Case study: The tyrant … overhung by the sword of Damocles.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
We have to recognise that we do live in an unjust world—a stupidly unjust world. Bad people often prosper, while goodness and virtue carry no guarantee of wealth, fame, power, or even security.
But prospering is not the same as flourishing. Injustice can only secure the external goods of life. Though injustice can make us wealthy and powerful, it cannot make us wise, tranquil, or contented.
The tyrant is the perfect test case of what I’m saying. The tyrant, almost by definition, is the most unjust person, seemingly enjoying the greatest possible success. Of course, not every unjust person is a tyrant, but the tyrant reveals, in its most extreme form, what injustice does to the person who practises it.
Seneca and Nero
The Stoic philosopher Seneca, who lived in the first century CE, once wrote a long letter to the tyrannical Roman emperor, Nero. In this letter, he warns Nero that the most powerful person in a tyranny may also be the least free. We don’t know whether he actually sent the letter, but a large part of it has come down to us. It’s called On Clemency. Clemency, says Seneca, is the trait that most distinguishes a king from a tyrant—and by winning admiration and loyalty, helps to keep the king safe and free. The tyrant, on the other hand, becomes the prisoner of his own power: he is hated because he is feared, and must make himself feared because he is hated. It’s a vicious cycle. In the end, he cannot travel freely or trust even his closest advisors. He cannot sleep soundly in his bed or take his meals without fearing that someone might have poisoned his food.
Few tyrants die in their own bed, and so it proved also with Nero, who ended his own life to evade capture. He did not even have the courage to wield the dagger: his freedman had to help him drive it into his throat. His final, deluded words were: Qualis artifex pereo—‘What an artist dies in me!’ Perhaps his last thought was of Seneca.
Plato’s Tyrant
If Seneca showed us the tyrant’s political prison, Plato showed us his psychological prison, the prison inside him. The tyrant’s soul is ruled by lawless appetites which he can neither control nor satisfy. Thus, the man who appears supremely free is in fact a slave to his own deranged psychology. He has conquered everyone except himself.
In Plato’s Republic, Socrates calculates, by some fanciful Platonic mathematics, that the true king is precisely 729 times happier than the tyrant!
How to Guard Against Tyrants
But philosophy cannot content itself with pointing out that the tyrant is miserable. The fate and suffering of the tyrant hardly make up for all his injustices—for all the injustices that he imposes upon others on his way up and then on his way down. That’s why we need to have much stronger safeguards against tyrants.
To guard against the rise of a tyrant, here are three things that we could do. First, we need to make sure that a career in politics remains desirable to decent people—or end up being governed only by power-hungry people. Second, we need to strengthen education so that every citizen can recognise the tyrant’s old bag of tricks. And third, we need to bolster constitutions and institutions so that they are able to arrest the rise of a would-be tyrant, no matter how insistent or popular they may be. We have put astronauts into space, invented nuclear reactors and artificial intelligence—so this, surely, is not beyond us.
Prospering vs Flourishing
So, yes, we live in an unjust world—a stupidly unjust world. Bad people prosper, while innocent people suffer. But prospering is not the same as flourishing. Only a life well lived can lead to the true goods of life: wisdom, freedom, tranquillity, contentedness. These are all internal goods which external goods may support, but can never guarantee.
But to lead a just life is not merely a winning strategy. It is also a refusal to become a part of the problem.
Why the Best Friends Tell us What We Least Want to Hear
‘Plato is dear, but dearer still is truth’—a saying that captures Aristotle’s willingness to disagree with his teacher in the pursuit of truth, and his conviction that genuine friendship need never fear honest disagreement.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
What makes a true friend? Aristotle distinguishes friendships of utility, pleasure, and virtue—and explains why the finest friends are so rare.
Today, everyone is obsessed with romantic love. Aristotle, however, conceived of the highest human relationship in terms of friendship—the bond through which we learn to value another person for their own sake.
For the Greeks, true friendship was a rare and precious thing. In Plato’s Lysis, Socrates says, “I would rather have a real friend than all the gold of Darius [the Persian emperor], or even Darius himself.” But today, on social media, we call hundreds of people our friends.
