a colourful sort⌗

‘Yes, that’s because it is very enjoyable.’ ‘But perhaps you’d say that it isn’t compatible with our community’s political system,’ I went on, ‘because each of our people has a single job to do, and therefore none of them is two-sided or many-sided.’ ‘That’s right: it’s incompatible.’ - Republic: ‘Primary Education for the Guardians.’

They are talking about whether or not to remove certain lines and passages from the Poets. Lines which represent good people being weak / gods behaving like mortals. And whether these have certain detrimental effects on growth and education. Furthermore, that the only way that one could master a form, such as tragedy, would be to stear entirely clear of farce and lunacy, as the only people who can create an immaculate representation of the evil and the insane, are they themselves. For, ‘He’ll concentrate on representing a good man who is acting reliably and in full possesion of his senses, but he’ll be less enthusiastic about and will tend to avoid representing a good man who has become unreliable as a result of illness, love, drink, or in general some catastrophe.” My interpration is that in the design for their ideal republic, they do not casually introduce deviation from the path towards their ultimate goal. As sages and philosophers, they appreciate these forces as a part of the human condition, as they exist. That in seeing the path of an immoral person fall into despair, after hearing ‘Morality, what is good for someone else, but not for myself.’ they can point to influences, and guage which of the lines would cultivate the heroic individual, and which lines cultivate the automatic curse. An argument which does not ask to remove all but the purest of form, but which introduces to the primary student, an abridged work which is representative only of the ideal. Later, different representations will be recognised on encounter. The immediate argument against this structure, is that people have to be aware of the evil, to avoid falling into their snares. This is of course true in the society as a whole. A sheltered existence does not breed confidence in the true navigation amongst the intentions of other people. But this is a republic being built as needs are uncovered by the designer, and as they would have it be brought into existence as a pure form of the possibilities of society, it is created without the true evils of the world. In this way we can picture how this system can be implemented into our own, which is mixed of representations from the radical, dark and sublime. A revolution is possible only through the dismantling of the current state, even if that is in the counterintuitive concept of shielding the new generation from the digressions it wishes to avoid. A less counterintuitive phrasing would be, the revolution is a slow process of the exclusive cultivation of goodness and positivity.