Skip to content

Writing Feed

A Case for the Philosopher King(s)

Teddy Warner's GitHub profile picture Teddy Warner| Oct 2025 | 10–12 mins

In his 2009 essay: The Education of a Libertarian, Peter Thiel argues freedom and democracy are mutually exclusive.

“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”8

My American knee-jerk reaction to this is total shutdown. What a ridiculous proposition - after all, it was upon the natural liberties of man that our country was founded, right?

With a bit of additional consideration, one may recall that America’s founding fathers consciously constrained the voter pool to land-owning white men.1 While I am certainly of the belief that Locke’s natural rights apply to all humans alike (“The poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he.”2), this limited democracy with conscious voter constraints is what built our republic. A constrained voter pool established the freedoms so entrenched that we take them for granted some 250 years later. The question is not whether all humans deserve equal rights, but whether all humans are equally positioned to protect those rights through the voting process.

A constrained voter pool is naturally quite an efficient form of democracy - efficient enough to establish the trial by fire that is the American experiment, and certainly much more efficient than our current government (low bar, admittedly).

To optimize for freedoms, we would be better served by having the most proactive, benevolent members of society make up our voter base.

I don’t think it’s particularly hard for me to argue that efficiency is a good thing. The concern with a constrained voter pool is what they choose to use that efficiency to achieve. If malicious actors attain positions of influence, this becomes particularly problematic. This, in its logical extreme, is what we call a dictatorship.

The Spectrum of Governance

The prerequisite in our Western definition of “dictator” is malice. This directly implies an inverse: some benevolent being capable of executing absolute freedom for all individuals under their governance. This is essentially Plato’s Philosopher King - the ideal form of a benevolent government.3

You could plot both these governmental structures on a horseshoe of sorts, alongside our current system of semi-popular democracy, which is somewhere between the prior two.

\[ \begin{array}{ccc} \text{Dictator} & & \text{Philosopher King} \\ \text{(Anti-Divine/Malicious)} & & \text{(Divine/Benevolent)} \\[1em] \Big\uparrow & & \Big\uparrow \\ \text{Efficiency} & & \text{Efficiency} \\[0.5em] \nwarrow & & \nearrow \\[0.5em] & \text{Semi-Popular Democracy} & \\ & \text{(Current System)} & \\ & \downarrow & \\ & \text{Low Efficiency} & \end{array} \]

Yet as Plato himself discovered in his failed attempts to implement this ideal in Syracuse,4 finding the MOST benevolent being in human form is an impossible task (as the MOST benevolent form implies the divine). The existence of some MOST benevolent thing directly implies an inverse: some MOST malicious thing (the anti-divine). While contemporary dictators may act like this anti-divine entity, claiming they themselves embody pure evil would be hyperbolic. Nonetheless, we can list qualities of these dictators and hold in our minds some Platonic form of what such concentrated malevolence looks like.

Similarly, we can begin to list objective traits that must be held by the MOST benevolent being, as we must hold in our minds some Platonic form of what we believe to be divine. The most serious challenge to this framework is the recursive problem: who gets to define what “benevolent” means? The very act of defining it seems to require the benevolent actor themself.

Fortunately, there exist certain traits viewed as benevolent good that span all cultures, customs, and religions (these are essentially our shared conception of what is divine). A few off the top of mind: Compassion for suffering, Truthfulness, Justice, Wisdom, Temperance, and Courage. There’s some objectivity to be found here, these traits are convergent discoveries across human civilizations. The longest-lasting religious institutions have survived precisely because they encode principles that enable human flourishing, and we can look to them for guidance whilst defining these objectively benevolent traits.

A true philosopher king must certainly embody all of these divine traits, and while no individual human holds all of these, we can use them as a filter search to begin to find the most benevolent voters.

The Current Trajectory

Plato argued in his Seventh Letter that states will suffer until either philosophers become rulers or rulers become true philosophers.4 Our society will continuously progress toward disorder, dysfunction, and lack of freedoms by the sole fact that enacting our will to establish freedoms has become - and will continue to become - more convoluted.