By putting romantic love on a pedestal, we have devalued friendship. Our romantic partner is also expected to be our best friend, confidant, counsellor… As a result, other friendships may be neglected or even treated as threats.
Aristotle’s Three Kinds of Friendship
Friendship is so important to Aristotle’s account of the good life that he devotes two of the ten books of the Nicomachean Ethics to it.
Aristotle famously distinguishes between three kinds of friendship: friendships of utility, friendships of pleasure, and friendships of virtue. In a friendship of utility, we value them for what they can bring us. In a friendship of pleasure, we value them for the enjoyment they provide. These relationships are not necessarily base: colleagues, neighbours, and tennis partners may genuinely like and help one another.
But the limitation of these first two kinds of friendship lies in their reason for being: when the advantage or pleasure fades, the friendship fades with it.
Why Perfect Friends Are Rare
Lasting friendships, on the other hand, are based on character or virtue: each friend values the other, not for what he brings, but for who he is. The friend’s wellbeing and flourishing become part of our own.
Because we are invested in the wellbeing and flourishing of our friend, we owe them the hard truth—and expect the same thing in return. A real friend does not simply accept us as we are, but recognises our potential and helps us become what we could be.
That’s why “perfect friendship”, as Aristotle calls it, is not for everyone. Most people would sooner ghost us than listen to the truth about themselves—particularly now, when there are so many less demanding distractions around. Whereas social media affirms our public image, true friends challenge the person underneath.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Happiness exists—but as a fleeting feeling, not a permanent state.
No one can remain cheerful all the time. Nor should they want to. A life without sadness would be shallow and dishonest, scarcely a human life at all. Our sadness is often the measure of what we value: we grieve because we have loved, worry because we care, and struggle because something matters.
Part of the problem with happiness is contained in the word itself. In English, happy is related to happen, which derives from the Old Norse happ, meaning fortune or luck. Like luck, happiness is something that happens to us. It comes and goes, often without asking our permission.
That is why happiness is such a poor goal. If we make a passing feeling our chief aim, we condemn ourselves to chasing it. Worse, we begin to monitor ourselves continually: Am I happy yet? Am I as happy as yesterday? Am I as happy as my friends appear to be?
The more we scrutinise our happiness, the more dissatisfied and self-absorbed we become. Happiness is turned into a performance indicator—and almost invariably found wanting.
From Happiness to Flourishing
The Spanish word for happiness points in a different direction. Feliz derives from the Latin felix, which originally meant fruitful, fertile, or productive. Whereas the English word points to fortune, the Spanish word points to fertility: not merely to how we feel, but to what we bring forth.
The Ancient Greeks aimed higher still. They called their ideal eudaimonia, which is often translated as “happiness” but is better understood as flourishing. Literally, eudaimonia means something like being possessed of a good spirit or divinity. It is not simply about feeling good, but about living well—leading a life that is worthwhile, fulfilling, and elevating.
Unlike happiness, flourishing can contain a great deal of unhappiness. Indeed, grief, struggle, and sacrifice may belong to our finest achievements and relationships. Raising a child, writing a book, caring for a dying parent, or standing up for a principle may bring anxiety, exhaustion, or pain. Yet we would not therefore wish these things out of our lives.
A pleasant life is not necessarily a good life, and a good life is not always pleasant. If we lived badly, what could it mean to be happy except to feel good about the wrong things?
What Cannot Be Taken Away
Socrates supplied the extreme test. The Athenians condemned him and made him drink the hemlock. But although they could put him to death, they could not take away who he was or how he had lived. They could take his life, but they could not make it a bad one.
Indeed, by killing him, they made him greater. His death became the final proof of his philosophy and transformed his life into an example for all humanity.
Aristotle, the intellectual grandson of Socrates, made flourishing an activity rather than a mood. Eudaimonia, he argued, consists in developing and exercising what is best in us—reason, judgement, and character—across the whole course of a life. It cannot be reduced to manufacturing a pleasant but insubstantial state of mind.
