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Book two of Plato's Laws continues the development of the ideal drinking parties. The ideal drinking party stands in relation to all real drinking parties as the ideal city stands to all real cities. It exemplifies the fundamental Indo-European concept of RTA, rightness, which originally meant cosmic harmony. Here, the idea that there is a "right way" to do things is the key to understanding the Aryan approach to existence. The Athenian Stranger says that he has hardly seen a drinking party which was run correctly. So we are not talking about something that ever exists naturally. In order to produce such an ideal drinking party, people would have to change fundamentally which is almost impossible. In fact, people can only change themselves -- not others -- and even that is very difficult. So drinking parties are normally run purely in order to indulge in pleasures and to give people an excuse to do things that ordinarily would not be socially acceptable. Drinking parties are about breaking the social norms -- summed up in the word hubris. The normal lifeworld resists change into the perfect form that exhibits cosmic harmony. In order to produce this cosmic harmony, as an instance, it is necessary to go against the grain of everyday affairs. So the cosmically harmonic, correct, right way of doing things stands on the background of the myriad of imperfect realizations. It is as if the Indo-European would bring the source form for the drinking party out and display it as an instance within the field of imperfect relations of that source form. The attainment of cosmic harmony is the realization of a perfect example within imperfect everyday life. The imperfect examples are like the broken forms of the perfect example. They emerge from the breaking open of the perfect example through cosmic sacrifice. It is the perfect, unblemished animal that is sacrificed. That perfect example manifests RTA, or cosmic harmony, which is thought of as the source form actualized. The harmony comes from the source forms. They are the source of unity in things. Forms that approximate the source forms are to us more beautiful. They are statistically closer to the average. When we destroy the forms that approximate the average, symbolically we see that as breaking open the source to make the myriad variations flow forth. However, it is a category mistake that leads to this act of sympathetic magic. It is a crucial error in the Indo-European view of things which has had devastating consequences. The whole idea that harmony comes from destruction has twisted our view of the world and caused endless suffering.

Rather, we should understand that harmony begets harmony; disorder produces more disorder. Harmony is the result of the resonance between forms. Harmony between forms is disconnected from the unity of the source forms. Destruction of the perfect example does not touch the source from which the all the examples flow. Nothing can touch the source because it does not exist. It is neither inside nor outside the form. It only exists from the point of view of the form -- because from the form's point of view the source form is all that exists -- not the myriad of forms that flow from that source. Yet again, all sources are just so many facets of a single source of all causation. From the point of view of the myriad facets, they do not exist; only the single source encompassing all other sources exists. Thus, we see that source forms exist from one point of view (that of actualized forms), but do not exist from another point of view (that of the single source). Since they do not exist from all aspects, they can never be reached by any action carried out on illusory forms by illusory forms. Non-existent things cannot effect non-existent sources.

So we are stuck in a worldview with a fundamental flaw; a worldview that believes it can effect sources by manipulating and destroying forms -- perfect forms. It seeks to actualize harmony through destruction which is exactly the opposite of what engenders harmony. One can see quite clearly that the Indo-European worldview seeks to push destruction to the point were it turns into its opposite -- harmony. It attempts to make the cosmic sacrifice in which God (the single source) destroys itself to produce all the myriad sources and forms.¹ This re-enactment seeks to effect the ultimate source by an equally sympathetic magic. It is just as flawed to extend this logic of destruction (anti-production) from sources of forms to the single source of all sources. Harmony between forms is not the same as unity of sources. Harmony and unity are two different concepts. The Indo-European worldview mistakenly sees them as the same. Impose unity, and harmony is smothered. Harmony only exists between different complementary entities that resonate. Unity insists on turning the SAME into an identity; a fundamental Indo-European mistake which constructs Being from indentity, reality, truth, and metaphor. Each of these are different views of the same categorical mistake.

Identity substitutes unity for harmony. Reality substitutes artificially induced disorder for normal order. Truth substitutes a narrow view of things for a global view. Metaphor substitutes the victim for the source. This minimal system of errors lies at the root of the deviation of the Indo-European worldview from the recognition of the emptiness of all things. Metaphors collapse into analogies. Truths collapse into empty statements. Identities diffuse into each other, and boundaries become fuzzy. Reality is recognized as an abnormal state of affairs. If we cannot use the defective terms Identity, Reality, or Truth, then we must find another way of speaking -- an empty speech that is full of meaning. If we give up these terms, we are suddenly checkmated. E-prime advocates finding ways of talking without reference to the word "is." But the radical E-prime would do without the sub-components of Being as well: Truth, Identity, and Reality. Throw these out, and one is suddenly adrift. Conceptual Being is the fusion of these sub-components of Being which succeeded primordial Being in which they were differentiated. Plato builds upon conceptual Being to give us a first picture of the ideational system seen as a city for men. Plato has demonstrated the relation of the city to reality in the metaphor of the drinking party. A drinking party is a community. In the ideal drinking party people would learn to resist pain. Resistance, in each case, means moving in opposite directions in terms of toward pain and away from pleasures. But in order to learn this, there must be a sober element within the drunkenness. Our next task is to explore this sober element which is called the Guardians.

