Stolen post but I like it.
My main problem with Plato and Confucius as far as politics go, they seem to have forgotten how the order they lived in was established in the first place.
King Wu(martial) of Zhou didn't conquer his opposition by pontificating on proper court decorum or what music is to be played when. You do that after establishing authority. If the sages like Confucius had the way of it they'd have ruled the world long ago.
Plato wanted to make an unassailable political system that would preferably be modified little if ever.
There will always be parties with an interest in changing the system. The system itself produces them, or brings them in, to cover its blind spots.
I find it strange that Plato and Confucius are pragmatic when it comes to religion (ritual should be engineered to control the masses) yet idealistic, even magical, when it comes to political thought. It's the exact reverse of reality.
It always struck me that Plato in his Republic forgot to banish the philosophers, as he did the poets.
If you want any kind of lasting order, a class of people who ask "why why why?" all the time is detrimental. We we can see philosophy constantly innovating and contradicting. A state governed by philosophers wouldn't get anything done except debate, and eventually faction, as Greek philosophy had always done.
You'd get people asking "Why do we need this class system? Why do we even believe in this Form of the Good? Why do we limit money and property?" There is no endpoint of philosophy. Eternal skepticism doesn't produce much in the way of conviction.
You couldn't have a Socrates in the Republic. He'd start demanding justifications for all the state doctrines and getting people to question them.
Plato wanted to reach a state where questioning was impossible and incoherent due to perfect state indoctrination. He was essentially trying to restore the old order that Socrates and the philosophers had dismantled in the first place.
@ubernigga That's factually true. If you kill all the people who ask why, eventually no one alive will question anything.
@ubernigga Just like with communism, it doesn't matter how many times it fails, this will never stop them from trying.
@Zeb It hasn't worked once in human history yet.