That’s why happiness often arrives when we are not looking for it: while absorbed in a friendship, a landscape, a piece of music, or some difficult and worthwhile work. At such moments, we are not standing apart from life to assess it. We are living it.
So, yes, happiness exists—but chiefly as a by-product, not an aim in itself.
Instead of asking, “Am I happy?” we should ask, “Am I living well?” and “What am I becoming?”
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
If you are brilliant and know that you are brilliant, is it arrogant to say so? And if you pretend that you are not, is that humility—or merely modesty?
‘Modesty’ and ‘humility’ are often used interchangeably, but they are actually very different concepts.
‘Modesty’ derives from the Latin modus, ‘measure’ or ‘manner’, and means restraint in appearance and behaviour. It is the reluctance to flaunt, display, or otherwise draw attention to oneself.
Modesty often implies a certain artfulness or artificiality, perhaps even insincerity or hypocrisy. In Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850), Uriah Heep is characterised by his obsequiousness, and often brings up his own ‘umbleness’ in an attempt to disguise the true scale of his ambition. Modesty often poses as humility, but, unlike humility, is superficial and external rather than deep and moral. At best, modesty is no more than good manners.
Indeed, modesty can sometimes be a subtle form of vanity or advantage-seeking. By conspicuously understating some trait or achievement, we may be inviting others to contradict and praise us, or to like us better. The ego has not disappeared; it has merely become more cunning.
‘Humility’, like ‘humiliation’, derives from the Latin humus, ‘earth’ or ‘dirt’. Unlike mere modesty, true humility derives from a proper perspective on our human condition: one among billions on a small planet among billions, like a spore on a crumb of cheese.
Of course, it is nearly impossible for human beings to remain this objective for very long, but truly humble people are nonetheless far more conscious of their cosmic insignificance, an insignificance that verges on non-existence. A speck of dust does not think itself superior or inferior to another, nor does it concern itself with what other specks of dust might or might not think.
Enthralled by the miracle of existence, the truly humble person lives not for herself or her image, but for life itself.
In sum, to be humble is to subdue our ego so that things are no longer all about us, whereas to be modest is to protect the ego of others so that they do not feel uncomfortable, threatened, or small, and attack us in turn.
Because genuinely humble people often have a great deal to be modest about, they may need to slap on an extra thick veneer of modesty, or simply give up the game.
Humble people do not, as is often thought, have a low opinion of themselves. Instead, they have an accurate opinion of themselves, and, probably, of us as well. They neither elevate nor diminish themselves, but seek to see themselves and everything else for what they truly are. Erasmus (d. 1536) could not have put it more pithily when he said, ‘Humility is truth.’
If humility is truth, modesty is often a lie—so that the two can sometimes come into conflict. Modesty may require us to gloss over the truth to spare the feelings of others; humility, on the other hand, may demand that we speak the truth. Whereas Uriah Heep was modest without being humble, Socrates was humble without always being modest.
The Case of Socrates
In 399 BCE, at the age of seventy, Socrates was indicted for impiety. He was accused of ‘studying things in the sky and below the earth’, ‘making the worse into the stronger argument’, and ‘teaching these same things to others’.
At his trial, he gave a defiant defence, telling the jurors that they ought to be ashamed of their eagerness to possess as much wealth and reputation as possible, while not caring for or giving thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of their soul.
After being convicted and sentenced to death, Socrates addressed the jurors, saying:
You think that I was convicted through deficiency of words—I mean, that if I had thought fit to leave nothing undone, nothing unsaid, I might have gained an acquittal. Not so; the deficiency which led to my conviction was not of words—certainly not. But I had not the boldness or impudence or inclination to address you as you would have liked me to address you, weeping and wailing and lamenting, and saying and doing many things which you have been accustomed to hearing from others, and which, as I say, are unworthy of me. But I thought that I ought not to do anything common or mean in the hour of danger: nor do I now repent of the manner of my defence, and I would rather die having spoken after my manner, than speak in your manner and live.
