If our public philosophy can give us no indication of what life is really all about, then it has failed us and is of no use at all. If it is a poor thing of patched together social anodynes and rewards at the end of rainbows, then we shall have confusion, social unrest and eventual breakdown. Indeed we are having them. Not everyone can succumb readily to the social cynicism of the middle aged and to comatose consumption of what the entertainment industry has to offer.
The public philosophy must give convincing answers to the big questions. They must be answers which can be challenged, debated and discussed. For if they cannot they are false, leading into darkness and to death.
This is a tall order but since a public philosophy is a good thing there are many cheap and tawdry imitations and of these, most are either nasty or dangerous, or both. A ruling elite whether military, clerical or of social class, does not like this open public debate of its ideas and its ideals. It believes that the peasants are there to obey their masters not to question them. This is the great weakness of the false philosophy and the strength of the genuine article.
The public philosophy has to be internally consistent, for if it contradicts itself then it is as weak as the proverbial house of cards. Public discussion and argument is the safeguard to uncover the internal weaknesses and contradictions. No one who seeks the truth and the good lives in fear of debate but welcomes it for he knows he can only learn from the ideas and opinions of others. No one who seeks the truth and the good, will insist that he is always right for he knows the weakness of his humanity and will even welcome his flaws to be revealed that he may do his best to correct them.
The public philosophy is hammered out on the anvil of good-natured discussion and more formal debate. As Socrates is alleged to have said. "Man's greatest privilege is the discussion of virtue."
There must be continuous discussion; a dialog where each is prepared to listen to all and all to each. Where only the person who insists he cannot be wrong may be excluded until he comes to a better frame of mind. This one thing is certain that none of us is always right, indeed we are all, often mistaken.
Elites, inevitably, fall prey to delusions of infallibility. Their privileged positions, confirm their assumed superiorities of birth, of education, and of skills. With the same inevitability such delusions lead downwards to the abyss. As with Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Napoleon and the systems they foisted on their deluded followers. "Mussolini is always right," publicly displayed, proclaimed only that Il Duce was a dangerous crackpot and those who followed him were suffering from serious delusions. A populace drunk on the heady wine of Fascism, marched unthinking, unseeing and unheeding, down into the pit to the beat of their mad leader's drum.
The public philosophy must work of course. Fascism, Stalinism and Nazism seemed to work. but only for a time. And only because there was enough force to spur on the doubters and enough idiots chanting away in adoring worship of a man. The public philosophy will work as long as people make it work and it will work because it is unselfish and has no leader but rather is enshrined in hearts and minds.
It must be something that puts public before private good. It must think in terms of responsibilities rather than in terms of rights. It will be willing to forgo what are seen to be rights and to put others before oneself. These will not be aims put about by government propaganda. There will be no need of that, for with the good of one's neighbour seen to be the aim of the individual, government will find it has very little left to govern. For with unselfishness comes self-control. And with that, freedom.
The cheap and tawdry imitation are demanding and they drain away the spontaneity and the joy. They demand loyalty and obedience to state, to party, to leader or to cult. They take and use that loyalty for aggrandizement of state, of party, of leader, or of cult. In so doing they reduce the individual and seek to make him nothing that they may be all. Where kindliness and courtesy rule in the thinking and the care, the parties, the leaders and the cults lose all meaning and the state loses its oppressive character and its threat. The siren songs of leaders and of cults soon become a dirge, untuneful, loathsome and eventually they die away while thought for others rules.