In the second book Plato goes back to his definition of education. Education, he says, must happen before reason appears in the child. Education is the alignment of pleasures and pains with what is right. When reason appears in the child, it confirms this alignment. Reason cannot rectify a mis-alignment which has occurred before its appearance. However, even when pleasures and pains are aligned correctly and confirmed by reason, still in the course of a lifetime the alignment deteriorates. For this reason the gods ordained the holidays to create a re-alignment. At these times humans rest and celebrate with the gods in order to become aligned again with what is right. The gods in this case are specifically the Muses, Apollo and Dionysus. Notice that Plato paired Apollo and Dionysus long before Nietzsche selected these gods as representative of the trends and undercurrents in Greek civilization. The difference between animals and humans is that humans are capable of perceiving order in terms of harmony and rhythm, and these gods lead men in choruses and dances which exhibit this order and thus set men's lives in harmony.

Plato next switches to the content of the choral performance. He says that the one who dances and sings beautiful songs and dances is superior to the one who does not. Plato takes as an assumption that all the postures and tunes aligned with virtue are beautiful, and those not aligned with virtue are ugly. This is indeed a big assumption which Plato slips into the argument. But he goes on to say that those who delight in the wrong kind of songs and dances are harmed by that, just as those who delight in good dances and songs are benefited by them. Because of this effect, the Poets should only be allowed to produce songs and dances that are oriented toward teaching virtue. Plato goes on to give the example of Egypt in which he claims this law was abided by since time immemorial.

AS "It's astonishing to hear. Long ago, as is likely, this argument which we are now enunciating was known to them -- the argument which says it's necessary for the young in the cities to practice fine posture and fine songs. They made a list of these, indicating which they were and what kind they were, and published it in their temples. Painters and others who represented postures and that sort of things were not allowed to make innovations or think up things different from the ancestral. And they are still not allowed to -- not in these things or in music altogether. If you look into this, you will find that for ten thousand years -- not `so to speak' but really ten thousand years -- the paintings and sculptors have been in no way more beautiful or more ugly than those that are being made with the very same skill, by their craftsmen."

AS "An extreme in the lawgiving and political art. There are other features in their law that you would find pretty poor. But this much about music is true and worthy of thought: it was possible to be firm about such things, and mandate in law songs which are by nature correct. This would have to be the work of a god or someone divine -- even as they claim there that the songs which have been preserved for this long time were the poetry of Isis. So, as I said, if someone could grasp in any way what is correct in these things, he ought boldly to order it in law. The search, dictated by pleasure and pain, for a music that is continually new, brands the sanctified chorus `old fashioned,' but this will not have a very corrupting effect on a chorus that has been made sacred. In that land, at any rate, it has probably had no corrupting power; entirely the contrary." [656d-657b]

This example of the Egyptians is very interesting. First of all, it is true that Egyptian art was very stable for a long period of time. However, it is also clear that a close study reveals change in style over the centuries. But the fact that Plato is pointing to what is an apparent stability in the real world is important. He believes it is possible, from this example, to achieve a law which can aspire to this kind of stability. So he sees this "extreme in the lawgiving and political art" as possible to attain. But that stability is based on the divine origin of the songs. So too, if one could discern what is virtue and turn it into song and dance, then this, too, would be divine and should be made the only chorus that was allowed by law. No one could be allowed to innovate because the new songs could not possibly achieve greater perfection in those divinely inspired. In fact, new songs only appeal to our pleasures and pains and make the sacred chorus appear "old fashioned," whereas a truly sacred chorus never goes out of fashion and is not effected by the continually created new offerings that attempt to supplant it.

So Plato appears to seek stability in the virtue of his citizens by implanting virtue through education whose content is guaranteed stable by law. This concept of stability verses newness is a theme throughout the Laws. Plato is attempting to drive change out of his ideal city. Like any formal system, the ideal city stands impervious to change and that imperviousness is achieved by an unchanging educational system which embodies perfect virtue and never wavers from it once it is discerned. In this way we see Plato as producing the first ideology. He intends to found a new world order himself. He believes he knows the source of all virtue -- The Good. He sees his city as having wells within it that tap this source and fill his city with virtue and meaning. Once the source of virtue is found, there must not be any wavering from this source. The purpose of the laws is to freeze the new structure of society so the source is never lost again.

