What is The Soul of a Nation and Why are so Many in the USA Trying to Kill It?

Disclaimer: I am a mother and an educator. I am not paid by anyone to write my opinions.

In an excellent article written November 11, 2020 by Elliot D. Cohen PhD, he breaks down the Platonic description of what a nation’s soul is and what can destroy it. The Soul of a Nation: Ancient Wisdom Applied 

He writes that according to Plato, “In each of us, there are the same principles and habits which there are in the State; and that from the individual they pass into the State… (435E) 

“-in a healthy individual, reason directs the soul by orchestrating cooperation between the passions and the will. Accordingly, the healthy individual must possess (1) temperance (rational constraint over the appetites), (2) wisdom (knowledge and prudence), and (3) courage (not being afraid to do what is right).”

Plato’s Republic is a utopian dream of the perfect city-state and how it would function. Obviously all of Plato’s ideals of that era, two thousand years ago, might not be met with our modern approval, however much of his idealism is on point even to this day. Dr. Andrew Wood of San Jose State University writes in his Summary of Book Five-The Republic: “The Republic divides the citizenry into three classes: teachers, guardians, and laborers. These classes are directly parallel to three components of human nature according to Plato's philosophy: wisdom (manifested by teachers), bravery (practiced by guardians), and self-restraint (required of laborers).” Therefore, Plato identifies the three most important members of a society which are the weft and weave (aka the soul) of a nation and includes its educators. And ironically, Plato’s Socrates is arrested for arguing that, “in nature, females and males must share in the dangers of rearing young. His interlocutors tentatively agree that while females may be physically weaker than males, the natural order of things calls for equivalent duties and that these similar duties call for similar modes of education.” It would seem that teachers, children, and education are things worthy of dying for over many millennia.

For perhaps as far back as ten thousand years societies have educated their people and their children. Passing on knowledge, wisdom, cultural traditions, the arts, literature, philosophy, science, and medicine, is not a new thing. The founders of these disunited states of America were all well-educated individuals, men and women, with a rich background in philosophy and even architecture, both self-taught and institutionally learned; it was educated, cooperative individuals, not illiterate, belligerent individuals, who drafted our declarations and constitution with its many amendments. 

There has never been a time when educators were not held in the highest esteem, honored, and valued as one of the most respected and important contributors to a society, until now, in the USA.   

There has never been a time when children were not held as the most precious members of a society, to be protected, nurtured, and celebrated as the future creators of society, until now, in the USA.  

NEVER before has a country or civilization worked so hard to demean, devalue, and disempower its educators as many Americans are doing today: By mocking higher education as elitist, or ideological, claiming educators as overpaid and underworked, working deliberately to remove educators from being able to educate students by restricting what can be taught or even read, and by making the educational environment unsafe where guns are more valued than human life.

NEVER before has a country or civilization worked so hard to dispose of its children’s access to a safe and affordable education: By fighting AGAINST free meals, free childcare, free healthcare, freedom to read what they want to read or learn, a free basic college education, the right to study art and science, logic and philosophy, without religious zealots interfering, and with the freedom to not be killed by an active shooter in their classrooms. 

If our children and our educators are treated this poorly, what does that say about our society? What does that bode for the future of our nation? These are the killers of a nation’s soul. 

The people behind murdering the soul of our nation are the same ones who have long fought against raising the minimum wage to a living wage, who have fought to keep the wealthy from paying their fair share of taxes, who have championed assault weapons over the lives of children on the one hand and on the other endangered women’s lives with forced-birth laws. These same people gnash their teeth about the unborn child but give a backhand to all born children in their own society. 

These soul murderers deny healthcare as a human right to our children and their parents, deny a right to free and equitable education to all our children and young adults, deny creativity, art, science, and philosophy as equally valuable, and most horrifically they deny the importance of our children’s safety from being murdered by hateful zealots while dismissively telling educators to just lock their doors against shooters. 

Our infant nation is already dying because we have allowed its soul killers to have power, to have the right to decide who gets to vote, who gets to succeed in life, who gets to have healthcare, who gets to be educated, and even who gets to live or die. 

This nation’s soul-murdering individuals are NOT the soul, weft-and-weave, nor heart of our society, but they like to think so. Their contributions are not in the arts, sciences, philosophy, or literature, their contributions have been hate-mongering, vengeance, spite, ignorance, greed, conceit, boastfulness, warmongering, and self-aggrandizement, largely on tik tok. Nothing good comes from these individuals, nor ever will. They shred the weft-and-weave of our nation’s fabric and will bring everything around them crashing because they are incapable of Plato’s temperance, wisdom, courage, and the will to cooperate. Much of our nation’s problems are due to 45 years of these nation's soul murderers being in power and manipulating the system to benefit a handful of wealthy warmongers at the cost of everyone else. 

There are only two ways to stop them: 

1. We remove their power,

   or

2. We do exactly the opposite of what they want us to do.  

Let’s: 

• Raise the minimum wage to $25. 

• Let our teachers teach. 

• Feed our kids. 

• Provide Universally free healthcare (end evil insurance companies)

• End schools’ dependence on local property taxes for funding local schools.

• Restore Access to abortion in all states and make birth control free to everyone on demand and available OTC and by mail. 

• Have a standing army, but end the funding of all foreign wars (requires abolishing the CIA and putting Victoria Nuland in prison as a start ).

• Make gun shows liable and require background checks for everyone. 

• Ban the sale of all assault weapons. 

• Allow ex-felons and people on parole the right to vote and to work. 

• Make voting by mail the way we vote. 

• End the Electoral College. 

• Tax the bloody hell out of the rich like we used to. 

Should we implement even just the first half of these actions, our nation’s soul would be largely restored, and the majority of our problems like homelessness, childhood hunger, and the highest rate of maternal and infant mortality in all developed nations, would most likely be eliminated!

Our society is dying. Our nation is rudderless, our leaders are all corrupt and base, and there are too many willing to destroy what is left of this nation’s soul for their own personal benefit. Combine that with the climate catastrophe taking place NOW not in 2100, and we are facing an insurmountable hurdle. 

Plato’s warning to us from two thousand years ago still rings true.

Cohen writes: “Plato believed that when there is such disequilibrium between the three parts of the state soul, the state is on a trajectory toward demise. He believed that the soul of a nation could not survive when its citizens are at war with themselves and fail to see each other as fellow citizens in a joint venture to improve lives. He believed that the soul of a nation could not survive where unreason and chaos ruled the individual souls of citizens. Plato also predicted that if a demagogue gained the reigns of a democracy, he would drive it into such a state of confusion; and out of such confusion would emerge a dictator who sucked the lifeblood of its citizens and left an empty state corpse to rot and wither away.”

It might already be too late to save this nation-state, let alone the planet.  

However, it never always hurts to continue to do the right thing to the very end.