Political systems tend toward increasing entropy (“Cthulhu swims left”), creating more positions of power and complexity that enable coordination failures.5 Constraining the voter base would decrease political entropy, reducing the convolution that impedes our ability to enact and preserve freedoms. I propose a thought exercise to satisfy this end: construct a list of the traits you believe the MOST benevolent being must hold, and work backwards from this ideal list into a list of voter requirements that would year the most benevolent, efficient voter pool. I think you’ll be surprised at the ease of objectivity here.

With such a list of voter requirements in hand, one could refine the voter base into a group of “Philosopher King(s)” of sorts. This is conceptually similar to Plato’s Guardian class, yet notably still constrained by American institution design (which are built to harnesses self-interest rather than relying on virtue alone).6

Stability in such a system comes from grounding benevolent voter qualifications in the longest-lasting practices. If we constrain the voter base by criteria that have predicted societal flourishing across centuries and cultures, we hedge against contemporary bias. We’re not asking “what traits do I think are benevolent?” but “what traits have consistently enabled human thriving?”

John Stuart Mill attempts to define voters fit for democracy in Considerations on Representative Government: “Active, self-helping character types promote progress better than passive ones.”7 There are two ways forward with this constraint 1) We refine the voter base to only the most active, self-helping voters, or 2) We educate more potential voters into more active, self-helping citizens.

  • Option 1 is in practice the current American structure, given the majority of active voters are elderly and focused on existential aid for their own benefit (think Social Security and Medicaid, which are certainly important topics but should not dominate the political sphere to the extent that they do). Voters with the greatest interest in self-help often hold antiquated interests that strip attention from our societal drive towards freedom and progress.

  • Option 2 is wonderful in spirit, but pragmatically most of the US voter base is extremely passive (or inactive all together) despite substantial efforts at education of the population. Only 2 in 3 eligible voters exercise their vote, and the other third of the country lives as though we are essentially under a tyranny (with allegiance to one of two political parties).9 Very few people are “active” in self-help, much less the help of all society. Mill noted himself that representative government doesn’t work with extremely passive populations accustomed to tyranny.

The “active” and “self-helping” character types become much stronger when we start to de-bias the voter base from antiquated and malicious interests with the objective, benevolent traits our longest-lasting practices have held and valued for so long.

So can freedom and democracy exist alongside each other? Certainly! We’ve been running a trial by fire of this experiment for 250 years now. Yet a true popular democracy cannot indefinitely maintain freedom. At best, it is an inefficient means to make adequate progress toward the continuous goal of freedom, and at worst, it empowers malicious actors who hinder our pursuit.

The question before us is not whether all humans deserve their natural liberties - they do, universally. Rather, it is whether all humans are equally positioned to protect those rights through voting. If we want to continue our Western pursuit of freedom and natural liberties, we would find it best to be prudent with our voter pool: careful not to empower malice, yet instead promote benevolence.

  1. “Who Voted in Early America?” Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Most states required property ownership or taxpaying qualifications for voting until the early 19th century https://www.colonialwilliamsburg.org/discover/civics/who-voted-in-early-america/ ↩

  2. The Putney Debates (1647). Inscription at St Mary’s Church, Putney. https://www.putneydebates.com/ ↩

  3. Plato. The Republic. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Books V-VII discuss the philosopher king concept. ↩

  4. Plato. Seventh Letter. Plato’s account of his failed attempts to implement his political philosophy in Syracuse. https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/seventh_letter.html ↩↩

  5. Yarvin, Curtis (Mencius Moldbug). “A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations.” https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/pdfs/gentle_introduction_to_ur.pdf ↩

  6. Madison, James. “Federalist No. 51.” The Federalist Papers, 1788. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed51.asp ↩

  7. Mill, John Stuart. “Considerations on Representative Government” (1861). https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5669/5669-h/5669-h.htm ↩

  8. Thiel, Peter. “The Education of a Libertarian.” Cato Unbound, April 13, 2009. https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/ ↩

  9. U.S. Census Bureau. “2024 Presidential Election Voting and Registration Tables.” Press Release, 2025. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/2024-presidential-election-voting-registration-tables.html ↩

  10. Madison, James. “Federalist No. 10.” The Federalist Papers, 1787. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp ↩

  11. Popper, Karl. The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. I: The Spell of Plato (1945). https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/open-society-1.pdf ↩

Comments

Copyright © 2025 Teddy Warner