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Comment by edem | Hacker News Reader

Which are the highest then. Or there are only 2 of them?

Democracy in his perception is when the uneducated masses who operate based on their 'instinctual' desires run the show.

He believes Democracy is just a brief transition phase to Tyranny.

The highest is an aristocracy run by philosopher kings who rule by reason and wisdom and dedicate their lives to this and are not allowed to own property.

Which sounds great on paper and all, but in practice is more likely to be a brief transition phase to Tyrrany.

I see your point but I think Plato may have been thinking at a higher level than either one of us so there may be more we need to consider.

By "a higher level" do you mean Plato was right in the same sense that "communism is a perfectly good economic/political system, it's just that real communism has never really been tried"?

Or do you mean that Plato was possessed of a higher intelligence than puny mortals like us could hope to properly contemplate, possibly even incapable of error, and therefore we should defer to his musings without using our critical thinking to apply the benefit of 2,360 years of hindsight?

Actually I'm just trying to get Karma by sounding smart. I really just copied and pasted everything from Wikipedia. I have no idea what I'm talking about.

http://theonceandfuturecoffeeaddict.files.wordpress.com/2012...

The one named after an engineer* [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato's_five_regimes

* Just kidding.

1. Aristocracy

2. Timocracy

3. Oligarchy

4. Democracy

5. Tyranny

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