Throughout his long life, Socrates had been a paragon of humility. When his friend Chaerephon asked the Delphic oracle if anyone was wiser than Socrates, the priestess of Apollo replied that no one was wiser. To discover the meaning of this divine utterance, Socrates questioned a number of people with a claim to wisdom, and in each case concluded, ‘I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.’ From then on, he dedicated himself to the service of the gods by seeking out anyone who might be wise and, ‘if he is not, showing him that he is not.’
Was Socrates lacking in humility before the jurors? Was he, paradoxically, being arrogant by bragging about his humility? Perhaps he deliberately put on a brazen display because he wanted to die, because he understood that by dying a martyr his teachings would be preserved for posterity.
Or perhaps genuine humility can seem like arrogance to those who are truly arrogant.
The more arrogant someone is, the more modesty they require from others.
The West’s Dangerous Obsession With Analytical Intelligence
The Oracle at Delphi. The West before the West.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Everyone wants to be intelligent. But no one is quite intelligent enough to know what intelligence is.
There is no agreed definition or model of intelligence. By the Collins English Dictionary, intelligence is ‘the ability to think, reason, and understand instead of doing things automatically or by instinct’. By the Macmillan Dictionary, it is ‘the ability to understand and think about things, and to gain and use knowledge’.
In seeking to define intelligence, a good place to start might be with dementia. In Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, multiple higher cortical functions are disturbed, including memory, thinking, orientation, comprehension, calculation, learning capacity, language, and judgement. In my time, I have worked with over a thousand people with dementia, and I think it significant that they, along with people with severe learning disabilities, cope very poorly with changes to their environment, such as moving into a care home or even into an adjacent room.
Taken together, this suggests that, at its broadest, intelligence refers to the functioning of a number of related faculties and abilities that enable us to adapt and respond to environmental pressures. Because this is not beyond animals and even plants, they too may be said to be possessed of ‘intelligence’.
We Westerners tend to think of intelligence in terms of analytical skills. But in a close-knit hunter-gatherer society, intelligence might be defined more in terms of foraging skills, hunting skills, or social skills and responsibilities. Even within a single society, the skills that are most valued change over time.
In the West, the emphasis has gradually shifted from language skills to more purely analytical skills, and it is only in 1960, well within living memory, that the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge dropped Latin as an entry requirement.
In 1990, Peter Salovey and John Mayer published the seminal paper on emotional intelligence, and EI quickly became all the rage. In that same year, Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser. Today, we cannot go very far without having some considerable IT skills (certainly by the standards of 1990, or even 2010), and computer scientists are among the most highly paid professionals.
All this to say that what constitutes intelligence can vary quite considerably according to our values and priorities.
The West Before the West
The Western privileging of analytical skills is rooted in Ancient Greece—but the story is more complicated than it first appears.
Before Socrates, there was the Oracle at Delphi. For centuries, prominent Greeks travelled to Delphi to consult the Pythia, the priestess of Apollo, whose cryptic pronouncements were thought to issue from the god of light. One of these pronouncements concerned Socrates himself.
According to Plato and Xenophon, Socrates’ friend Chaerephon asked the oracle whether anyone was wiser than Socrates. The Pythia replied in the negative. When Socrates found out about this, he did not know what to make of it. So he went about questioning one man after another, first the politicians, then the poets, and then the craftsmen, and found that those with the greatest reputation for wisdom were, in fact, the most foolish of them all. By this exercise, he came to understand the oracle’s meaning: that the wisdom of men is little or nothing, and those who know this are as wise as any man can be. Inspired by this revelation, he entered the service of Apollo, seeking out anyone who laid claim to wisdom and putting his wisdom to the test.
Thus, one of the founding stories of Western rationalism begins not with some argument, but with a rather irrational oracle.
Socrates held that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’. He typically taught by the dialectic or Socratic method, that is, by questioning one or more people about a particular concept such as courage or justice to expose a contradiction in their initial assumptions and provoke a reappraisal of the concept.
But even Socrates, the great champion of rational enquiry, made room for another kind of knowing. At various times, he claimed to have a daimonion or ‘divine sign’, an inner voice or intuition that prevented him from making grave mistakes such as going into politics or fleeing Athens after having been sentenced to death. When, in Plato’s Crito, his friends urge him to flee Athens, he refuses on the authority of his daimonion: ‘This is the voice which I seem to hear murmuring in my ears, like the sound of the flute in the ears of the mystic; this voice, I say, is humming in my ears, and prevents me from hearing any other.’
