the intermediate space there were judges seated, who commanded the just, after they had given judgment on them and had bound their sentences in front of them, to ascend by the heavenly way on the right hand; and in like manner the unjust were bidden by them to descend by the lower way on the left hand". This is familiar to the Christian; God at the Last Judgment, separating the good from the bad, the left and the right, the sheep from the goats.

But what happens next is more in the Eastern traditions of Hinduism or Buddhism: "Mortal souls, behold a new cycle of life and mortality. Your genius will not be allotted to you, but you will choose your genius; and let him who draws the first lot have the first choice, and the life which he chooses shall be his destiny. Virtue is free, and as a man honors or dishonors her he will have more or less of her; the responsibility is with the chooser—God is justified."

The soul chooses for itself a new, different, life. The choice of new life is crucial, for it is part of the continual upward spiral of spiritual improvement, with each successive life being better than the last – if the right choice is made. And this choice, claims Plato, must be framed in moral and ethical terms. "Learn and discern between good and evil, and so to choose always the better life." 

Er speaks of a soul that chose the life of a tyrant, "his mind having been darkened by folly and sensuality; he had not thought out the whole matter before he chose, and did not at first sight perceive that he was fated, among other evils, to devour his own children". Our souls are to be "schooled by trial". Plato's recipe for a happy life on this earth is to dedicate yourself to "sound philosophy". 

Plato and I see the process of reincarnation in the Hindu way; a continual upward spiral of spiritual improvement. One life isn't anywhere near long enough to fulfil a soul's purpose. "What was ever great in a shirt time? The whole period of three score years and ten is surely a little thing in comparison with eternity?" "The soul of a man is immortal and imperishable ... there is no difficulty in proving it."

Plato states something that I have long held to be true; that evil is equivalent to entropy. "The corrupting and destroying element is the evil, and the saving and improving element is the good", he says. He compares disease in humans, mildew in corn, rot in wood and the rust of iron with the evils that corrupt the soul: unrighteousness, unbridled appetite and ignorance.

"The soul which cannot be destroyed by an evil must exist forever, and if existing forever, must be immortal," writes Plato.

And so, to the final sentence of the final part of the most influential book in Western philosophy: "Thus shall we live dear to one another and to the gods, both while remaining here and when, like conquerors in the games who go round to gather gifts, we receive our reward. And it shall be well with us both in this life and in the pilgrimage of a thousand years which we have been describing."

Saṃsāra.

This time last year:
Mornings with My Cat, Mii

This time eight years ago:
Black-necked grebes hatch

This time nine years ago:
To Warka in the sunshine

This time 13 years ago:
The descriptive vs. the prescriptive

This time 14 yeas ago: 
Noc Muzeów – night of pride in being Polish

This time 18 years ago:
Why Poland can no longer afford to keep the grosz
[It's still here. If you find one in your change – keep it.]

Plato and politics

The Republic is remarkable for the light it sheds on the human condition. This 2,400-year-old treatise about making society – made up of flawed humans – work remains even more relevant today than when it was written. Its implications are global, rather than concerning city-states of Ancient Greece. 

Reading Plato today in a 19th-century translation is slightly jarring as it casts Victorian shade over a work which is 2,400 years old; but as I discovered yesterday, the version I read had a massive influence on the development of modern Britain, and thus the world.

Benjamin Jowett’s translation entered university libraries almost immediately after its publication in 1871. It became the dominant English-language academic Plato for generations because of Jowett’s immense influence within the Victorian Oxbridge intellectual establishment. This influence is to be felt to the present day, about which, more below.

The Republic's central premise is a thought-experiment. It posits the ideal state as imagined by 'Socrates' (Plato's narrator – the real Socrates didn't leave any writings). 'Socrates' suggests that the state should be ruled by a class of Guardians, whose one aim in life is to rule the state; they should indeed be brought into the world with this express intention. A caste of high-born philosopher-kings, they should not possess wealth, but be provided for by the rest of the state's citizens – the cobblers, the shipwrights, the bakers, the farmers, the builders and everyone else. The Guardians should be the children of renowned warriors, they should be generalists rather than specialists. Controversially, they should share their wives in common, and bring up their children in common.

Did Plato really believe this to be an ideal form of governance? Or was it a narrative device? A conceit designed to provoke thought – in today's parlance... to trigger?

Plato identifies various forms of government: aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy and tyranny. Familiar terms to us today, but Plato uses them slightly differently, attaching different values to them. Tyranny, of course, being the worst, then, as now. But democracy he sees as a form of mob rule, where the majority can hold undue sway over the minority; the free poor can get together and say "there's more of us than there are of the rich – let us pass laws that allow us to seize their wealth." However, avoiding the rule of tyrants was the greatest challenge for society.

Plato identifies the drive for money and power as the key to understanding the motivation of tyrants. Appetite – lust for power, for glory, for wealth – is why rulers slip away from idealised forms of government towards more corrupt polities. You only need to look at contemporary America and Russia to see how true Plato's insights remains some two and half millennia on.

At the heart of politics sits personality and human behaviour. Not ideology. A fucked-up mind within an untiring, driven body, obsessively seeking power, wealth, and in some cases adulation, turning power into wealth and wealth into more power – this is Plato's tyrant. We see this so clearly today. Ideology is merely a means to the end rather than being an end in itself. "Vote for me, because I hate those whom you hate" has replaced "vote for me and I'll give you the rich man's money".

Plato's Republic serves as a timeless warning to societies to watch out for those who seek to rule over us. Plato argues that a decent and stable society can exist only when the qualities of justice, truth and goodness govern both the individual and the state. He commends rule by philosophically educated guardians who subordinate their private interest to the common good. 

Back to Jowett. This ideal filtered through into the British Civil Service (after the Northcote-Trevelyan report of 1854. Its full title was: Report on the Organisation of the Permanent Civil Service, Together with a Letter from the Rev. B. Jowett. Yes, that Benjamin Jowett of Balliol College, Oxford, who would go on to translate Plato's The Republic.

The result would be a close real-world approximation to a Platonic administrative elite, though moderated by parliamentary democracy. Plato set out that rulers should not seek wealth, that rule should belong to the educated and morally disciplined, and that within the ruling class, appetite must be subordinated to the common good. The Victorian reformers believed that public office should not be a source of private wealth or patronage. Entry into the Civil Service should be by ability, not connections, and an ethos of integrity, duty and competence should govern, not avarice or party interest.

Plato's observations about tyrants' appetites squares with modern warnings about the 'dark triad' of narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism. Rising politicians who display these traits (especially if they are capable of masking them!) need weeding out as they gain power, before their innate characteristics – indeed their personality disorders – can turn into tyrants. 

In my next post, I shall turn to what Plato had to say about God, the soul and the afterlife.

This time four years ago:
The speed of life

This time five years ago:
Does it all come right in the end?

This time six years ago:

Self-discipline and creativity during the lockdown

This time seven years ago:

Russia's Far East on road maps

This time eight years ago:
Heavenly Jeziorki

This time 12 years ago:
Why are all the shops shut today? 

This time 13 years ago:
Jeziorki at its most beautiful

This time 15 years ago:
Useful and useless in my wallet

This time 16 years ago:
In search of the dream klimat - remote viewing made real

This time 17 years ago:
Zakopane to Kraków in 3hrs 45min
[Less than two hours today.]