The next image Plato presents us with is a Vaudeville show when all the different types of entertainment are mixed together. He says that the people of different ages will like different forms of entertainment better. He goes on to say that it is the oldest and the best who are better judges, not the people; that if poets do not teach the people virtue, then the people teach the poets to be rude by withholding popularity from those who do not please them. The Vaudeville image is telling. It shows us a dis-harmonious contest in which all the arts compete without discipline; and it shows us that the propensities of the people are varied as well. Those propensities constantly crave the new to tantalize them rather than the Good which will make them truly happy. The Good departs from what is natural in people. Plato would raise examples of the Good and enshrine them in his choruses rather than what is popular. This act of manifesting the Good within art and freezing it by law, making the many the slave of the old, is itself an act of hubris. It is an unnatural extreme act which attempts to create a perfect example which rises directly from the source of the Good. In order to do that, the natural variety created by human beings must be suppressed. The suppression of variety in order to raise the perfect example of the Good is an act of counter-manifestation. Manifestation naturally produces variety. Suppression of variety actually creates the disorder of the ephemeron. The variety of manifestation has its own order which is extremely complex. When it is suppressed, that very complex order becomes a dark disorder which serves as ground for the overly light new order of the holoid which is the perfect example drawing directly from the source of virtue -- The Good. Establishing the reign of the holoid causes a new order to be established -- the novum which discriminates epochs from each other. The holoid is an epiphany of the source of the good that manifests on the dark background of suppressed order which has been turned into chaos (remember Chaos was the first thing to appear in the Greek founding myth coming before Gaia and Uranus). When the holoid arrives, we attempt to cling to it and continue to suppress change as long as we can until the flood gates burst open and a new epoch is produced by a new novum.

Notice that when the holoid is broken, then all the suppressed variety rises from the background ephemeron in a flood. Thus, the sacrifice of the perfect example is the means of opening up the flood gates for all the natural variety of forms to appear. Sacrifice is implicit in this model. It is the means of renewal which breaks the hold of the holoid -- the totalitarian Uni-verse -- "One Song." Out of the chaos, which occurs when natural variety reasserts itself, can arise a new perfect example, and on it is a way to induce changes in epochs. The cycle of sacrifice yearly destroys the order of law that was always part of the Indo-European culture. The law is set up in order to be broken so that epochs will be generated by the arrival of new holoidal examples as novum. The suppression of natural variety inevitably leads to the opening up of the flood gates for natural variety to pour through, and then those gates are shut again as a new perfect example is found. Order is restored for a time until the next celebration of sacrifice. This, of course, all sounds like an artificial filtering system for change. The system opens and closes continuously as Zelney says all autopoietic systems should. The opening and closing, freezing and thawing of the system created a certain specific type of anti-manifestation to be set up. This kind of anti-manifestation is associated in Plato with Sophism when it does not align with virtue. But when it aligns with virtue, it is praised by Plato and solidified into his ideal city. The ideal city is a theater in which this anti-manifestation of holoids is continually maintained. It is based on the suppression of the normal manifestation of manifold variety. It suppresses natural variety in order to spotlight the perfect example that indicates most directly the source of the Good. But this theater, as it attempts to indicate the Good more directly, also causes it to be eclipsed by the darkness it produces, suppressing natural variety. Here we recognize nihilism as the too bright holoid over against the overly dark background of the ephemeron of suppressed variety. The mistake of the Indo-European worldview is the attempt to get too near perfection, and by that very move, it plunges into darkness. The Good is seen best in the natural variety, not in the perfect example. The whole idea of setting the stage to display the perfect example and then freezing things to keep that example in view, suppressing natural variety is itself perverse -- going against nature in extreme. There is no doubt that Plato was aware of the perversity of this kind of theater. But it captures perfectly the structure of anti-manifestation, which is embedded in our Western worldview. We are this form of anti-manifestation and everything we look at and do is transformed by it. We are constantly looking for the ideal and suppressing as bad the natural variety of things. We look for the source of everything in perfect examples rather than in the myriad of imperfect things. We suppress natural variety and create chaos as the dark background against which the perfect examples are seen that indicate the source -- can you say the word HOLYWOOD? The movie industry has embodied this principle more than anything else in our culture -- but all of our culture manifests it.