So here we have it: the father of Western rationalism, in hock to some mysterious voice.
The Rule of Reason
Plato and Aristotle built upon the legacy of Socrates, while underplaying his more mystical side.
For Plato, reason could carry us far beyond the confines of common sense and everyday experience into a ‘hyper-heaven’ (Greek, hyperouranos) of ideal forms. He famously fantasised about putting a geniocracy of philosopher kings in charge of his utopic Republic.
Aristotle—who for centuries came to be known simply as ‘our Master’—argued that our distinctive function as human beings is our unique capacity to reason, and therefore that our supreme good and happiness consists in leading a life of rational contemplation. To paraphrase Aristotle in Book X of the Nicomachean Ethics, ‘Man more than anything is reason, and the life of reason is the most self-sufficient, the most pleasant, the happiest, the best, and the most divine of all.’
And with that, where else could the West go?
Aristotle, in the Metaphysics, also conceived of God as ‘thought thinking upon itself’ (noesis noeseos). In later centuries, reason became a divine property, found in man because made in God’s image. If you struggled with your SATs, you now know who to blame.
When Intelligence Becomes Human Worth
As I argue in Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking, the West’s obsession with analytical intelligence has had, and continues to have, dire political, social, and, above all, moral consequences.
Immanuel Kant—probably the most influential philosopher since Aristotle—most memorably made the connection between reasoning and moral standing, arguing (in simple terms) that, by virtue of their ability to reason, human beings ought to be treated, not as means to an end, but only ever as ends-in-themselves. From here, it becomes all too easy to conclude that, the better you are at reasoning, the worthier you are of personhood and its rights and privileges.
For centuries, women were deemed to be ‘emotional’, that is, irrational, or less rational, which justified treating them as chattel or, at best, second-class citizens. The same could also be said of non-white people, over whom it was not just the right but the duty of the white man to rule.
Rudyard Kipling’s poem The White Man’s Burden (1899) begins with the lines: Take up the White Man’s burden–/ Send forth the best ye breed–/ Go bind your sons to exile/ To serve your captives’ need;/ To wait in heavy harness/ On fluttered folk and wild–/ Your new-caught, sullen peoples,/ Half-devil and half-child.
Although this sounds appalling today, at the time most of Kipling’s countrymen would have approved of the sentiment. In his lifetime, Kipling was offered (and turned down) a knighthood, the position of Poet Laureate, and the Order of Merit. He was not writing from the fringes.
People deemed to be less rational—women, non-white people, the lower classes, the infirm, the ‘deviant’—were not just disenfranchised but dominated, colonised, enslaved, murdered, and sterilised, in all impunity. As late as 2015, Virginia agreed to compensate surviving victims of its state-sponsored sterilisation programme for, among others, the ‘feeble-minded’.
Today, of all people, it is the white man (that is, the white male) who most fears artificial intelligence, imagining that it will usurp his status and privilege.
But even on its own terms, analytical intelligence is not quite what we make of it.
According to science, IQ is the best predictor of job performance. But that is not altogether surprising given that ‘performance’ and IQ have been defined in similar and overlapping terms, and that both depend, at least to some extent, on third factors such as compliance, motivation, and educational attainment.
Genius, in contrast, is more a matter of drive, vision, creativity, and luck or opportunity, and it is notable that the threshold IQ for genius—probably around 125—is not all that high.
William Shockley and Luis Walter Alvarez, who both went on to win the Nobel Prize for physics, were excluded from the Terman Study of the Gifted on account of… their unremarkable IQ scores.
In later life, Shockley developed controversial views on race and eugenics, using his ‘formidable intellect’ to make claims about the intelligence and worth of others.
And so it was that a Nobel Prize winner who had failed to qualify as ‘gifted’ came to advocate eugenic measures on the basis of supposed differences in intelligence.
Of course, analytical intelligence is of value. But it is not intuition, it is not imagination, and it is not wisdom.
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