Donald Trump walks among the ancient Greeks.
Did the ancient Greeks foresee the rise of Donald Trump?
Many of us are familiar with Socrates and Plato, or at least we know they enjoyed hanging out in the public square and deflating fatuous blowhards. But they were not the first. They were preceded by a group of thinkers known as the pre-Socratics, philosophers who planted the first known seeds of what would become western thought. They asked the earliest questions about fields of inquiry that would later become physics, astronomy, cosmology, medicine, politics, justice, ethics, humanism, and much more. Considering they were active 2,600 years ago, some of their observations seem eerily applicable to Donald Trump’s run for the presidency. I guess people like Trump have been around a long time. Either that, or Trump uses a time machine to go back and harangue the Greeks of ancient times.
Heraclitus (550-490 BC) “Let us not make arbitrary conjectures about the greatest matters.” We’re going to build a wall and make the Mexicans pay for it.
“It pertains to all men to know themselves and be temperate.” “Men should speak with rational awareness.” “To extinguish hubris is more needful than to extinguish a fire.”
“Dogs bark at a person whom they do not know.” Trump supporters bark just to be barking.
“Bigotry is the sacred disease.” My favorite, for obvious reasons.
Empedocles (484-424 BC) “Each one forms opinions according to what he has chanced to experience as he drifts about, yet each vainly boasts of knowing the general nature of things.” Vain boasting is an understatement.
“When I enter a flourishing town, with my attendant youths and maidens, I am received with reverence; great throngs of people press upon me, seeking benefits. Some desire a revelation; others, who have long been pierced by various kinds of painful illness, want me to tell them effective remedies.” This may be what motivates Trump to seek high office.
Anaxagoras (500-428 BC) “For how could hair come from what is not hair…?” Ah, yes. The hair. I was delighted to find this quote, but somewhat disappointed there was nothing about small fingers.
Democritus (460-351 BC, 109 years old!) “The man who is enslaved by wealth can never be honest.”
Thrasymachus of Chalcedon, as quoted in Plato’s Republic. “Justice is simply the advantage of the stronger.”
HassleCat of the Olympic Peninsula (1952- AD) “A man with small fingers may also have a small mind. As he discovers his tiny fingers are only capable of grasping small things, he concludes that only small things are meant to be grasped, and he applies this principle to his mind as well as his fingers.” I couldn’t let the fingers go unremarked.
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