Innovation is the enemy of anti-manifestation. We say anti-manifestation because it keeps everything other than the subject of discourse, the universe, the single perfect song from manifesting. Innovation is the enemy because it brings more than natural variety. It brings with it a destruction of the pattern which shows off the perfect example. The perfect example is inundated by the dark chaos of suppressed natural order until a new artificial order is set up which focuses on a new perfect example.

There is continual innovation in dances in all the rest of music, and the changes are not ordained by laws but by certain disorderly pleasures which, far from remaining the same and being concerned with the same things (as in the Egyptian system you have interpreted), never stay the same. [660d]

When we look into the dark background of the ephemeron, what do we see. We see a writhing of continual novelty upon which the stable perfect example rises in the spotlight. So, from the point of view of the Indo-European worldview, this writhing of continual change is the defective state of the world valued low when compared to the stability of the ideal perfect example. However, there is an essential difference between the change in the ephemeron and that which causes a new epoch to unfold. Change within the ephemeron does not shatter our worldview. Change of the holoidal perfect example does shatter it. Thus, there are changes that the filter of our worldview can suppress, and those which it finds impossible to suppress. By setting up an extreme example which attempts to suppress all change in the uni-verse, Plato draws our attention to the inner structure of the worldview itself which, like men, is really only seen to be what it is when it is put under stress.

Plato proposes that only a man who is good should be portrayed as happy. No matter how many goods someone has accrued, if that person is wicked, then those goods are deemed to be evil. Here we see the suppression at work that Plato proposes. A myriad of goods that bad people experience are seen as bad. The unhappiness that good people experience are reinterpreted as goods. Plato changes the natural variety of goods and evils that people experience into their opposites based on the nature of the people that experience them. Thus, Plato constructs a great lie -- the lie that bad people have no goods, and good people see no bad times. This lie suppresses the inherent variety of nature in which goods and bads rain down on good and bad people indiscriminately. It attempts to distort reality in order to persuade people that being good will allow them to receive good, and that the bad will be punished by receiving bad. This is, of course, totally untrue in life, but is ultimately true. Ultimately, after death, the good will receive good, and the bad will receive bad. This is because as Anaxagorus stated, there is recompense for injustice in endlesstime. So the lie Plato tells us is an ultimate truth. He is taking an endlesstime truth and applying it in time, and that turns it into a lie. Here again, we see the ruse of attempting to bring a source into existence. Just as the source of a thing is attempted to be brought into existence in a perfect example to the detriment of natural variety -- so too, the truth of retribution in endlesstime is brought into the intime realm and turned into a lie because it is clear that retribution does not happen here except in rare circumstances. Why would Plato lie to us -- except to teach us something about ourselves.

Plato is attempting to bring the changelessness of the endlesstime realm into the intime realm. As the wise Sophist said, "We want change and changelessness at the same time." So Plato's ideal city attempts to embed changelessness into the arena of change. He is attempting to apply the principles of the endlesstime retribution within this world. If everyone acted as if retribution occurred here, then this would be a better world and less retribution would occur in endless time. Perhaps there is method to Plato's madness.

KL "Looking at things from a distance produces dizzying obscurity in everyone, so to speak, and especially in children; but our lawgiver will do the opposite to opinion by taking away obscurity, and will somehow or other persuade, with habits² and praises and arguments, that the just and unjust things are shadow figures. From the perspective of the unjust and evil man himself, the unjust things appear very unpleasant, but from the perspective of the just, everything appears entirely the opposite."

AS "Even if what the argument has now established were not the case, could a lawgiver of any worth ever tell a lie more profitable that this (if that ever has the daring to lie to the young for the sake of a good cause), or more effective in making everybody do all the just things willingly and not our of compulsion."

Plato is aware of his lie. The lie attacks the truth which is called "a noble lasting thing." We have already seen Plato dallying with Reality in the form of war and drunkenness. Now he is willing also to attack truth, another bulwark of the Indo-European worldview for the sake of establishing justice on earth. He is willing to lie to the young to set them to follow justice willingly. The lie would be frozen by being etched into the unchanging law -- producing identity over time. So we see that Plato's ideology touches each pillar of the Indo-European Primal Being.

Plato's ideology directly attacks these pillars of our worldview, showing them up for what they are -- distortions of the natural order. In the natural order there is endless variety which keeps changing. In the natural order good and bad rains down on all kinds of people, good and bad alike. In the natural order war and drunkenness are artificial inducements of disorder which are rare events-- not the norm. Natural manifestation is turned into anti-manifestation which induces artificial chaos on purpose -- suppresses variety -- on purpose and lies to maintain the status quo on purpose. Plato wants us to understand the nature of anti-manifestation, and thereby the nature of our worldview which creates the totalitarian uni-verse as ideal city floating in the clouds over the darkened and destroyed natural world. We need to understand the structure of anti-manifestation today, more than 2000 years later, more than ever.

AS "So be it. Now didn't it prove easy to persuade people that myth told by the Sidonian though it was incredible and doesn't the same hold true for thousands of other myths."

AS "About the teeth that were once sown in the ground, from which grew heavily armed men. Indeed this myth is a great example for the lawgiver of how it is possible to persuade the souls of the young just about anything, if one tried. If follows from this that the lawgivers should seek only the convictions which would do the greatest good for the city and he should discover every device of any sort that will tend to make the whole community speak about these things with one and the same voice, as much as possible, at every moment throughout the whole of life, in songs and myths and arguments."

This is really One Song -- a Uni-verse. Do we not notice that if the lawgiver is prepared to lie to gain the greater good, he is himself no longer good? So he loses his access to the Good in the very instant he attempts to instill the Good into others with the noble lie. This tells us that Plato's is producing a myth and ideal city that can never be realized because in order to institute the Good, the lawgiver must become bad. The myth of the sown men is very important in this regard. Plato realizes that for his ideal city to come into being, its people must be created whole on its pattern, just as the sown men of earth are. They are not human -- but men who appear out of the earth fully grown with the pattern of the ideal city imprinted on them from their very inception. They appear out of the parthenogenetic earth as did Uranus; just as they fall into it again to disappear in death on the Battlefield. This is a poignant lie. Men appearing from the earth are elsewhere, in Plato, called those who only believe in what they can hold in their hands -- they are materialists that do not believe in the unseen and set themselves up as the measure of all things. So Plato sees his ideal city being filled with materialists. When the retribution of the next world is imported into this world, then we see this materialism realized. Men of earth cannot imagine the unseen world in which retribution occurs after death. We must lie to them and make them think retribution occurs here. The lie that men can spring from the earth whole and clad in armor is equivalent to the lie of the retribution in this world. But there is an awesome truth which appears between these two lies. The Indo-europeans are just such a army sprung from the earth: Gog and Magog. They are the materialists that have forgotten their origins in childhood helplessness that have dared to dynamically cling to things in the world and have thus taken over most of it one way or another. Such an army denies the retribution of the next world, and so the only thing that can make them just is the idea of retribution in this world. That army specializes in anti-production which is merely an instance of the projection of anti-manifestation on existence. That army of the Dajal produces artificial chaos of war which it alternates with drunkenness. That army projects and defends its uni-verse -- its world order. It lives out the lie that it was never weak like a child as it does injustice to the old and young weak ones in this world. The lie that it sprung full blown from the earth allows it to destroy, without remorse, and only the threat of retribution in this world will allow these deniers of the unseen and their own childhood, as well as their own old age, to become just. Plato wishes to find a way to reform these followers of Indra that terrorize not just the world, but their own Indo-european societies. Only by inducing self control in these monsters can anyone live at peace within the prison of the uni-verse.

Plato says there should be tree choruses and one group of myth makers which sing the lie:

AS "What follows after this, the would belong to me. So I assert that the choruses, three in number, must all sing incantations for the tender young souls of the children, repeating to them all the noble things we have been saying and will say later on, the sum of which is this: when we claim that the gods say that the most pleasant life and the best life are the same, we will be saying what is most true, and also persuading those who must be persuaded, more effectively than if we speak in some other way."

AS "First, it would not be most correct for the children's chorus dedicated to the Muses to lead off, singing such things in complete seriousness before the whole city, Second, should come the chorus of those up to thirty ears of age invoking Paen (Apollo) as witness to the truth of what is said and praying that he be gracious and make the young believers. Then it is necessary that a third group sing, the men between ages of thirty and sixty; the ones who come after these, since they aren't able any more to bear the toil of singing, should use their divinely inspired voices to present mythical speeches about these same kinds of characters." [664b-d]

By having these chorusers and the myth makers all singing and saying the same thing to the whole community, Plato is attempting to unify the uni-verse by suppressing other songs and other myths. The totalitarianism in that creates the universe is one of taking over the entire logos of the community and directing its flow toward a single vision of things. Everyone speaking the same lie creates a distorted view of the world in which the natural variety of the logos is suppressed. Today we would call this a "cult" phenomenon. In fact, Plato's city has much in common with the cult which is a closed group in which everyone has the same view of "reality." The single mindedness of the cult normally results in major distortions of their view of reality. Since all speeches are self confirming and no disagreement is allowed, there is no way for dis-confirmations to creep in and allow corrections to the false views that breed in the closed universe of discourse created by the cult. The fact is that the common chorusers all singing the same lie represent a sick and unnatural situation in which human beings become disconnected from their actual situation and embedded in a group trance that denies existence as it stands, with no mechanism for correcting errors in perception of the situation.

AS "That every man and child, free or slave, female or male -- indeed, the whole city -- must never cease singing, as an incantation to itself, these things we've described, which must in one way or another be continually changing, presenting variety in every way, so that the singers will take unsatiated pleasures in their hymns." [665c]

Here the whole city sings the lie to itself. By singing the lie to itself, it hopes to create itself on a certain pattern by educating its young to follow in the footsteps of the men of earth who have instituted the pattern full blown. This is the description of what Maturna and Varela call an autopoietic system. That is a system that produces itself out of nothing. In this case once the pattern is created, it attempts to recreate that pattern by impressing it on the young who will, in turn, impress it on their young. The autopoietic system is self grounding. It produces its own organization out of itself. By singing to itself, Plato's city attempts to maintain its organization in an autopoietic manner -- taking control of Logos and producing a single vision of Reality, Truth and Identity. The flow of the tamed logos becomes the means of impressing anti-manifestation on manifestation, and thus producing a universe which is self-enclosed and self-generating.

The three choruses are dedicated to the Muses, Apollo and Dionysus respectively. This choice of gods is very illuminating. The children's songs are the property of the Muses. The young men's songs are the property of Apollo. The older men's songs are the property of Dionysus. The older men must be persuaded to loosen up and sing so that they take wine to accomplish this, whereas the younger men may taste wine but never get drunk, and the children should never taste wine. As Plato says, one should not pour fire into the fire.

AS "As a man approaches forty, he is to share in the enjoyment of the common meals, invoking the presence of other gods, and especially Dionysus, at this mystery rite and play of older men, which he has bestowed on human beings as a drug that heals the austerity of old age. Its effect is that we are rejuvenated, and the soul, by forgetting its despondency of spirit, has its disposition turned from harder to softer, so that it becomes more malleable, like iron plunged into fire." [666b]

Plato calls this drinking party of the older men a mystery rite. They invoke Dionysus and the other gods rather than Apollo or the Muses. Here the wine is seen as a medicine which helps the old participate in the singing. But the songs of the old are different in nature from those of the young. The songs of the very young appeal to the muses for inspiration. The muses are guardians of the arts. They were tamed by Apollo, the god of music. Apollo is the god of light who killed the Python and took over the oracle at Delphi. He was the god who leaned wisdom and said, "Know thy self" and "nothing to excess." Thus, we can see why the young men who come to know reason should offer their songs to Apollo. Apollo unites the muses as reason unites pleasure and pain, confirming the correctness of the training of the children. On the other, hand Dionysus is the god of darkness and madness which the older chorus invokes. It is the god of unleashed suppressions. Apollo is the god of too much light, and Dionysus/Shiva is the god of too much darkness. The famous dichotomy between these two is the nihilistic opposites which are known in Chinese medicine as Yang Splendor and Closed Yin. They are so yin they appear yang and vice versa. Plato builds this nihilistic dialectic into his city and their expression of the one song, uni-verse. The older chorus experiences the disorganization that comes with wine, and thus plunges into the ephemeron of suppressed variety. From the suppressed variety they take what will allow them to introduce variety into their single song in order to keep the people enchanted and entranced. Later in the Laws we see the nocturnal council interviewing citizens that have lived abroad, taking from the chaos of other cities customs and laws the best ones to improve the Ideal city. In this case the Ideal city becomes the perfect exemplar on the background of all the real cities. As such, if it were ever to exist, it would have to be destroyed like Atlantis in a kind of political sacrifice. Artificial variety is generated from suppressed genuine variety. The Dionysian chorus is a filter that samples from the suppressed natural variety and selects that which complements the single song. The single song is changed slightly in order to keep the people's interest. Those changes filter down to the Apollina and the muse directed chorus. So within the field of suppression there is a place where the suppressed contents are allowed to well up. There is also the Apollain spotlight which focuses on the perfect examples from the younger men. Finally, there are the muses that give different skills and gifts to different children which need to be unified and perfected before they can share in the spotlight themselves.

K "My people at any rate, stranger, as this fellow's as well, wouldn't be able to sing any song other than the ones we learned to sing when we were habituated in choruses."

AS "Of course not. For you have really never attained the most beautiful song. Your regime is that of an armed camp and not men settled in cities. You keep your young in a flock, like a bunch of colts grazing in a heard. None of you takes on his own youngster apart, drawing him, all wild and complaining, away from his fellow grazers. None of you gives him a private groom and educates him by currying and soothing him, giving him all that is appropriate in child rearing. If you did, he would become not only a good soldier but someone capable of managing a city and towns, someone who, as we said at the beginning, was more of a warrior than these warriors in Tirtaeus³. He would always and everywhere honor the possession of courage as the fourth not the first part of virtue, for private individuals and the whole city."

TABLE 7 Choruses in the Laws. {FIGURE IX 111}
Muses Choruses	Apollian Choruses	Dionysian Choruses	Mythmakers
Children	Young Men	Middle Aged Men	Oldest Men
no taste for of wine	a sip of wine	may become drunk	sober leaders
Lied to about justice -- source of variety	Spotlight	Suppression upwells	Those who make up the lie
skills and gifts need perfecting	perfect examples	past prime -- no longer perfect examples	Knowers of the Good
courage	justice	moderation	wisdom
Beauty	Strength	Health	Wealth

This is a significant passage. For here the young men are likened to wild horses that are to be tamed, just as Apollo tamed the muses. We see a plea for special education for each child to perfect the god-given skills and gifts unique to each individual. Only by breaking the wild and untamed child correctly is the best result attained in which they realize the whole of virtue, not just a part of it. This theme of breaking wild animals will become important to us in this study as it is the way the young man learns dynamic clinging as opposed to the more natural mode of static clinging. Likewise, children when broken properly, learn exactly this dynamic clinging, as they are broken of static clinging. Dynamic clinging is identified as the action that occurs based on knowledge of the whole of virtue. It appears as one moves dialectically through the choruses. First appears the natural gifts which will never be polished if the child remains in the herd. These are perfected by breaking and grooming the wild horse so that the perfect examples can be found and put in the Apollian spotlight. Then the perfect examples are disorganized or sacrificed with the Dionysian chorus in which outer justice is turned into inward moderation. Apollo himself went through this as he served King Admetus of Thrace. Apollo learned moderation and thus said henceforth "nothing in excess." Eventually he went on to learn wisdom and said, "know thyself." Finally, the sober guardians who led the drunken Dionusian chorus achieved wisdom following Apollo.

Play is an important concept. All of the work of the choruses are seen as play. If harmony is instilled in play, then it is assumed it will affect the whole city's non-playful work. Distinguishing between work and play is a fundamental act. Placing play as more fundamental than work is a bold move which goes against our intuition. This again returns us to the theme of autopoiesis. Self-organization occurs within the playful surplus over what is necessary to survive (The Accursed Share -- Battille). We are free to organize our pleasure as we please; it is not constrained by anything beyond itself. This self-organization starts with one's excess and works toward organizing what is externally constrained. The interface between what is externally dictated and what can be internally reordered displays the degrees of freedom of the system of self-organization. The autopoietic system maximizes self-organization. It produces a playful image of itself, and uses that as a template on which to reorganize itself.

The gift of wine loosens up the tongues of the older men. They get drunk under the control of the older mythmakers who remain sober. As a result of the ministration of the older mythmakers, the drunken remain friends and, in fact, become better friends. Placing sobriety in the midst of drunkenness has an interesting effect.

Moving from the disorderly motion of children, we attain the perfection of the gifts and skill in young men who know reason. These men, when they get older, are allowed to get drunk and become disorderly like children again, but under the control of the sober. Those who can control themselves in drunkenness are graduated to become mythmakers that generate the lies that the other chorusers sing. We wonder who is the god of these sober ones? It may well be Zeus who is the lawgiver for the mythopoetic era toward whose cave the three elderly speakers are moving. That is Zeus of whom Apollo and Dionysus are aspects. Apollo killed the Python who is an image of the Typhoon that Zeus defeated. Zeus is the Janus faced god which represents the whole of the nihilistic opposites in his manifestations as the light sky and the dark of night. Zeus is the framework that holds the nihilistic opposites apart, keeping them from cancelling and yet together so their manifestation may oscillate between them. The sober ones know the whole of virtue and seek to teach their drunken students that source of all goodness. Thus, there is a relation between the sober knowers of the whole of virtue who have laid hold of the source of the good, and the Perfect Apollian example that exemplifies that good. Between the source and the example lies the artificially induced drunkenness which allows the suppressed variety to surface within the center of the totalitarian uni-verse. This artificial chaos is contrast with the natural variety that occurs in children. The disorderly motion of children is suppressed by the Apollian orderly bright spotlight on perfect examples, for instance at the different games, like the Olympics. The disorderly motion is allowed to surface again in the Dionysian chorus so that change can occur to keep the choral performance interesting. But the sober guardians keep the goal of the good in sight and steer the ship of the city ever onward toward the goal.

This pattern makes wonder if it is not continued with Zeus being the god of the sober ones, but with this orderliness disordered yet again by Kronos only to be reordered again by Uranus. These successive stages of order and disorder provide a perfect model of a teleonomic system as described by J. Monod in Chance and Necessity. The autopoietic system would appear externally as teleonomic -- that is, moving toward a goal which it does not know itself. The fact that Uranus appears out of the earth like the man of the city is not necessarily an accident. Uranus is the cap of the layers of order and disorder. The mutual injustice of Kronos and Uranus toward their children is equivalent to the lie on which the city is built. They did not believe in retribution in endlesstime, so they were unjust toward their children. Plato asks us to bring retribution into this world to counter this tendency. But it is through the layers of order and disorder that anti-manifestation is controlled and perpetuated with the city which projects its own distorted uni-verse. This is done by forcing the "yang splendor" of Apollo and "closed yin" of Dionysus together and causing them to fuse by layering them together. This mixture of too light and too dark is the essence of anti-manifestation. The teleonomic autopoietic system embodies anti-manifestation which produces overly orderly and overly disorderly states that disturb the natural production of variety.

Plato alludes to another tale by his mention of the anger of Hera toward Dionysus.

There is another tale which of Orphic origin, perhaps originally from some lost Thracian or Phiggian myth. Zeus loved his own daughter, Persephone, and finally was united with her in the form of a serpent or dragon. She bore a wonderful child, Zagreus (identified rightly or wrongly with Dionysus) who the jealous Hera stirred up the Titans to attack. Beguiling him with toys of various sorts, including a mirror, they succeeded in killing him, whereupon they tore him in pieces and devoured him. Athena, however, continued to save his heart, which she brought to Zeus. He thereupon swallowed it and destroyed the Titans with his thunderbolt. From their bones sprung mankind who, therefore, are partly divine, as the Titans had eaten Zargreus before they were destroyed, and partly wicked owing to the wickedness of the Titans. Zeus having swallowed the heart of his son, was able to beget him once more this time on Semele."⁴

Here we see the relation between Dionysus and the Titans made explicit. The Titans ate Dionysus, and mankind sprung from their remains. This double destruction mediated by Zeus shows Zeus as between these two disorderly elements, bringing order through the medium or disorder. The disorder of drunkenness is contrast to the deeper more wicked disorder of the Titans who will destroy the child Zargreus. The Titans eat Zargreus like Cronos eats his children. The consumption of the children is the deep dark secret on which the autopoietic teleonomic system is founded. Plato is also cannibalizing the young in a certain way by getting rid of the natural variety and making them the content for the mold of his ideal city.

The ideal city consumes the children and by seeing them as disorderly raw material, transforms them into pieces of the machine of the ideal city. They are tamed and polished to appear in the spotlight of Apollo, then disordered by drunkenness and guided to know the world or virtue by the sober old men. But behind the soberness of the old men lie the Titans who consume the children, and finally Uranus, who suppresses the growth of the children completely. The autopoietic teleonomic system has deep roots in injustice, and as we peel back the layers, we see how these dark origins inform the ideal city that appears to be autopoietic on the surface but is in reality a hell on earth.

Both Dionysus and Apollo are sons of Zeus. They represent nihilistic opposite aspects of that form. Within the system of the choruses we see the interplay of darkness and light, order and disorder. This system has its stages which the human being as a process moves through. It is a teleonomic system, for each chorus forms a pool of those who have survived to this point in life. Those who survive determine the direction the whole system goes, serving as a filter for those who are younger. And this is the key point. The temporal gestalt of the human being is harnessed and tamed by the system of choruses. The four stages are projected on their lives as an artificial construct. In order for someone to change the system, they must survive until old age and go through the conditioning of the system. Seeing each human being as a secondary, or autopoietic, process (where the primary process is manifestation itself) we see that each human being that survives goes through four stages of manifestation. In fact, the city is the arena of manifestation or primary process. Plato attempts to forge an autopoietic unity in the city to match the autopoietic unity of the human organisms. That autopoietic unity imposes anti-manifestation over the top of the natural manifestation of the humans within the city.